Last year, Cannon Michael - the president/CEO of Bowles Farming Company- left over 100 acres of ripe cantaloupes unharvested as he could not justify paying workers to pick them all because the cost of labor, packing, and, shipping would have been more than the price he could get for the fruit. This meant he left about 30 percent of his perfectly edible cantaloupes to decompose and get churned back into the ground.
“It was very frustrating to grow a high-quality product and have to leave it in the fields,” said Michael whose company grows 120-160 ha of cantaloupes in Los Banos, California, every season. Apart from this, hundreds of hectares of watermelon, tomatoes and cotton are there. “If the pricing drops,” due to oversupply or other reasons, said Michael, “there’s a certain economic threshold that just doesn’t justify harvesting the crop.”
Michael’s experience, it turns out, is fairly typical. According to a new ground-breaking study about on-farm food loss from Santa Clara University, a whopping one third of edible produce —or 33.7 percent— remains unharvested in the fields and gets disked under. This is a much larger percentage than previously reported and it may end up dramatically increasing the current estimate of overall food waste in the U.S., which until now has been long tallied at 40 percent.
Most research on food loss and food waste has focused on post-harvest, retail, and consumer levels. The new study offers a far more accurate look at on-farm food loss by relying on in-field measurements. Most other studies have used less reliable grower surveys to estimate produce left in fields and put the percent of on-farm loss closer to 20 percent.
Source: salon.com
