Understanding the impact, potential, and scope of the Nationwide Gleaning effort on-farm food loss and residential food waste.

Commodities

Practices

The U.S. wastes enough food to
feed 150 million people, yet thirty-five million Americans are
food insecure.
(1)  Food waste has
ripple effects that are both social and environmental. While the
amount of food wasted post-harvest is staggering, most food waste
reports do not consider pre-harvest food loss. While it is
generally understood that significant food loss occurs on farms,
the true scope of on-farm food loss is poorly understood. In
addition to on-farm food loss, millions of fruit trees go
un-harvested annually in cities nationwide. 

We can’t develop practical
solutions to these problems without adequate data. Gleaners are
uniquely positioned to gather the needed data. With over 200
organizations in 42 states, gleaning organizations have a vast
reach across farm sizes, crop types, and geographic regions. The
Association of Gleaning Organizations (AGO) is the only group
working to unite gleaners from across the U.S. to understand the
gleaning movement more fully and provide the needed support to
grow its capacity. 

AGO defines gleaning as the act
of gathering food from a plant or from someone who gathered it
directly from a plant. Although many organizations do other types
of food rescue, our support focuses on this type of gleaning. Our
members’ tasks include leading volunteers to harvest unharvested
produce from farms, post-harvest food rescue from farms and
farmers markets, and harvesting underutilized fruit trees and
community gardens. This funding will allow us to gather data on
how much food is lost on farms and wasted from urban fruit trees
and learn what gleaners are doing to address this form of food
loss. 

We will use our vast network to
gather over 2,000 data points on the type and scale of on-farm
food loss. This data will be uploaded to a database. Once this
information is collected, AGO will allow others to access the raw
data in real-time. At the end of the project, we will compile
this information into a report that details the findings. This
information will be helpful not only to gleaning organizations
around the country but also to policymakers and other NGOs like
ReFED.

We will use the information
gathered to update our 2020 Gleaning Census with a 2025 version.
This report gives a view of the gleaning effort in the U.S. Other
deliverables will include fact sheets about food loss and waste
prevention, and training resources for gleaners. Lastly, these
activities will be supported by three annual in-person gatherings
of gleaning organizations held in different regions of the U.S.
In conjunction with these activities, we will continue to provide
training for gleaning organizations. Training will cover various
valuable and timely topics, including how to gather reliable data
about on-farm food loss, how to share that information with
farms, how to offer resources to farms who wish to monetize this
food loss, and how to better rescue these forms of food loss.
This comprehensive response will reduce food loss and waste,
increase community self-reliance, and improve outcomes for all
involved.

1. Better understand the amount of
   produce that goes un-harvested on farms each year. Once there
   is more precise data from a national data set, more informed
   decisions can be made that will lead to reduced food loss on
   farms.
2. Help gleaning programs adapt
   and identify best practices to most effectively reduce food
   loss and waste. Specifically, we are focused on loss and waste
   before harvest and pre-wholesale. This will improve the effort
   of gleaners nationwide to minimize food loss and waste. To do
   so, we will gather up-to-date information on the gleaning
   movement's effort to rescue food in the US, analyze this data
   for the best practices, and share those best practices with the
   wider gleaning community.
3. Understand the potential impact
   of unharvested fruit trees on cities' efforts to promote
   healthy eating, food sovereignty, and food
   security. 
4. Improve profitability and
   decision-making for small and mid-scale farms across the US. We
   aim to help farmers better understand the amount of food not
   consumed in real-time and historically by crop type. In
   addition to this information, we aim to provide better
   information on how to monetize that produce. This information
   will lead to less food loss on farms and increased farmer
   profitability.
5. Increase the availability of
   fresh produce at small charity distribution sites around the
   country.