Apple overload gives gleaning team, SNAC new ways to avoid waste
Through the drought and early snowstorm this year, a Utah State University student-run gleaning organization picked and donated 11,977.5 pounds of local produce throughout the valley during the season from July to October.
Cache Community Gleaning faced some unique challenges during the past season. Gleaning coordinator Emma Watts said they picked more fruit than in 2020, but not as much as they did in 2019.
Watts said there were a couple of reasons why they didn’t pick as much produce as they did during the first season, one reason being due to this year’s drought.
“A lot of people’s trees suffered from not having as much water,” Watts said.
She explained the trees also could have had an off year, another reason for the decreased yield.
“They’ll have a year where they just don’t produce anything, and it’s hard to know exactly when that’s going to happen,” Watts said.
This year’s early October snowstorm was also challenging for the team to work through. Watts said they were mainly picking apples at the time, and she was afraid of how the colder temperatures would affect them.
“It compromises a lot of the fruit. It makes them have this watery core, and then they start rotting because they’re frozen, then we can’t use them,” Watts said.
In addition to damage from the lower temperatures, the wind from the storm also made much of the produce unusable. According to Watts, a lot of the fruit had fallen because of the wind and branches falling.
The gleaning team did a session of picking fruit the day after the storm. Watts thought it would be their last of the season, so she canceled the remaining sessions they had scheduled.
Then, once the temperatures warmed up, the team was able to do additional sessions to pick apples until the fruit on trees was too mushy to give out to people. The USU Student Nutrition Access Center, or SNAC, was already overrun with apples, so they decided to stop picking.
Kara Bachman, the food security program coordinator, said it was difficult to manage the amount of apples SNAC received from the gleaning team. She was concerned they would go bad.
“There was a week that we had maybe 2,000 to 2,500 pounds of apples in our pantry. We were running out of space to put things and the whole pantry smelled like apples,” Bachman said.
Her solution was to sort and grade the apples to make the distribution easier.
“It’s really hard to manage that and so with the fruit now we grade it,” she said. “We grade it into A, B and C.”
According to Bachman, grade A produce can be eaten as is. Grade B goes to USU Extension and is made into applesauce or fruit leather. Grade C is composted or fed to animals.
To ensure the excess apples aren’t wasted, Bachman said SNAC recently purchased a cider press and containers to make and package apple cider.
“We’re going to package the cider in those and then hopefully distribute them in SNAC or find a way to sell it,” Bachman said. She estimated the cider will be ready by the beginning of December.
In addition to apples, Watts said Cache Community Gleaning picked cherries, apricots, pears, peaches, grapes, plums, tomatoes and other miscellaneous produce property owners grew this year.
With the season finished, Watts continues to work on making the team more organized for next year’s gleaning coordinator. She also plans to apply for more grants and make the team more well-known.
“In order for the gleaning program to really become like what we want it to be, we need more resources,” Watts said. “We need to network more, so people know who we are.”
According to the gleaning team’s official website, their mission is to reduce food waste by harvesting excess produce in Cache Valley and feeding it to those who can use it.
Watts explained the team fulfills their mission by donating harvested produce to SNAC, the Cache Community Food Pantry and gleaning volunteers.
“We’re just trying to not waste food that we can use to give to people that need it, or whoever is going to eat it really,” Watts said.
In addition to donating food to the community in Cache Valley, the team’s efforts also benefit the trees they glean from.
“It’s helpful for the community because we get to feed them but it’s also really good for the tree owners to have that stress taken off the trees,” Watts said. “When you leave a lot of fruit on the tree, then the branches don’t get strong enough to sustain all of the fruit.”
According to Watts, many trees they gleaned from were owned by older people who were unable to pick the fruit themselves. The gleaning team’s work helped to strengthen the trees for future growing seasons.
Gleaning efforts at USU began in 2018, according to the gleaning team’s website. The food preservation intern began a project to preserve fruit obtained at a low cost, so they picked fruit from local properties.
The following year, the USU Service Center went on a trip to Tucson, Arizona to work with an organization who teaches gleaning techniques to refugees and integrates them into their community. One member of the trip used this experience to start a gleaning program at USU.
Bachman, the sustainable food intern at the time, came back from the trip wanting to start a program to prevent food waste in Cache Valley. She and the food preservation Intern, Amria Farnsworth, noticed excess fruit in the community going to waste.
“We were noticing a lot of produce was being wasted,” Bachman said. “We knew that food security was an issue in Cache Valley and really everywhere else but we knew that the produce could be used to feed people.”
Bachman and Farnsworth recruited volunteers to do their first gleaning session in the summer of 2019, and Cache Community Gleaning began.
They started advertising and reaching out to people they knew who owned property in the valley. Eventually, they had over 50 properties to glean from.
Watts said the property owners were put on a list the team contacts every year. Using the list, they did about 35 gleaning sessions during the 2021 season.
Watts coordinated the gleaning team’s efforts this year with help from Sarah Moore, the co-director of SNAC. Watts and Moore are both USU students in addition to their jobs.
Watts said their schedules and course loads limited the time they were available to go out on gleaning sessions, but it was worth the time they had to spare.
-Audrey.Flood@usu.edu