DES MOINES, Iowa — Friday morning, Gov. Kim Reynolds announced a plan to slowly reopen the state amid the coronavirus pandemic. Step one: make elective surgeries available again, and open up the farmers' markets.
In a world without the coronavirus, the Downtown Des Moines farmers' market would bring in thousands of people on any given Saturday morning. But now, given the circumstances, that sounds a little unsettling.
Jerry Holub is the owner of Holub Garden and Greenhouses, which supplies goods for farmers to take to the markets. He reopened business on Thursday, and says it's been booming since.
"This is our fourth day open here and it's been wild," Holub said. "It's been a long winter, and a long five or six weeks."
Though Gov. Reynolds laid out conditions for farmers' markets, like only allowing food or farm products to be sold, vendors being at least six feet apart and having no musicians or seating areas, Holub still feels uneasy about it.
"They need to have some way of controlling it. Because I've been to the Downtown Farmers' Market, and that's 20, 30 thousand people," Holub said. "That's way too many people to have in one area if we're going to contain COVID-19."
Holub says he thinks that it could be fine if the farmers' market had some sort of limit to how many people can be on the street at one time.
No date has been set to reopen the Downtown Farmers' Market yet, as they're still looking for ways to open up safely. Holub says the producers haven't been given any sort of guidance yet from officials, but expects they'll have some for them around May 1.