Bountiful donation
Yuma County Master Gardeners harvest, give 9,000+ pounds of produce to local food bank
When COVID-19 nixed annual events like Visit Yuma’s Field to Feast agriculture tours and community-wide “u-pick” days, the University of Arizona-Yuma County Cooperative Extension had an abundance of crops sprouting in its demonstration garden with no guests to harvest or consume them.
Rather than letting it all go to waste, members of the Yuma County Master Gardener program rolled
up their sleeves and got to work, harvesting 9,817 pounds of fresh produce – the entirety of which was donated to the Yuma Community Food Bank.
“Rather than having all that food go to waste, our first thought was to get it to the food bank,” said Yuma County Master Gardener program coordinator Janine Lane, noting that the task was tricky to execute as access to the cooperative extension was limited to individuals conducting business there in order to mitigate any possible COVID-19 exposure.
Lane enlisted the help of five Master Gardeners, who harvested 400-600 pounds of produce every Tuesday and Thursday from January through March.
According to Lane, who designs the plot map and facilitates the planting of the demonstration garden each season, the grand 9,817-pound total was the largest the Master Gardener program has ever harvested at one time, and its most sizable food bank donation to date.
“The weather and growing circumstances are different every year,” said Lane. “With things like broccoli or cauliflower, you have a small, limited window (in which) you can harvest them. If something got ripe too early and the tours weren’t going to start right away, we’d take that stuff out and send it to the food bank. It’s a perfect time to be able to have that much food to take to the food bank, because there are some people that are in bad ways right now. My passion, seriously, is growing vegetables and feeding people – that’s one of the most basic things you could do, and I love it. To be able to do that, it really makes you feel like your day was well spent.”
Throughout the sixyear duration of Lane’s involvement with the Master Gardeners, the program has continued to strengthen its partnership with the food bank by eliminating food waste and food insecurity using the one basic resource at its fingertips.
“The farmland here in Yuma, I always say, is magic,” Lane said. “It can grow almost anything. To put your seeds into the ground and have them grow into something so delicious and so good for you, and then being able to share that with people instead of letting it go to waste, is the best.”
According to the cooperative extension’s director Russ Engel, initiatives like this are what the cooperative extension is all about: supporting the local community.
“We wanted to optimize and put it to the best use that we could,” he said. “We could have plowed it under, we could have found other options, but when we talked about it the consensus was, ‘We wanted to do the most we can to benefit the community.’ That’s our mission.”