For tribal agriculture, the new post-pandemic environment is likely to carry new opportunities. With interest by both grocers and foodservice operations in diversifying and localizing their supplier base, tailored growing and potential development of smaller processing operations by tribal agricultural ventures and individual members should generate greater interest and have greater demand potential. While such businesses cannot compete on price with major factory farms and processors, the end user is likely to be willing to pay a premium for flexibility and local access, even more so than in the past. Given the strain the pandemic has placed on global trade and international relations, opportunities may develop for replacement of foreign sources with new local growers and processors, even at a higher cost per unit. Unfortunately, the same factors will reduce export demand for U.S. agricultural products. However, this should not be as great of an issue for tribal agriculture as it is for others. Beyond farming and ranching, other segments of the sector such as forestry products and hunting and fishing are also being impacted by the pandemic and mitigation efforts. Hunting and fishing are expected to experience a new growth in popularity as they become more than just a hobby, but also a hedge to reliable access to protein. Already there has been a marked increase in gun sales under the pandemic. While this is attributable in part to safety fears, increased interest in shooting and hunting is inevitable. Timber, on the other hand is expected to take a lagged hit from the effects of the crisis on construction. Construction naturally lags in a sudden crisis, with momentum sustaining activity for a period of time and then returning demand taking longer to spur new construction spending than spending in other areas. An anticipated increase in at- home projects, including renovations, expansions and new in-home recreational additions, will help reduce the impact on some timber products. However, a lagged decline followed by a lagged recovery is probable. Other specialized agriculture products, such as cotton and other fibers for clothing, wood pulp for paper and grain for ethanol, amongst others, have all experienced declines in demand or shifts in end use needs that affect production targets and specifications. Of these, ethanol is particularly vulnerable due to the massive decline in fuel needs that will be discussed further later in this section. Producers, processors and distributors focused in these areas are likely to experience more severe impacts than the overall average for the sector as a whole. Because tribal agriculture is more fragmented, with fewer large-scale factory farm and processing ventures and more individual or smaller-scale operators, some of the effects seen at the industrial agricultural scale will be less severe for tribes and their members. The average AIAN-owned farm in 2017 produced only $58,250 worth of goods. However, some subsectors of the agriculture industry are so consolidated that it is impossible to avoid dealings with the large players. In the same way, even as tribes explore new ventures and recover from the pandemic in their existing ones, they will have to compete with the large industrial players.
∴ PROGNOSIS
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