This year, Gorge Gleaning volunteers gathered and donated 3,000 pounds of produce to local food access partners, according to Gorge Grown. Last year’s total was almost 5 tons — mostly fruit, with just 130 pounds of vegetables.
Interested producers or volunteers can sign up for an email newsletter with upcoming gleans at gorgegleaning.com, or contact Peter Fink at gleaning@gorgegrown.com.
"The 100 or so active volunteers visit Gorge-area producers who invite them to gather imperfect or leftover crops that can’t be harvested and sold. The group donates half their gleanings to food security organizations. The farmers get a tax write-off for food that would otherwise go to waste, or even cost money to dispose of, said Peter Fink, coordinator of the Gorge Grown program."
This year, Gorge Gleaning volunteers gathered and donated 3,000 pounds of produce to local food access partners, according to Gorge Grown. Last year’s total was almost 5 tons — mostly fruit, with just 130 pounds of vegetables.
THE GORGE — A decade-old program is gathering the produce Gorge-area farms can’t harvest and gifting everything from cilantro to blueberries to the food insecure through a network of local food access partners.
The 100 or so active volunteers visit Gorge-area producers who invite them to gather imperfect or leftover crops that can’t be harvested and sold. The group donates half their gleanings to food security organizations. The farmers get a tax write-off for food that would otherwise go to waste, or even cost money to dispose of, said Peter Fink, coordinator of the Gorge Grown program.
The program started as a Hood River workshop on food security and food waste, organized by the Ford Family Foundation in 2015. Now Gorge Grown runs the program.
Any producer in the Gorge’s five counties, whether a big farm or a backyard market garden, can donate to Gorge Glean. Fink coordinates the harvest day, and volunteers can keep up to half of what they pick, donating the rest to the nearest local food access partner.
“Who that is sort of depends on what the food bank needs; if they already have a bunch of blueberries and they don’t necessarily need more blueberries, then we find another group like a school ... a youth camp, summer camp or find a another food access partner supporting the community and working on food insecurity,” Fink said.
The logistics of getting the word out, organizing harvests and delivering produce are most of Fink’s job — which didn’t exist before the COVID-19 pandemic reached the Gorge.
During COVID, Gorge Gleaning’s volunteer participation and number of gleans dropped. Farmer’s markets were becoming “very popular,” as the food system was “so drastically affected” that more people found other ways of accessing fresh produce.
Volunteers pick cherries during a recent Gorge Gleaning event. The produce is donated to local food access partners.
Photo courtesy Peter Fink
“Gorge Grown became very busy with that project,” he noted. Fink came on board last June to help run the gleaning program, sorting out all the logistical complications of harvesting other people’s crops during a pandemic, and the big changes COVID brought.
Heatwaves and wildfire smoke have also canceled gleans. But Gorge Glean itself is doing well.
“By and large, it’s been a really successful program ... We glean a lot of produce every year and feed a lot of hungry mouths and a lot of communities,” said Fink.
A typical season of 20-30 gleans begins with cherries, mid-June to July. Then blueberries start to come in. Then plums and a few vegetable gleans. Peaches are a typical glean in August. Then apples and pears come in.
Volunteers come from all different backgrounds, some speaking Spanish and some English, some living as far away as Portland. They logged 260 hours in 2020.
Fruit makes up most gleans, with a few vegetables and some oddities, like a recent cilantro glean.
Volunteers pick cherries during a recent Gorge Gleaning event. The produce is donated to local food access partners.
Photo courtesy Peter Fink
With no local value-added processing centers for anything except a few major fruit crops — cherries, pears and apples — everything else must be sold through farmers’ markets, CSA (community-supported agriculture) groups, or similar. Many of these smaller farmers are able to sell most of their produce, and don’t run into the logistical challenges that face the large-scale orchards.
As a result, most small farms of a few acres or less don’t have extra produce to donate. And some of the biggest producers and orchards won’t donate their leftovers. That’s because they don’t want the logistical issue of 20-30 volunteers wandering a farm alongside 500 or so laborers, Fink said. So most gleans take place on multiple-acre fruit farms, few of them in Wasco County.
Fink noted that “many, many” migrant farm workers enter the region, particularly those picking cherries and pears, from California or abroad. “Because it’s a very difficult and often low paying industry, that being the agricultural industry law, those folks are unable to afford groceries locally, and so ended up having to visit the food bank,” Fink said. Visits to Gorge food banks have grown over the past four years, with FISH Food Bank predicting the largest increase in clients of its 55-year history this summer. It’s Hood River location has seen an 80% increase in clients requests since last year.
Often, fresh, just-harvested green produce and fresh fruit, ripe and of good quality, aren’t easily purchased by Gorge Gleaning’s food access partners, Fink said. The gleans make a “nice supplement” to food banks’ own purchases and donations.
Interested producers or volunteers can sign up for an email newsletter with upcoming gleans at gorgegleaning.com, or contact Peter Fink at gleaning@gorgegrown.com.
Photo courtesy Peter Fink
About five tons of produce was gleaned in 2023, one of Gorge Gleaning’s biggest-ever years. Farmers could write those donations off on their taxes and avoid problems with leftover fruit on the tree — for example, the problem of pestiferous fruit flies, which are attracted to unharvested cherries. The volunteers could take home half their personal harvest. Food access partners get the other half. “It’s a win-win situation,” Fink said.
He thinks gleaning 100,000 pounds of produce a year is possible. “Our hope is a system in which no crop would need to go to waste, and no farmer would have to watch all the work that they put into — just rot out in the field because of a labor issue, because of whatever issue it may be,” he explained. “They will be able to see that food go and feed people. And think we’ve really achieved a lot of that goal in many senses, but I do think that there’s so much more potential.”
"The 100 or so active volunteers visit Gorge-area producers who invite them to gather imperfect or leftover crops that can’t be harvested and sold. The group donates half their gleanings to food security organizations. The farmers get a tax write-off for food that would otherwise go to waste, or even cost money to dispose of, said Peter Fink, coordinator of the Gorge Grown program."
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