Good Enough To Eat With Gleaning Program, Nutritious Fruit Doesn’T Have To Go To Waste

The market for apples is so rotten this year that many Central and Eastern Washington growers are leaving their less-than-perfect picks on the trees.

But a few farmers, along with volunteers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have found a way to get good fruit to needy people. They’re gleaning their crop and sending it to agencies such as the Spokane Food Bank, where a truckload of red Delicious apples from Wenatchee was delivered Monday afternoon.

“These are hail-marked. They’ve got dents in them,” said Clyde Simmons, the Wenatchee orchardist who donated about 60 bins of his apples to the Spokane Food Bank.

“They’re good apples,” he said, adding they may not look just like supermarket fruit, but are tasty and juicy.

With various industry problems, including a diminished market in Asia and a bumper harvest here, only the best fruit in Washington’s orchards is getting picked.

For Simmons, it’s a boon to get the apples out of the orchards instead of leaving them to rot. For the food banks, its an opportunity to get fresh produce to their clients.

This is the first year of the USDA’s gleaning program in Washington state. Through the program, county Farm Service Agency offices link farmers who have surplus harvests with area food banks.

“We know where most of the farmers are, and they can contact us and let us know they’ve got excess food,” said Scott Hallett, spokesman for the USDA. “All of this food goes to needy people, food banks and food distribution agencies.”

The food is gathered with the help of volunteer groups such as the Boy Scouts, student associations and senior citizens. And the USDA program has moved a lot of produce, from potatoes and onions in Odessa to Skagit County broccoli.

“But where we’ve really cleaned up this year is apples,” Hallett said. The USDA and gleaning operations have collected 475,000 pounds of apples. “We’re just really knocked over by the response we got from producers.”

For food banks this is an ideal donation.

“Apples are such a great food for kids,” said Al Brislain, executive director for the Spokane Food Bank. Almost half the people the food bank supplies with food are children.

The food bank will quickly distribute the apples through Eastern Washington and North Idaho, “while they’re still good and crispy,” he said.

While the charity could benefit from more gleaning of other crops, it has found it hard to find volunteer gleaners in a region where the harvest season is so short.

“It’s a shame that nutritious products languish in trees and fields,” Brislain said. “Let’s hope this is sort of a first salvo in a whole move toward gleaning.”