Supporting Local Producers, Preventing Food Waste and Feeding People!
Would you be surprised to learn that nearly half of a small farm’s crop goes to waste?
For years, small farms have faced the same dilemma. How to address the issue of food waste and how to get food out of the field and into the market or into the hands of hungry Americans? At the very least, how do hard-working farmers recoup the cost of their seed and water?
As a young person growing up on the family farm in Maine, my family and I were always giving our fresh picked produce to friends and neighbors. We’d grow asparagus, tomatoes, carrots, beets, rhubarb, spinach, radish, peaches, squash and pumpkins. Seed is inexpensive and with a handful of children running around, there were always ten hands available to sow a hundred foot stretch of heirloom tomatoes. Perhaps my parents were a tad overzealous when they decided to plant a couple of hundred foot rows of asparagus that all peaked their heads through the cool spring soil like soldiers waking to attention after a long deserved winter nap. It didn’t matter that we were only a family of five. Rain was plentiful making it easy to grow our own produce through the short hot summers. We never dreamed of making a profit; we were part of the self-sufficiency movement and any extras were happily shared within our community.
Magnify that picture by a factor of twenty and envision your local Farmer with a need to make a profit to continue providing healthy food. Employees and 10-30 acres and the need for irrigation, weeding and the mighty task of harvesting 1,000 tomato plants that all ripened at once because of a blistering hot spell. It’s sort of like a getting heat stroke: you get dizzy followed by a headache and before you know it, you’re delirious and fainting. How do you harvest two and a half tons of organic tomatoes and flog them into the market? Do you head down to the day labor pool and hire fifteen workers to get those rainbow-hued orbs off the vines and into cases before they turn to soup? Once those nightshade fruits are harvested they’re fragile and perishable. The farmer has about three days to sell them before they’re ready for sauce or drying. Most farms aren’t equipped to process and pack their products. That’s a whole different animal and USDA certification. Most pick their crops as quickly as possible with their own crew and half of the crop gets cooked on the vine. Sadly, I’ve seen this tragedy one too many times.
The issue with American agriculture isn’t about a shortage of good food to feed the hungry. It’s about food waste, perfectly fresh produce irrigated by an ever-decreasing supply of clean water thrown and up to 50% of produce added to the compost pile or worse into landfill.
I recently attended the Sow Your Seed Funding program given by Slow Money Northern California. I had the honor to meet Nick Papadopoulos, a management consultant cum general manager of Bloomfield Farms (a farming family of thirty years) in Bloomfield, Sonoma County. Nick is an affable fellow with a healthy glow, kind heart and enough gumption to tackle a behemoth of a food supply issue that could address hunger in much of the world.
Nick approached me like an old friend and asked if I would help him get the word out about his love child, “CropMobster“, that he’s confident will divert food to those who desperately need it. Nick recounted the story of Bloomfield Farms founded by Mike Collins in the rolling hills of the Estero Americano Watershed between the hamlets of Bloomfield and Valley Ford. This region is constantly cooled by the salt kissed air coming in off the Pacific. A climate perfect for cool weather greens like all those nutrient packed, anti-cancer, cruciferous vegetables like emerald-green kale, fog kissed broccoli, jewel like treviso and blue-green orbs of cabbage. Bloomfield Farms had already garnered the support of Marin and Sonoma County neighbors with their U-Pick Sundays, where a family could visit the farm with the freedom to explore and pick their own organic produce for a flat $30 plus a little more for farm fresh eggs and strawberries.
Nick learned about farm waste in his early days at Bloomfield. He’d see perfectly good, organic produce come back from the farmers market and end up on the compost pile. Fresh produce has a finite life and trucking is expensive. A farmer needs to know when to cut their losses and move on. Nevertheless, it pained Nick to know that there are people in Sonoma County who didn’t know when they’d sit down for their next meal.
Nick did an experiment with $500 worth of nutritious organic produce destined for the compost pile. He posted his status on Facebook, “$500 worth of organic produce to the highest bidder”, was his first “produce flash mob”.
There was one response and the taker paid $100 for the organic produce and kindly shared it with hungry families. Two more Facebook Produce Flash Mobs cemented the idea and he sat down with his web development team partners at Presstree to create CropMobster.com, a platform that uses social media to distribute healthy food to those in need for at a fraction the cost of retail and helping the farmer recoup his overhead and continue farming. It’s a winning solution for everyone involved.
CropMobster offers Free Farm Product Donations, Auctions, Deals and Gleanings (a farmer opens their fields or orchards after harvest to the needy to collect the produce that remains). Within two weeks of CropMobster’s inception, 6500 Lbs. of produce had gone to those in need.
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Here’s an example of a current offering on CropMobster by Bi-Rite Market:
DONATION: $250 Worth of Sweet, Local Cherries | Bi-Rite Market (San Francisco, CA)
June 18, 2013 By Bi-Rite Market – DIVISADERO
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Bi-Rite Market, San Francisco’s premier neighborhood market, is donating ~30 lbs. of sweet American River cherries (valued at $250) to one qualified hunger relief non-profit in San Francisco. These dark red beauts are firm and sweet; great for snacking or for any DIY project – homemade scones or pies, sweet preserves or dehydrated cherries!
Here at Bi-Rite Market, our mission of “creating community through food” extends beyond our four walls. We believe that it takes a village to make a community thrive. To that end, we support organizations that are working to strengthen our San Francisco community. Help us continue creating this community by getting this beautiful, delicious local fruit to families in need!
- Retail Value: $250 (at 100% off)
- Price: FREE!
- Location: Bi-Rite Divisadero (550 Divisadero between Hayes and Fell)
Terms: Email [email protected] with a short note accepting this donation and describing your organization or group’s hunger relief mission. Inquiries will be addressed on a first-come, first-served basis. The donation will be given to one SF-based organization. The recipient agrees to pick up this produce today or tomorrow at Bi-Rite Market at 550 Divisadero St. in San Francisco. Appropriate transportation is required.
This donation of cherries by Bi-Rite Market was snatched up by the venerable Project Open Hand to nourish their clients around the Bay Area.
CropMobster fills the void and routes nutritious food away from the compost stream and into the mouths of the hungry in our communities. While this concept was founded locally, it is scalable across the nation and the globe. There is no reason for anyone to go hungry when so much good food is rotting in the field. Learn more about CropMobster and it’s impact to date and how you can get involved as a food producer or community member who’d like to help get good food to those in need.