By Caroline Abels

It’s an ancient practice — so old it’s mandated by the Bible — but these days, finding someone who knows what “gleaning” is all about is like hunting for a pea pod in a field of green.

Which is exactly what it is about: gleaning refers to the gathering of unmarketable vegetables, fruits or grains left behind in farm fields after harvest. The food is deemed too small, too pockmarked, or too bruised to meet the cosmetic standards of supermarket shoppers, but it is welcomed by the poor, homeless and unemployed victims of the current U.S economic slump, who receive gleaned food from assistance organizations after it is collected by volunteers.

Today’s gleaning beneficiaries needn’t wander the fields, though, thanks to the efforts of organizations like the Oregon Food Bank, the San Antonio Food Bank in Texas, and Santa Cruz Second Harvest Food Bank in California. The Hunger Action Network of New York State has published a gleaning guide for students.

It’s even likely that gleaning has arrived in your community; grassroots groups around the nation have geared up this harvest season to help their neighbors. The Virginia-based Society of St. Andrew, which oversees a national volunteer gleaning network that is active in 16 states, reports that over 12 million pounds of produce was gleaned nationwide by 37,700 volunteers in 2008.

The way it works is that gleaning groups put together teams of volunteers-sometimes the food recipients themselves, sometimes school groups or church groups-who head to local farms and collect leftover produce. Gleaners also rescue unwanted food from supermarkets, wholesale outlets, farmers’ markets, even people’s backyard fruit trees. Gleaned crops are dropped off at central locations, such as food pantries and soup kitchens, where the fresh produce is highly appreciated by those in need-the poor, jobless, and the disabled and senior citizens on limited incomes.

I recently spent a satisfying morning gleaning with the Vermont Foodbank, which provides food to assistance agencies statewide. When I pulled into Dog River Farm-a small vegetable farm near my Montpelier home-about a dozen volunteers were standing beside the Foodbank’s red pick-up getting a quick course in gleaning from field coordinator, Amanda Payne: farm workers had already harvested the best beets, she told us; we were to sort through the remaining ones lying on the ground in the field.

The beets we harvested that day — only an inch or so around, their stems mushy from recent rain — looked perfectly edible. Barbara Ploof, a 66-year-old volunteer, expressed what all of us gleaners were likely thinking: “It just seems like such a shame to let all this food go to waste. It’s food that’s needed.” The farmer who runs Dog River Farm was grateful, too: he would later receive a tax credit for his donation.

A few days later, I tagged along with Amanda as she delivered boxes of fresh gleaned vegetables to Vermont food assistance groups. The soup kitchen organizers, food pantry directors, and senior center cooks clearly appreciated receiving free, fresh vegetables; their budgets are so limited that they can often only afford cheaper, less tasteful canned goods.

What’s distributed in Vermont is no small potatoes (pardon the pun): in 2008, about 400 Vermont Foodbank volunteers collected 160,000 pounds of gleaned food, and dropped off to 180 sites, including nursing homes, school lunch programs, and senior centers.

But even small-scale gleaning projects can make a difference. Kentucky resident John Walker recently founded the Lexington Urban Gleaning Network, which encourages city volunteers to knock on the doors of neighbors who have fruit trees or vegetable gardens and ask to glean what isn’t wanted. Last year, Walker and a few others collected nearly 400 pounds of apples and pears from city backyards for the hungry.

With U.S. unemployment and underemployment now totaling 16.8 percent of the labor force — one out of six American workers — it makes sense to conserve food through gleaning. It’s also an opportunity for seniors, students, and citizens from all walks of life to get outdoors, get some exercise, and help those in need.

And what a great way to get to meet your neighbors. It turns out that gleaning is not only a sensible way to feed the hungry but a delightful way to harvest community.

To volunteer with an existing gleaning group, or to learn how to establish your own, contact the Society of St. Andrew: 800-333-4597 or www.endhunger.org.

Caroline Abels is an independent journalist and editor of Vermont’s Local Banquet magazine. Previously she was a reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. © 2009 www.blueridgepress.com.

Living Green

By John Coleman

We’ve all heard and probably participated in the bashing of the Federal government from time to time; whether it’s stimulus funding for corporate CEOs, the war in Iraq, or the latest cry about universal health care.

The sunny disposition in me tends to look for the positives in life (I like to think anyway) so this article calls out the 1980s federally funded SEMATECH project and the recent attempt to emulate its success.

In the 1970s, the United States had fallen far behind the rest of the world in the research and development of semiconductors; to the point where there were genuine concerns about our ability to remain a player in the high tech economy.

In response, the Fed pulled together a coalition of the most advanced U.S. firms in the semiconductor world and bankrolled a consortium called SEMATECH to revitalize the U.S. market. Austin, Texas landed the project back then and is now home to almost 30 semiconductor companies; including AMD, Freescale, Sun and the $3.5 billion wafer plant developed by Samsung. More importantly, the U.S. is a leader in the industry.

Today, semiconductors are a fundamental component of just about every gadget on the market, from phones to computers to hybrid vehicles, and SEMATCH consortia members make up over 50 percent of the worldwide chip market. What would the U.S. economy look like if we were not at the top of this field?

Similarly, batteries are expected to be the next semiconductor if you will. Already, we see cell phones, laptops and solar photovoltaics rely heavily on batteries. Plug-in hybrid vehicles and renewable energy installations, large and small, will depend even more on the technology in order to be successful.

Whoever cracks the code on lithium-ion or other long term storage devices will take a big step in the global economy. Wind energy could then be stored in large volumes and used to draw down peak energy demands. Laptops, cell phones and electric bicycles could go days or weeks without being recharged. The potential is limitless and success is essential in order to draw down global carbon emissions while growing the economy.

With this in mind, the Department of Energy awarded $2.4 billion in grants in early August to go towards battery research and development and jump start the U.S. economy. Personally, I was disappointed to see so much of it go to the big three auto companies instead of rising companies like Fayetteville-based Arkansas Power Electronics International.

Nonetheless, it’s important to recognize obvious future markets like semiconductors and battery development and then be aggressive in pursuing them. In both of these instances the Fed jumped out in front of Adam Smith’s invisible hand to stake its ground. SEMATECH was incredibly successful and a decade from now we’ll be saying the same thing about the battery industry.

Take Action to Protect Local Watersheds

Thinking Green

Non-point source pollution is the enemy!

Before moving back to Fayetteville in 2007, I worked on stormwater issues in the Washington, D.C., metro area (Chesapeake Bay), the Mississippi River Delta and Austin, Texas. All of these places are dealing with significant stormwater pollution, but only the smallest of percentages comes from a large factory or rogue company. The overwhelming majority comes from massive parking lots, over-fertilized lawns or fields and rooftops of small businesses and homes.

It’s called “non-point source” because an engineer obviously labeled it before a marketing specialist could get a hold of it, but also because instead of large volumes coming from a single location, it is thousands of locations each contributing a small amount of pollution. The shear number spread out over large acres of land eventually overcomes a watershed’s ability to cope with the pollution. This eventually leads to large costs for local governments, the local water supplier and eventually you.

We are all responsible in some shape or form for this problem, and since it impacts our drinking water supply (Beaver Lake) and our pocketbooks then we all have a stake in correcting the problem.

The key to eliminating pollution is to limit stormwater runoff in the first place. This may seem counterintuitive with all of the money invested on infrastructure to carry water off of properties, but in reality it is better for the water to be absorbed by on-site vegetation and soils. Unfortunately, most housing developments are constructed to get water off the property as quickly as possible so the homeowner can then turn on the sprinkler and water the lawn with drinkable water. That makes much more sense … ha!

So I set out to create a positive example using my recently-purchased home on Washington Avenue as a test bed. As my sister says, I’m a bit of a dork like that.

I created a compost pile last fall mixing leaves and organics (apple cores, egg shells, banana peals, etc). With weekly additions of organics and turning of the pile, I had incredibly rich compost by spring. As it started to warm in March I went out to my neglected backyard and raked all of the bare spots, and mixed in the compost with some rye grass seed. By May, the grass filled in most of the yard and now soaks up the majority of the rain when it hits the ground.

At the same time my wife planted several “raised-bed gardens” to grow some vegetables. The raised-beds eliminate the weeds, absorb an incredible amount of rainwater, and grow fresh vegetables with very little maintenance required. We also collect rainwater in two rain barrels in the back which allows us to water the gardens without using drinkable water from the faucet.

Finally, we have created a buffer zone between our yard and the stream in the back. This zone has a thicker stand of grass and plants that can absorb even greater amounts of water and purify runoff before it enters the stream. If any rain water does reach the stream from our yard it will have traveled across a yard with no chemicals or fertilizer, thick grass, and a buffer zone; therefore having little, if any, adverse impact on the watershed.

These are all very simple methods for reducing your personal impact on the watershed. It takes some thought and a little patience, but together we can reduce the environmental and economic impact on ourselves and the region.