It’s a good kind of problem for farmers to have: After an unexpectedly seasonable winter and growing season, the Champaign Berry Farm in Urbana produced an unexpected bumper crop of one of its mainstays this year.
“Peaches are very weather-dependent,” says Cathy Pullins, co-owner of the farm and a member of Pioneer Electric Cooperative. “This year we had such a warm winter that the crop was way larger than we had anticipated.”
Obviously, an unexpected bounty is preferred to the alternative, but it still presents some issues to deal with. The farm often donates food to local churches and food banks, but this year’s bumper crop called for something more, and Pullins knew right away what to do with the extra peaches.
In the first half of 2024 alone, volunteers from the Society of St. Andrew in Ohio gleaned more than 60,000 pounds of food — including copious cabbages — from fields and orchards.
“We saved a certain section of the orchard for the gleaners,” she says. “I told the [professional] pickers not to pick those peaches. We like to give back to the community and to those in need. That’s one of our purposes in life.”
Gleaning, described in the Bible’s book of Leviticus, is the practice of collecting leftover crops from farmers’ fields after they have been commercially harvested. Sometimes farmers will intentionally leave a portion for gleaners, though sometimes a farmer can’t find enough workers to pick the produce, or a wholesaler orders less produce than the farmer anticipated.
Rather than leave the perfectly good, but unharvested and unsold, produce to spoil or plow it under, the farmer offers it to volunteers who come and pick it and then transport it to a food bank for distribution to hungry clients.
Pullins called Sue Plummer, program coordinator at the Ohio chapter of the Society of St. Andrew in Cincinnati. The interfaith, nonprofit Society of St. Andrew is the largest field-gleaning organization in the country, mobilizing 30,000 to 40,000 volunteers each year to gather unharvested crops. In Ohio, St. Andrew volunteers gleaned more than 60,000 pounds of food from fields and orchards in the first half of 2024 alone. Plummer arranged for some volunteer gleaners to come to the Champaign Berry Farm, pick the peaches, and then transport them to a food bank. They’ve made several return trips throughout the growing season.
“St. Andrew’s is very nice to work with,” Pullins says. “Sue takes care of everything.” When Plummer hears from a farmer that produce will be available for gleaning, she schedules a picking time, then posts that information online for volunteers, who sign up to go to the farm and do the gleaning. Picking shifts last two to three hours.
When Plummer first heard about gleaning, she was running a community garden in Walnut Hills. In 2019, she began working part time for a grant project on gleaning. In 2022 she started working in her current full-time position. Plummer often gets to help with the gleaning. “If I’m needed, I go. I really love it.”
She says that people who volunteer to do gleaning “tend to be individuals, rather than in groups. We get short notice from growers that a crop is ready for picking, maybe only a couple of days. Then it’s a scramble to get people who can show up then.”
Many volunteer gleaners are retired, because they have the most flexible schedules, though plenty of college students come out, mostly in the summer. Older children are welcome if they are supervised by their parents. Fortunately, Plummer has a lot of regular volunteers, but she can always use more, and more farmers donating food, too.
Plummer says the general public would be surprised “at the amount of food we end up getting, at all the beautiful produce we can deliver to hungry people.” In Ohio, most gleaning work begins at the end of June, and then can go
into December for potatoes, root vegetables, and apples.
“The connections I make with farmers, volunteers, people at agencies, that’s the best part of my job,” Plummer says. “Farmers’ work is so hard, to grow what they grow. They don’t like waste. They’re so grateful when they come [to learn about gleaners], because farmers are some of the most generous people I’ve met.”
