Rhiannon Hampson thought she would hear a cacophony of cheeping when she went to her post office in coastal Maine to fetch a delivery of newly hatched chicks. But the cardboard boxes addressed to her poultry farm were silent.
“We could hear a few, very faint peeps,” Ms. Hampson said. “Out of 500, there were maybe 25 alive. They were staggering. It was terrible.”
This is what happens when the mail suddenly becomes unreliable in rural towns and stretches of countryside where there are scant FedEx or UPS deliveries, and where people rely on the post office as an irreplaceable hub of commerce and connection.
Now, with delays raising fears that the United States Postal Service is being hobbled by a combination of financial problems, politicization and pandemic, farmers and other rural residents say they are particularly vulnerable to the crisis roiling the postal system. And while President Trump’s own words have raised alarms that the problems are part of an effort to keep Democrats from voting by mail, many of those being hurt the most live in rural areas that overwhelmingly support the president.
“This is an attack on a tried-and-true service that rural America depends on,” said Chris Gibbs, a farmer in western Ohio who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, but this year started an advocacy group arguing that the president has failed rural America. “It pulls one more piece of stability, predictability and reliability from rural America. People don’t like that.”
Across the country, rural residents already have been affected in several ways.
Checks and plant shipments are delayed, and tracking them down can take hours in rural towns without quick, reliable internet. Replacement parts for farm machines are late in coming. Prescription refills are taking a week or more to reach mailboxes, a particular threat because rural communities are older than most of America.
On Native American reservations, among the country’s most remote places, families are driving five hours to get medicine and worry about being disenfranchised in November.
Then there are the chicks.
For decades, postal carriers have delivered day-old chicks, ducklings and all manner of plants and animals to small farmers and families with backyard hen houses. Industrial-scale farms have enough money to truck around their own animals or operate sprawling hatcheries. For everyone else, the mail is how the chickens come home to roost.
Some chicks are getting lost in postal warehouses or spending days on trucks, farmers said. Others are getting smothered or crushed in the deluge of boxes created by America’s coronavirus-induced online ordering. One hatchery in Pennsylvania lost 3,000 chicks in a recent shipment.
“We just don’t have any other options,” Ms. Hampson said. “There’s nothing sadder than seeing a box of tiny little fuzzy peeps and all of them are D.O.A.”
Farmers said they were so afraid of losing more chicks in transit that they were driving hundreds of miles to pick up shipments from hatcheries. Ms. Hampson’s parents and in-laws Pony Expressed their way across Pennsylvania and New England to bring 15 boxes of just-hatched turkey poults to their farm.
Other farms are telling customers not to expect products to come quickly. In Beech Island, S.C., Jenks Farmer, who ships two-pound lily bulbs across the country, has been getting bombarded with calls from anxious customers whose flowers had not arrived. He shipped one bulb to a customer in North Carolina, and a week later, the package was still stuck in Shreveport, La.
“My business isn’t political, but it depends on the economy and political leadership,” Mr. Farmer said. “I don’t have a leader who’s doing anything to help my businesses thrive.”
Rural post offices have struggled for years with staffing shortages and high turnover, and rural carriers say their days can be long and perilous if they get stuck in a blizzard on some remote county road. Unlike their city counterparts, rural carriers said they do not generally earn overtime, so when the mail is heavy or weather is bad, they say they work extra for free.
This year, elected officials and postal workers said the Postal Service suffered a double blow. First came the coronavirus, which sickened workers and flooded the system with a tsunami of package orders. Then came cost-cutting measures ordered by Louis DeJoy, the new postmaster general.
Amid a bipartisan fury, including lawsuits from state attorneys general and multiple congressional investigations and calls for his resignation, Mr. DeJoy said he would delay the overtime cuts and other operational changes until after the election.
David Partenheimer, a Postal Service spokesman, said the agency had “experienced some temporary service disruptions in a few locations” because of the pandemic, but said “things are slowly getting back to normal.” Union members, however, said that sorting facilities were still overflowing and that the situation was chaotic.
A recent survey of voters in three rural, Republican districts in the 2020 battleground of Pennsylvania found that in this polarized election season, some voters’ views of the post office were splitting along party lines.
The survey by the Niskanen Center, a moderate think tank, found that Republicans were far less concerned than Democrats about the current turmoil, and said they were also less likely to vote by mail. Twice as many Democrats said they were “very dependent” on the post office.
But the same survey found some risk in attacking what has been among the best-loved government agencies. Rural Democrats and Republicans in the survey were leery of privatizing the Postal Service, an aim of Mr. Trump’s conservative allies, or cutting its budget. Mr. Trump opposes a Democratic effort to provide the post office with $25 billion in emergency aid.
Amid the uproar, some rural residents worried that the damage to their livelihoods and the credibility of the Postal Service had already been done. They wondered whether they could still trust the mail to handle their packages, animals and ballots.
“I’ve always counted on the post office,” said Carrie Sparrevohn, 64, who raises merino sheep and sells wool and yarn from her ranch outside Auburn, Calif. “Now, I don’t know if I should be mailing anything.”
Lately, her bills have been slow to come. She said the mail collection box outside her rural post office was among many across the country that were recently locked or removed, until an angry backlash forced the Postal Service to stop. Ms. Sparrevohn said that she planned on voting absentee, but that she would drop off her ballot instead of trust it to the mail.
“I don’t know if it’s going to arrive,” she said.
In Fort Benton, Mont., Leone Cloepfil, 75, started worrying about her mail in July, when her Visa payment was not delivered and she was charged a $35.04 late fee. She had to stop driving recently after the numbness in her foot got so bad that she could no longer feel the pedals, so she said she had no choice but to trust her ballot to the mail.
“I can’t say I’m 100 percent sure,” she said. “It’s a mess.”
Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat in rural Montana, has received 4,800 calls about the Postal Service since the pandemic began. One of the complaints was from a neighbor in the 600-person town of Big Sandy who ran out of medication while waiting for a refill to come in the mail. (Mr. Tester’s Republican counterpart in Montana, Senator Steve Daines, also objected to the postmaster’s new policies but did not respond to an interview request.)
“It’s worse than it’s ever been,” Mr. Tester said. “It’s hurting rural America. It makes no sense whatsoever.”
Rural residents know that sparsely populated backcountry routes and tiny post offices are not moneymakers for an agency losing tens of billions of dollars because of congressionally mandated health care payments and declines in mail volume.
But in places already isolated because of spotty internet access, people said the post office was the only institution mandated to serve them at a flat cost, no matter the weather or how remote they were. Like a hospital, school or grocery store — all of which have closed across rural America — they said a post office anchored a town’s survival.
“If these small rural towns lose their post offices they lose their identity,” said Gaylene Christensen, who relies on the post office to ship orders of home décor from her shop in Arlington, S.D., now that foot traffic has been slowed by the pandemic. “We’re the ones who are going to get hit.”
Lucy Tompkins contributed reporting.
August 21, 2020 at 04:00PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/us/postal-service-mail-rural.html
Postal Crisis Hits Rural America Hard - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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