Fact: America has an abundance of food.
Question: So why does anyone go hungry in this country?

A potato gleaning in Virginia (Photo: Society of St. Andrew)

Armed with this simple thought, the Society of St. Andrew (SOSA) took up the cause of feeding the hungry in 1979 with the idea of gleaning fields for salvageable produce.

“We do this in two says,” says Carol Breitinger, communications director. “We use volunteers in the field for hands-on gleaning, or we send out trucks to pick up surplus crops that farmers can’t use and would just end up in the landfill.”

Once SOSA obtains the produce, they distribute to food pantries around the country. Breitinger says they salvage 20 to 25 million pounds of food a year with the help of 30,000 to 35,000 volunteers. The volunteers come from church groups, schools, scout troops, and even from the people who need the food.

Becky and Dave Aduddell of Wake Forest, N.C., are two of SOSA’s veteran volunteers. “We’ve been doing this for five or six years now,” says Dave, who is a web programmer for a local community college by day and a bass player by night. The couple was hooked after a friend who was gleaning introduced them to the concept. “It sounded like such an eminently logical idea that we joined him very shortly after he started.”

Gleaning a field in North Carolina (Photo: Society of St. Andrew)

“Our interest in gleaning stems from that great desire within each of us to ‘do some good.’ We like it because it is very concrete and tangible. Writing a check to a charity gives one a good feeling and a sense of satisfaction, but going out and working to glean, then delivering the produce directly to the recipients is a very concrete act.”

The Aduddells bring their gleaned crops to a public housing complex in the small town where they live.

The couple acknowledges that the gleaning process wasn’t a big stretch – both of them come from farming families. “While we didn’t grow up on a farm, we spent time doing farm work as kids, so this is a nice déjà vu for us,” says Dave.

In mid-October the Aduddells joined several hundred volunteers for the 19th annual Yam-Jam, sponsored by SOSA. The group salvaged unharvested sweet potatoes from a 50-acre field in rural Johnston County, North Carolina. The area had already been harvested by professionals. In addition to sweet potatoes, Becky says the group has collected corn, green beans, collards, tomatoes, watermelon, squash and blueberries.

“A good 20 percent of produce is lost in the fields,” says SOSA’s Breitinger. She says the USDA calculates that 96 billion pounds of food is wasted in this country before it gets to market.

Why do farmers leave good food behind? “Sometimes commercial growers must leave one field to move on to the next crop,” says Breitinger. Other times, the produce isn’t “perfect” enough for market – not quite the right size or color, but perfectly edible. Also, sometimes the farmer can’t afford to pay another crew to come through his fields again.

Gleaning a perfect cabbage in Virginia (Photo: Society of St. Andrew)

Farmer Leo Stallings says he has leftovers because there isn’t a big market for produce in Franklin County, the area of North Carolina where his farm is located. Stallings, who has been in the farm business for 40 years, grows a number of crops including sweet corn, beans, cantaloupe, collards, peas, squash and string beans. “This area is not very commercial. There are few markets. Growing is not a problem, but selling is. We don’t have a co-op to handle acres of crops.

“I try to plant about as much as I think will sell. But because the market varies, I often have leftovers.”

Stallings says SOSA volunteers come out in the summer and late fall to salvage his fields. He says he doesn’t mind giving it away. “I don’t want it to go to waste and they give us a tax credit for it.”

When large growers donate a tractor trailer load of food, SOSA might contact a group of volunteers, often a church group, to sponsor a “potato drop.”

“Imagine 45,000 pounds of loose potatoes dumped into a church parking lot,” says Breitinger. “Volunteers then put 10 to 15 pounds of potatoes into mesh bags. We contact the local food pantries to come to pick it up.”

Corn-based ethanol, once a star on the alternative energy scene, has fallen from favor in the past year, battered by reports that raising corn for fuel raids the world’s pantry and that corn ethanol has a heavier carbon footprint than originally thought.

Many now argue over whether the US should continue to grow corn for fuel or make the switch to grasses that can be grown on less desirable land, with fewer pesticides and fertilizers, or use plant waste to make fuel.

Now a new debate looms: Should the US allow genetically altered corn to be grown for use as biofuel?

The Union of Concerned Scientists wants to stop that genie before it leaves the bottle, because it believes that genetically modified corn will inevitably mix with and contaminate corn grown for food products.

Syngenta, a multi-national agriculture company that has readied a new genetically modified corn intended for ethanol production, disagrees. The company has applied for permission to sell its corn seed in the US, telling officials that it would control where the crops are grown so that the GMO corn would not mix with the food supply.

“Corn Amylase will be produced and managed in such a way as to avoid the product entering the broad commodity grain streams,” the company says in a position paper. It proposes that the corn be handled in a “closed look type system” that would contain the grain and further promises that it will complete “full-scale trials” and discussions with industry stakeholders before putting the corn on the commercial market. The company is targeting the US market, but would apply for import clearances into other markets.

The newly developed “Corn Amylase” contains a new protein that breaks down corn starch under high temperatures and could reduce the cost of ethanol production, according to Syngenta. The company suggests in the position paper that the product also could boost crop yields (though it doesn’t offer a figure). In addition, it reports that a “detailed economic study” shows that Corn Amylase could reduce the energy, chemicals and water currently required to grow corn for ethanol.

The non-profit UCS, however, says that growing other types of plants for biofuel use would still be more efficient than growing row crops like corn.  The group is asking the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to exercise due diligence on the Syngenta request before de-regulating its use.

“We should be moving away from corn for ethanol and trying to get it from non-food crops; get it from switch grass instead of corn, and cellulose instead of food crops,” says Dr. Jane Rissler, a plant pathologist with the UCS who has been working on biotechnology issues for the past 25 years including a stint with the EPA.

These second-generation biofuels take less of a toll on the land, produce fewer greenhouse gases and don’t displace cropland for food production, she said.

Conservation minded farmers might naturally assume it’s wise to get the most out of what’s available; if post-harvest waste material can be used in biofuel production, it seems to make financial and ecological use to sell it.

Not necessarily, according to a scientist at Washington State University who is urging farmers in her region to leave the waste where it falls.

Ann Kennedy, a USDA-Agricultural Research Service soil scientist who serves as an adjunct professor at the school, studies the composition of soil in the Palouse region, an area in Washington, Idaho and Oregon where wheat is grown.

Specifically, she tracks the balance of minerals, microorganisms, and organic matter that constitute soil, determining how levels are affected by different farming practices and how they in turn influence a field’s productivity.

Kennedy has found that the farmers in her region should aim for around 3.5 percent organic matter — the mix of “well-decomposed plant material and microbes” that “is black and rich and gives soil its dark color” — in their soil, but that most of have only about two percent.

“Organic matter provides nutrients crops need; it holds water and contributes to aggregation,” Kennedy says, so she is focused on ways to replenish it where it’s low. One way she has found is to cut back on tilling, which can mix materials too quickly for microbes to process them effectively.

But another is leaving crop residue on the soil surface, where “it will tend to stay around longer, and the microbes will slowly invade it and convert it into organic matter.” Harvesting this residue for biofuel production, Kennedy believes, will only lead to decreased fertility and require farmers to find other means of boosting organic content. “We need to constantly replenish organic matter,” she says, “so removing valuable residue, especially in areas with low rainfall, may not be the best practice.”

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