Gleanings from the Director by Duck Caldwell I once admitted to one of our partner farmers that I saw the role of the Gleaners within our local agricultural ecosystem to be that of the scavenger – to clean up what had been left – and the reaction I got was a hearty belly laugh and a nod of approval. Fortunately, farmers are connected enough to natural systems on a day-to-day basis that this idea clicked immediately. I even felt that I had encouraged a deeper understanding of gleaning to this particular farmer. Back in the modern mainstream, however, scavenging usually connotes negative images. Those seen as societal dropouts might scavenge by dumpster diving, for example, and poor people might sometimes be forced to scavenge, which can be considered shameful and a sign of personal failure. Seen from a biological perspective, however, the activity of scavenging plays an essential role in ecosystems. It ensures that abundances of rotting and decomposing organic material are processed and return important nutrients to the food chain, keeping ground water clean and preventing disease. Given that gleaners are cleaning up good produce that would otherwise be plowed under, our work is not quite on par with a vulture’s (I’m pretty sure that gleaning does not prevent disease, for example), but it does serve the same purpose within our food system in terms of retrieving important nutrients from the waste stream and bringing them back into our food supply chain. I sometimes think of gleaners as a colony of ants, where scouts locate good stores of nutrients, and then send out teams to bring back the goods for the larger colony. In our consumerist culture, however, we seem to truly forget that we are part of a living ecosystem. We’ve also been effectively trained not to pay attention to signs of imbalance, such as huge amounts of food surplus. On a basic, biological level, however, food is fuel, and fuel is energy. Any omnivore in their right mind would know that passing up good fuel is not in their best interest and, ultimately, represents a serious threat to their survival. So why don’t we follow suit? Why aren’t we as smart as our omnivore cousin the bear, for instance, that eats a wide variety of seasonal fare and scavenges as well? I think it is because we are so disconnected from our food sources that we scarcely understand the basic nature of fuel and energy. This basic, biologic knowledge has been stripped from many people in the modern age, and is compounded by the fact that most people in the US now do not live on or near farms. This type of knowledge will slowly return to people as the local food movement grows. And the Gleaners will be right there in the thick of it, waiting opportunistically for our chance to pounce on agricultural surplus, and carry it, like so many ants, back to our larger colony, especially to those of us who are in need of nutrient rich fuel. Yes, it’s true: farmers in Massachusetts have no financial incentives on either the state or federal level to donate either harvested or unharvested crops. There are no tax laws that allow a deduction for this donation. So when farmers invite BAG out to glean, you can be sure it is entirely because of their personal values that we are there. As farmer Carl Hills of Kimball Fruit Farm explained to me, and as his accountant had explained to him, deductions for the crops have already been taken in the cost of goods sold (seed, fertilizer, etc.), so deducting them again would be viewed as “double-dipping.” The latest attempt at federal legislation that would allow a deduction for the transportation of donated food took place in October 2011, when Congressman McGovern introduced H.R. 3177: The Hunger Relief Trucking Tax Credit Act (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr3177) to the 112th Congress. This bill would have provided a tax credit in the form of .25 cents per mile for the transportation of donated goods to hunger relief organizations. This bill was referred to the House Ways and Means committee and died therein. In theory, this bill represented a step in the right direction and would have gone some way toward acknowledging the need for compensation to individuals who thanklessly move donated food. In actuality, however, it would not have benefited farmers at all. As I also mentioned in my previous post below (“But WHY is all this produce left in the fields?”), farm sponsored gleaning activities are financially unfeasible, and .25 cents a mile would hardly motivate a farmer to take a truck and a worker out of production for a day or even an hour. This law might have benefited your weekend gleaner, and maybe a wholesaler who could figure out how to feasibly transport donated goods as additional cargo on existing routes. That’s a good idea as well, but it doesn’t give any credit to the producer. What farmers need is a financial acknowledgment that there is additional value in the food that is leftover beyond the costs to grow it, and that the government sees this as important enough for the overall food system that tax deductions are implemented. Even if this deduction amounted to one quarter of the market value, this could really add up and help motivate farmers to make it a regular part of their business practices. Not enough to start their own gleaning programs (that would almost be business as usual, after all), but at least to call in gleaners. Some of our partner farmers have regularly donated over 10K lbs. annually to BAG. If one quarter of the market value represented .20 cents per pound, this would amount to a $2K deduction. I can’t see a farmer turning his/her nose up at that, and I am quite certain that it might push a few other farmers to pick up the phone and call us when there are 50 other tasks pressing them as well. This 10K pounds, by the way, represents almost 56,700 servings (80 grams each) of fresh produce. As we continue to see food insecurity and diet related health issues rise in eastern MA and across the country, I think that everyone can agree that there is a lot of value in figuring out how to help farmers develop systems to reliably capture their surplus. Duck Caldwell Executive Director References: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr3177 This is the question our staff hear from many-a-gleaner on the occasion of their first gleaning outing. It’s a good, straight-forward question with a very long and layered answer. I’ll start the answer here, and will continue to address the questions and complexities of agricultural surplus here in my new blog, “Gleanings of the Director.” Let’s start with how farms work. Farmers are business people dealing with uncontrollable risks that would make most of the rest of us run screaming from the fields. Over-producing is one of the only ways they have of mitigating the enormous risks they face seasonally in the form of weather, pests, labor shortages, and constantly shifting markets, just to name a few. Any lost sale is that much more out of their own pockets, so planting extra is like a form of insurance. The good news is, most farmers are perfectly willing to donate the resulting surplus, they just can’t afford to do it without some help. I once calculated the cost to a farmer for devoting one farm worker to one day of gleaning a truckload of apples and delivering to the local food bank. All told, labor, fuel, and opportunity costs (lost revenue of a laborer and a truck not doing their normal work) came to at least $400. For one day! You can see how a farm funded gleaning operation would be prohibitively expensive given most farms’ slim profit margins. Volunteer gleaning efforts are a great way to recover some of the agricultural surplus that is left out in the fields in eastern Massachusetts. On a national scale, however, turns out gleaning is not always the most efficient way of recovering unharvested crops because of the large amount of time and labor required. In states with large vegetable farms that use mechanized harvesting systems, for example, millions of pounds of post-harvest surplus can be recovered regionally by simply sending a food bank truck out to large wholesale farms (Bloom, 2008). Basically, the agricultural surplus recovery efforts that make sense in one region’s food system may not make sense in another. In our densely populated area, farms are tucked away in suburbs, outlying areas, and on conservation land. They tend to be small, diversified, and able to react to changing markets and specialty demands. They harvest mostly by hand and are very interested in being an integral part of their local communities. This all adds up to great opportunities for gleaning in the Greater Boston area, and a great potential for delivering significant amounts of fresh, local produce to our neighbors who may not otherwise be able to afford it. More Soon! Duck Caldwell Executive Director References: Bloom, J. (2010). American wasteland: How America throws away nearly half of its food. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. |
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