This blog post was written by our partners at Gloucestershire Gleaning.
In the Stroud District of Gloucestershire, we have been exploring the potential for gleaning surplus food from local farms and primary food producers for distribution via community food hubs, in order to supplement their usual sources of surplus food via supermarket collections and national distribution schemes.
As a fledging gleaning group, we have learnt that there are some key stages to this process that we hope will be useful to others interested in getting started with gleaning.
A good place to begin is to work through the excellent online Gleaning Toolkit produced by Feedback Global. This describes the many reasons behind surplus food, how to go about making contact with farms, recruit volunteers and find recipients for the food surplus. It also explains how to organise and run a gleaning event (specifically harvesting on farms). We decided to condense this information into an accessible handbook of resources for our gleaning group and to tailor aspects of it for our own use. For example, we decided to broaden our research into other sources of surplus food such as eggs, dairy and meat, which necessitated considering other food-related aspects beyond fruit and veg, and we also produced a printable gleaning event checklist covering everything a coordinator needs to run a glean event on a farm.
It is also well worth checking out other resources online, for example, Real Farming Trust’s webinar from the spring and making contact with your neighbouring gleaning groups to see what they are up to.
There is a degree of preparedness needed to go gleaning – insurance, health and safety risk assessments and training, sign-up forms for volunteers, equipment, advertising, checking out potential recipients and so on – and getting that structure in place beforehand is essential. Surplus food is often offered at short notice with little time to prepare and it is a shame to miss out on it because you are not ready.
Next you’ll need to do some detective work into farms and food producers to find out who is growing/producing food in your area. We found searching online maps and farm surveys helpful, but also visiting farmers markets and farm shops for details of their local suppliers. It’s a good idea to keep records of this data, even those contacts that seem unlikely initially. And don’t rule out some of the hyper local sources of food – an apple tree in a private garden near a food hub, for example, your local allotments or even collecting surplus at the end of a farmer’s market – it all counts as gleaning. Making contact with farmers/food producers requires patience, and an element of tact and understanding of the challenges and complexities of making a living from food. A surplus is often not welcome to farmers/food producers for various reasons (even though it is usually unavoidable), but equally you may be helping by taking it off their hands with the knowledge that they are supporting people in need in their community. These partnerships can take time to develop, as the mechanics of gleaning and distributing surplus are established, but then the glean may become an annual event.
In Stroud District, the 20 or so community food hubs offering free or ‘pay-if-you-can’ food in cafes and pantries are the recipients for any local surplus food we are gleaning, and each time the logistics need working through – do the food hubs want/need the food on offer? How much of it can they make use of? Maybe you/they can store/freeze/preserve it for future distribution? When are they open to receive it or can they collect it from a central point? Distribution work can take as long as the harvesting/collecting work itself so it’s important not to glean more than you can find recipients for, and ideally distribute it on the same day. This needs assessing realistically when considering the quantities of food and travel distances involved, especially if there are costs incurred in staffing, storage and transportation.
When costing out some of the gleans we ran this year, for example (apples, pears, pumpkins and pheasant eggs), had we not had the benefit of volunteer labour in some cases it barely stacked up financially. This is not the main purpose of gleaning, of course, and we haven’t here described the numerous benefits to volunteer gleaners, the great quality, seasonal food we obtained, reducing food waste and food miles, increased local resilience, rural/urban partnerships and so on, but it is worth keeping an eye on feasibility nonetheless.
Following the work this year (enabled by funding from Feeding Britain, Feeding Gloucestershire and Stroud District Council) we have now established the groundwork for Gloucestershire Gleaning and are looking to move forward in a measured way as we gradually expand making farm/food producer contacts. If you would like to get in touch, please email us at: hello@gloucestershiregleaning.org.uk.
