On social media this spring, a Willamette Valley farmer noted one of the few upsides of the COVID-19 outbreak: Traffic dropped dramatically, by 40 percent in some cases, as school, job, retail and recreational closures took hold and people stayed home.

Temporarily, at least, that made it easier to move large, slow equipment from farm to fields. True, traffic probably will jam up again in time for summer harvests, when tractors, combines, worker transport vans and trucks bound for silos and packing houses become even more common on the state’s roads.

But there might be another favorable outcome. As rural producers point out elsewhere in this issue, the pandemic caused many people to stop and think about the urban food chain. Lining up, masked, to get into a grocery store and then finding blank spots where the milk, eggs and flour used to be is a jolt. Meat shortage rumors, anyone?

You can almost see the thought bubbles. Wait, where did all this food come from, anyway? And how did it get here?

So there’s an opportunity, once again, for rural Oregon to repeat its story. We grew it. We gathered it. We put it in bags, boxes or cans. We sent it to you. Our work, which is also our pride and our joy, sustains you and people all over the world.

The corollaries might have to be repeated as well. The people who grow your food must be allowed to succeed. They must be able to make a living. They must have a strong say in the rules that govern their work. Their land and the water they use must be protected from grasping development. And the pathways they use to bring food to market, from bridges to broadband, must be top-flight.

In too many cases, those pathways are crumbling, crowded, outdated or non-existent.

The American Farm Bureau Federation took a look at the issue and laid out the stakes. More than 70 percent of U.S. agricultural products move by public access roads, 71 percent of which are in rural areas. Only half of the country’s rural roads are in good condition; 13 percent are in poor condition and 21 percent are mediocre.

Here’s the kicker. Megan Nelson, an economic analyst with the Farm Bureau in Washington, D.C., said the study included only state and federal roads, not ones maintained by counties. When’s the last time you heard of an Oregon county rolling in road maintenance money? Or money, period.

Bridges? In 2019, only 8 percent of rural bridges were rated poor or structurally deficient, which doesn’t sound too bad. Except that more than 70 percent of the nation’s bridges are in rural areas, and rural bridges make up nearly 80 percent of the country’s bad ones. Fair?

One more statistic: Rural roads have a fatal accident rate that is more than twice as high as urban roads. And rural Oregon, with 2.2 traffic deaths per 100 million miles traveled, is second-deadliest in the country, after South Carolina. Yay us.

Nelson said there is bi-partisan support in Washington to eliminate the backlog of infrastructure improvement projects, but money is always the issue. The coronavirus, she said, highlighted the issue once again.

The uptake, and the connection to blank spots where the eggs, milk and flour used to be, was summarized well in the Farm Bureau’s study:

Continued degradation of the surface transportation system threatens the nation’s economic standing, endangers the livelihood of farmers and ranchers, and jeopardizes our food supply.

Chew on that.