September 16, 2022
The end of summer is harvest time and for us that means “gleaning time”. Gleaning has been a tradition dating back to biblical times when it was the law in some Christian kingdoms. After the grain was commercially harvested, it was mandated that “the poor” had to be allowed to collect whatever was left in the fields.
Currently half of all the produce that is grown in the U.S. is wasted and 21% of all landfill waste is food. The good news is that more and more gleaning volunteers are organizing across the U.S. and collecting what’s left in the fields and delivering it to soup kitchens and food pantries.
Even after all the food that is fit for human consumption has been harvested and gleaned - there is still way too much being thrown out, or tilled under, which could otherwise be used for animal feed.
Anne and I pick up tons of vegetables every year from farmstands and fields. What we collect is free for the taking - the farmers are just happy to not have their hard work go to waste. What we save in feed costs though, we spend in time collecting. It is definitely not a profitable endeavor, but it still feels like the right thing to do.
This week we harvested a half-acre patch of corn that was “past its prime”. The tradition of gleaning may be 2000 years old, but the technology has certainly come a long way. The farmer texted me a couple days before he was planning to till the crop under. When I texted him that we were on our way, he dropped a gps pin to show exactly which rows of corn on his 80-acre farm were available for us to pick. After we arrived at what I hoped was the right spot, I dropped another pin and texted a photo, and he confirmed we were indeed in the right place. Once he and I were done pinging gps coordinates back and forth to each other via satellites in outer space, Anne and I got to work methodically picking row after row of corn, just like we might have done 2,000 years ago.
The pigs, who could not have cared less about the technological advances that I found so amusing, were ecstatic about the corn. They ate pretty much everything but the husks - which the sheep happily cleaned up after them. What little the pigs and sheep missed during their harvest, the chickens gleaned for themselves. And what the chickens missed, the earthworms consumed, and when the earthworms processed as much as they possibly could, the microbes devoured the rest- leaving behind a nutritionally dense, biologically happy soil. It is a practically flawless system perfected by billions of years of evolution. Indeed, when humans don’t interfere, there is very little waste in nature.
In stark contrast, a “modern farmer” (a.k.a. “confinement operator”) keeps the pigs housed in concrete bunkers, the chickens in cages and the earthworms and microbes are meticulously eliminated by chemical sprays. By their calculations, that system is more profitable – but there are other costs that never show up on any balance sheet. And similarly, there are benefits to farming with nature and allowing it to thrive which are also hard to quantify. Maybe profit isn’t the correct metrics with which to decide how best to farm.
For information about gleaning in Connecticut visit