Nationwide Gleaning Effort On Reducing Food Waste

The Association of Gleaning Organizations’ (AGO) SARE project is a comprehensive project to measure the scale of the problem of on-farm food loss and fresh produce waste nationwide and to build the capacity of gleaning organizations to address this issue.

AGO is a national organization that focuses on building the capacity of local gleaning organizations. We don't do any direct field gleaning, and with this project we will focus on utilizing our membership base. There are about 280 gleaning organizations in the United States, and about 120 of these interact with us every year in some way.

We are leveraging that membership base to do in-field measurements. One of the real struggles for our members is realizing how bad the data is on the amount of food that goes to waste in fields. This problem affects our ability to think about what the national scale of the gleaning movement is, and how it can fit into overall efforts to reduce food waste. We are going to be doing data collection across the country on small-, medium-, and large-scale farms, and on residential properties. We will be aggregating that data to share a better picture of what's happening in food waste across the country. In addition to that, we're going to create some resources to share our work. But the real heart of this project is to help gleaners and the public understand the scale of food loss on farms and food waste in yards, and then use that information to come up with better solutions.

Gleaners will work out in the fields and do postharvest gleans, or gleans of fields that weren't scheduled for harvest, and then a subset of our members will also do urban gleaning, whether it's in fruit trees in backyards or community gardens or food bank farms. They may also be doing grocery store or restaurant recovery, or semi-truck recovery.