Unlocking a charity windfall straight from field to fork

Peter Sargeant has devoted his working life to growing food for Britain’s dinner tables, so nothing irks him more than having to plough perfect, ripe crops straight back into the soil. Yet it is a fact of life in farming that food goes unharvested not because nobody wants it, but because it is too expensive to get it to people who are going hungry.

Mr Sargeant, the chief operating officer for salads and mushrooms at G’s Fresh, which has almost 30,000 acres under cultivation, must decide each month whether excess crops are simply left in the field or whether, somehow, he can get them to charities that turn them into meals for those who need them most.

That is where Fareshare, which is being supported by The Daily Telegraph’s Christmas Charity Appeal, comes in. Fareshare arranges for surplus food to be collected from food

‘There’s nothing worse as a grower than seeing your product ploughed back into the field or thrown in the bin’

producers and taken to thousands of charities across the country that feed people for free, ranging from hospices to church halls. It’s a complex business that involves far more than simply arranging for a lorry to turn up at the farm gates to be loaded with carrots or potatoes and driven to a depot.

Mr Sargeant, whose company farms land in the Midlands, the south and in several European countries, said: “Even for something as simple as mushrooms, there are a lot of costs involved in getting them to charities.

“There is the cost of haulage, there is the cost of hiring the crates to move them in and there is a cost to store them at the other end.

“We gave 68 tons of mushrooms and onions to Fareshare in the past year, partly because mushrooms have to be harvested – they affect the following crop if you leave them in the soil – so they would otherwise have been thrown away or composted.

“But we also grow celery, for example, and that costs about 10p per stick for harvesting and cold storage costs. If we have more celery than has been ordered by our clients, I have to decide what to do with that excess, and the cheapest option is to leave it unharvested. There’s nothing worse as a grower than seeing your product ploughed back into the field or thrown in the bin, but economically speaking that’s sometimes a choice you have to make.”

The cost of getting a tonne of surplus food from field to table is around £150, broken down into transport and storage costs of £70, and another £20 to £50 to compensate producers who would otherwise sell food for anaerobic digestion (AD) or animal feed. The remainder is made up of labour costs for packing or re-packing food that would otherwise be thrown away.

Anaerobic digestion plants use microorganisms to turn food waste into biogas which can be used as fuel. Since 2010, government feed-in tariffs, which last for 20 years, have provided a guaranteed price for each unit of energy produced by AD plants, meaning they compete for surplus food with charities such as Fareshare.

Fareshare is campaigning for a £15million government fund that would cover the cost of getting 100,000 tons of surplus food on to plates, compared with around 13,000 tonnes that Fareshare currently handles.

A fund that would pay £150 per ton would be enough of a subsidy to “unlock” 90,000 extra tons of food, but would stay below the costs of production, meaning it would not provide an incentive for farmers to over-produce food. It would have the added benefit of saving charities £150 million.

Just one per cent of food waste comes from supermarkets. Almost all comes directly from farmers and food factories that tend to over-produce to ensure they can meet their orders.

Helen Sisson, group technical director for Dublin-based Greencore, which makes sandwiches, sushi, salads and ready meals in 18 factories across the UK, said any scheme that made food redistribution cost neutral would have a dramatic impact overnight.

Last year Greencore, which supplies its products to supermarkets and other high street retailers, gave 167 tons of food to Fareshare, the equivalent of 400,000 meals. Ms Sisson said: “It used to be the case that a lot of surplus food went straight to landfill, but the industry has worked hard to stop that happening, especially since a landfill tax was introduced.

“But it’s much cheaper to send food to anaerobic digestion plants than it is to send it to food charities. For a start, waste food for AD can be transported in a tipper truck, like any other waste, but if it’s going to be eaten it has to be packaged, possibly kept chilled, stored, labelled for any allergies, shelf life and so on, and transported safely. At every stage there is a cost.”