Rutland Area Farm and Food Link’s “glean team” coordinator, Mary Bilecki, says the organization received a gift of 1,000 pounds of fresh corn this summer from a couple of farms in Wells. More recently she’s gotten hundreds of pounds of butternut squash from a Rutland farm, most of it blemished or oddly shaped and therefore not considered up to snuff for the market.
It’s both a gift and a curse: Bilecki has to figure out how to distribute or process these large donations. In the case of the corn, Bilecki gave more than half of it to a new program run by the Vermont Farmers Food Center in Rutland that provides families with fresh local food. The rest she processed for freezing.
But gleaning, an agricultural term that refers to the gathering of crops left in the field after a harvest, usually involves far more active labor. RAFFL, part of the Vermont Glean Network, has about 100 volunteers and works with about 25 farms in the area. In the summer they work with up to 15 farms on a weekly basis. Last year they harvested more than 36,000 pounds of produce, which found its way to local food pantries, schools and shelters like the Open Door Mission.
However, as Bilecki points out, the amount of usable produce salvaged from farms in Vermont pales in comparison to the vast quantity of food that goes to waste every year. According to a recent study by Salvation Farms, a nonprofit devoted to making use of surplus food, 14.3 million pounds of vegetables and berries from Vermont farms is lost every year. Based on surveys completed by 58 farms in nearly every county in the state, the number “highlights the great opportunity to place more Vermont-grown food onto people’s plates,” the authors write.
But farmers can hardly afford to spend time harvesting and distributing surplus produce. The gleaning network allows them to donate far more of the otherwise unused food at little or no cost.
According to the Salvation Farms survey, the top reasons farmers did not harvest food were blemishing, lack of confidence they’d be able to sell it, and lack of available or affordable labor.
“While some of the edible produce that is left unpicked by farmers is captured by gleaners,” the authors write, “a large percentage is turned under in the field or fed to pasturing animals. It is this food — that which never makes it onto people’s plates — that we consider food lost in the field.”
According to the report, greater access to markets, incentives for farmers, and expansion of gleaning and food rescue operations could help reduce the waste.
Since its inception in 2009 the Rutland glean team has harvested and distributed more than 130,000 pounds of fresh food.
Read more at vtdigger.org.
