What does a farm do with six-pound cabbages? With zucchinis longer than forearms and fatter than calves? With tomatoes falling off the vines, more of them than there are bins and pints to catch them?
Not everything a farm grows can be sold or processed on-site. Who wants a six-pound cabbage sitting in their fridge? It costs labor and time to harvest these things, and simply “planting less” risks a poor harvest if the year does not go well.
Enter the gleaners.
The gleaning program was one of Island Grown Initiative’s (IGI) first branches, beginning in 2009. A coordinator works with farms, volunteers and nonprofits to glean, or collect the excess produce left in the fields after a harvest. It is an easy, ancient way to increase access to local, nutritious food, reducing in-field waste and introducing people to farming and food systems in the process.
Gleaning was also, I realized while writing this, my first formative introduction to farming as a young girl.
I went gleaning at IGI in early September. I had been trying, and failing, to schedule a glean all summer for this column. The Thursday morning I finally arrived, it rained like crazy.
That didn’t stop a team of six of us, plus gleaning manager Astrid Tilton and her assistant, Jen Novick, from going out to IGI’s farm for collards, kale and rainbow chard. We worked for just over an hour and brought in 148 pounds of greens, 109 of which were collards.
Since IGI acquired its farm, previously Thimble Farm, in 2020, many of the gleans have taken place on site. The crew plants excess with intention, more than what they can distribute through CSA and wholesale. Last year, 40 per cent of what IGI grew was gleaned, according to Astrid. From IGI and other farms, gleaners pull in an annual 60,000 pounds of food. When I worked at Morning Glory, we’d occassionally see these volunteers in a previous planting of brassicas. They took the afforementioned six-pound cabbages, to my great relief.
Once the produce is in, Astrid works on distributing it. It goes to three different places: food distribution programs such as Island Food Pantry, Serving Hands and Kinship Heals; meals programs at IGI and Grace Episcopal Church; and to the Island’s schools.
In the fall, gleaning picks up, bringing in excess storage crops that Astrid distributes all winter. She also organizes dozens of school field trips, where students get a chance to harvest vegetables and learn about food systems, from the farming that intentionally created the surplus, to where it eventually ends up, if not in a farmstand or grocery store.
“It’s important to understand how different people in the community are meeting their needs for good food and making it work,” Astrid said. “In the same way we talk about some people going to the grocery store, some people are going to the food pantry. A lot of people are going both places, and getting food from different sources.”
I learned this, too, when I was young. People often ask me how I got so interested in farming, an origin story that has largely been a mystery to me. From a class I took? A documentary I watched? Something like that, I respond.
Actually, it begins here, in my synagogue’s community garden in the suburbs of Chicago, where I grew up. It begins with gleaning.
In the Torah — the foundational book of Judaism — there are laws about harvests, that no field should be harvested completely, and that this excess, plus the corners of the fields, should be left for the poor and the stranger to glean. In our community garden, we did the same. Half of each corner plot in the square arrangement would be donated to our local food pantry.
My mom had one of these corner plots, beginning in my pre-teen years. Privately, I didn’t understand it. Why would she put all that work into growing vegetables, if we were just going to give it away?
This was before I truly understood food systems, food equity and farming. Over the next few years I helped out in the garden and accompanied my mom to bring not only her produce, but others’ donations, to the food pantry. An early understanding of our food system began to take shape, and it has only grown from there.
I’m still learning. It took me a long time to understand that access to grocery store produce is not the same as access to locally-grown vegetables. That farming comes with surpluses, but not always the labor to harvest and donate that surplus. And that the economics — and especially the politics — of farming and food are complicated, which is a huge understatement.
This is not something everyone needs to study in detail, especially young children. But a basic understanding of how food and farming operates, I believe, is invaluable as we move through our lives.
At IGI’s gleaning field trips, kids can explore vegetables in a way that makes sense for them, Astrid said. They notice the color of vegetables, get to taste raw vegetables in a low-pressure environment, and are introduced to farming through an exciting, sensory-rich experience with an impactful end-goal.
“I like to stump them with stuff like kohlrabi, it looks like little spaceships landed,” said Astrid. “They get to see a crazy vegetable that now they recognize…it makes them more adventurous. It’s really fun that they can expand their idea of what food looks like.”
The same goes for adults. Astrid and Jen teach you how to harvest a vegetable, if you need. During our glean in September, I noticed for the first time that mature Tuscan kale leaves have a beautiful pink-blue hue. Last year in the fields of Morning Glory Farm, I tasted my first raw onions, raw garlic, romanesco cauliflower and entire chili peppers. I learned that strawberries are called such because the plants are covered with a thick layer of straw at first frost. Duh, right? Wrong. How can we know these things, unless someone shows us?
I met kohlrabi for the first time at 18 years old, and habanero peppers at 21. Gleaning at 12 years old was where I learned what a zucchini looked like on a plant, and that it grows to such excess that most people don’t know what to do with it. Everyone starts somewhere, and it’s easy to start with gleaning.
You might just fall in love with farming, like I did.