Published: May 2024
Authors: Deborah Hill, Jack Daly
Gleaning usually involves collecting fruit and vegetables left on the field after conventional harvesting. It can involve picking crops that the farmer won’t gather because of high harvesting costs and low produce prices. And gleaning can also include collecting excess foods from gardens, farmers markets, grocers, restaurants, state/ county fairs, or any other sources in order to provide it to those in need.
Results from Consensus-focused Solutioning Session
Farmer Support
- Create an alert network for farmers to announce a need gleaners and/or direct farm sales
- Help farmers with taxes and tax preparation related to gleaning
- Create collective tax incentive filing for shared resources
- Establish congregation “food hubs”
- Create local farmer co-op programs for before gleaning to maximize their opportunity to sell for fair market value
- Create markets for UGLY but edible food
- Offer liability/safety training for gleaners
- Brand and promote gleaning as best practice in operations
Food as Medicine
- Subsidize local CSA produce prescription programs and use gleaned foods
- Integrate healthcare system and gleaning in creative ways
- Increase funding from healthcare partners & data collection
- Offer grant funding for farmers to grow food as medicine specifically
- Promote food as medicine
Community Engagement and Farmer Recognition
- Create recognition programs for farmers
- Create marketing campaigns to farmers (personal connections)
- Offer visible farmer recognition such as signage, web badges, social media to signal
“great neighbor” and “great environmental steward” - Celebrate farmers as community partners in visible, locally relevant ways
- Show appreciation through gifts and recognition
- Drive commerce to gleaner farmers as reciprocity – storytelling is key
Legislative Changes
- Build a policy case for a generous NC tax credit that is financially beneficial to small/medium farms in particular
- Remove cap on tax break
- Reinstate tax break with no requirement to claim break as income
- Higher tax incentive
- Allocate more farm to table funds
- Place market value on donation and give tax write off
- Subsidize gleaned food aggregation and shipping (also send food back to farmers)
- Develop financial incentives that farmers want Economic Policies and Incentives
- Create ways to increase farm labor force
- Change USDA categorization from specialty to essential
- Ease farmer liability concerns
- Strengthen institutional sourcing policies
We received funding from The Eads Family Undergraduate Research Endowment Fund and The Duke Endowment Fund to support this effort. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2115405. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.