Meet the gleaners who comb farm fields to feed the newly hungry
AGE-OLD TRADITION SUDDENLY HAS FRESH URGENCY, DELIVERING SURPLUS PRODUCE TO AMERICANS WHO CAN’T FEED THEIR FAMILIES
Armed with a cheap steak knife and a plastic basket lined with a garbage bag, a high-school sophomore named Alicia Garlic sat cross-legged in the dirt at Specca Farms, a pick-your-own operation here in South Jersey. As the sun burnt through the early morning clouds, she harvested curly-leaf spinach as fast as she could, lopping the sweet green tops off yellowing plants, trimming away thickening stems.
Garlic wasn’t picking greens for herself on this Tuesday morning in June, but for Farmers Against Hunger, a programme of the New Jersey Agricultural Society. Along with more than a dozen others spread out along the rows for social distancing — a retired schoolteacher, a Census Bureau employee, a young mother with her grade-schooler in tow — she was there to glean.
Gleaning is a hallowed agricultural tradition, traditionally defined as gathering anything left over after a harvest. In recent years — as new emphasis has been placed on supporting local agriculture, reducing waste and improving the nutritional quality of food in hunger relief — a fresh wave of organisations have taken to the idea.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic, mile-long traffic jams at food banks and the disturbing sight of farmers ploughing under their onions when food-service contracts disappeared overnight.
Gleaning is a hallowed agricultural tradition, traditionally defined as gathering anything left over after a harvest.
Front line warriors
Now, gleaning groups are at the front lines of those helping to stabilise the nation’s shaky food supply, perfectly positioned to leverage one problem — a bounty of unsellable crops — to help solve another: rampant hunger. “When you see how long the food lines are, it just kind of makes people realise that now we have to find the food that is already here,” said Virginia Baker, the part-time gleaning coordinator for Farmers Against Hunger. “We already have it. We just have to be able to get it into the hands of the people who need it.”
Baker, 27, tracks down growers willing to donate surplus food, manages a lengthening list of volunteers itching to do something safely outdoors, and drives contributions to a wholesale produce market where her organisation rents a corner of a warehouse refrigerator.
Each of those steps has been slowed by the need to don protective gear, sanitise and maintain social distancing. But the payoff is worth it, because the gleanings these days are often prime produce rather than just leavings. In just two hours at Specca Farms, she and her group bagged more than 500 pounds of spinach for local food pantries.
Herculean efforts
Gleaners around the country tell similar stories of Herculean efforts, all hastily arranged to meet the fast-growing need.
In San Luis Obispo, California, a food bank programme called GleanSLO has pivoted from staging fruit-gleaning parties around the Central Coast’s abundant backyard fruit trees, to working the fields at farms that used to sell their produce wholesale to food services. At one farm,
“we were picking from bushes that were loaded with berries that hadn’t been touched,” said Emily Wilson, 29, the group’s programme coordinator, with a note of disbelief. “A thousand pounds of blueberries.”
“We’ve gotten every grant we’ve applied for,” said Barbara Eiswerth, the founder of the 17-year-old Iskashitaa Refugee Network in Tucson, Arizona, whose gleaning crews include refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. They usually take part of what they pick for their extended families.
Her volunteers used to meet three days a week, then pile into a handful of cars to go pick, said Eiswerth, 58. “Now with Covid-19,” she said, “the seniors can’t come, the interns can’t come, and many of the refugees are elderly or immunocompromised.”
She has since recruited more than 70 new volunteers who go out on solo or family-only gleaning trips, and help collect food from bakeries, distributors and concessionaires on the state’s many shuttered RV campsites. Those donations are packed into boxes and delivered to the 11 apartment complexes where many of the area’s refugees live, as well as to several hunger relief agencies.
It has been an equally intense spring at the Orlando, Florida, office of the Society of St. Andrew, a gleaning group with roots in the United Methodist Church and programmes across the Southeast, Ohio and Indiana.
The pandemic arrived smack in the middle of the busiest season for Florida vegetable farmers, who supply both the local tourist economy and the rest of the country with pallets of produce from September to May. By early March, the office was getting calls from growers who were selling less than they had expected, or whose contracts with the region’s convention centres, hotels and distributors had fallen through — including one whose cucumbers normally went to Vlasic Pickles.
“He said, ‘It’s the best crop I ever had. It doesn’t pay to harvest it,’” said Barbara Sayles, 65, the group’s regional director. “’You better bring your people out to pick.’”
The need for food relief was still so acute that she began cold-calling farmers who had won bids from Farmers to Families Food Box, a new programme from the US Department of Agriculture that pays them to donate unsold produce to hunger relief programmes. Many growers, Sayles said, had no idea whom to give it to or how to get it there.
Along with several other groups — Food Forward in Los Angeles, Boston Area Gleaners in Massachusetts and other Society of St. Andrew teams — her office is helping farmers distribute, sort and fill those boxes, which must contain a mix of vegetables. In Florida,
Sayles is working with the local arm of Service Trades Council Union to give boxes to its members who had been furloughed by Walt
Disney World.
Success stories
These are among the success stories shared at the online meetings of the 4-year-old Association of Gleaning Organisations, based in Salt Lake
City. Part of its mission is to help its “200-ish” members learn from their colleagues, said the association’s founder, Shawn Peterson, 37. Its ultimate goal, he said, is to collect as much food as possible from the nation’s fields.
Accurate numbers on just how much that is are hard to come by, he said, but two studies last year — one by researchers at North Carolina State University and another by those at Santa Clara University in California — determined that about one-third of all edible crops grown in the United States likely went unharvested.
That’s why Harvest Against Hunger, in Seattle, eventually added gleaning to its larger food-rescue programmes, said David Bobanick, 54, its executive director. Today, the 38-year-old organisation also runs a national gleaning incubator programme through AmeriCorps VISTA that aims to create operations that are tailored to meet the specific needs of their region.
His organisation is one of several that have recently won funding to broker arrangements between hunger relief organisations and farmers who can’t sell their crops. Most of the money will go to the farmer, but a portion will also go to the gleaning group to cover the costs of distribution, said Erica Merritt, 29, who is coordinating the effort.
The idea arose when the obvious became clear, she said: “Gleaners are literally in this unique position between the farms that can’t sell their food, and the people that are hungry.”