HISTORY — Boston Area Farm Gleaning Project - page 3

Antecedents: Gleaning dates back to Biblical times, but is still practiced into modern times, of course self help, not like B.A.G. crews picking for food pantries. (We have tried to recruit people from the shelters and food pantries to glean, for various reasons not so easy to arrange). There is the famous Millet painting of French women gleaning in the fields, which we are now offering reproduced on tee shirts and tote bags. And in 2007 as a fund raiser we showed the movie The Gleaners and I by Agnes Varda, which showed videos of modern gleaning in the fields, and also in the streets, and by artists (junk art!).

I had been involved in gleaning farms before, back in the 1990s for Food For Free.

Food For Free gleaned from Chelsea Wholesale Market, also from such produce stores as Whole Foods, so it was a natural step to glean from farms. Ari Kurtz of Linden Tree Farm in Lincoln proposed to set aside 3/4s of an acre to grow collards and kale, greens then not so commonly sold in supermarkets, and I helped coordinate that too. We called the project Field of Greens! When we discovered there was fallow ground at the old U/Mass Field Station in Waltham, myself and several other people from the gleaning crews determined to farm for food pantries there, and U/Mass accepted our proposal. The farm came to be called Waltham Fields Community Farm and is still very much a going concern today.

  Waltham Fields Community Farm