Thousands Glean Fields For Food In USA

A little background will help explain my view of this article. I live in New England's poorest county and I'm a farmer. People needing food and not being able to afford to go to the grocery store is daily life here.

I can re-write that first sentence.

That tens of thousands of people came to a Weld County farm on Saturday to collect free potatoes, carrots and leeks could be one of the most encouraging signs of people enthusiastically returning to their food roots.

I don't think needing to go out into a field for food is a bad thing. If it takes a pinch in the economy to get folks out there, so be it. It's a good thing - the food is there for the taking, it's not going to waste and people are having to really think about one of their most basic needs. We've lost that as a country. Going "backward" is progress.

Texican wondered how many people took less food than it cost them to get to the field. Some folks probably did. If you don't know what you're doing when you step into the field it's a little overwhelming. Potatoes, carrots and leeks are simple to harvest. If they put even a small amount of effort into picking I doubt many took too little. The enthusiasm of tens of thousands of people is contagious. I think a lot of people had fun and a lesson or two.

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Robin

I think this is a good thing. The folks with the extra produce didn't have to see it go to waste and the recipients got some "real" food. They also may go back there as customers next year. I always give away my extra produce to needy families that I know.

The problem with the article is that it draws a conclusion without any evidence. The woman they mentioned at the bottom of the article had a job. And as someone pointed out, it's hard to accurately count a crowd.

While I wouldn't doubt a portion of the people may have been needy, I think a good component of them were simply people like on this board - resourceful, against waste, and simply out to appreciate another's kindness.

I wish that the reporter had done more work to either prove that the large crowd was predominately 'depressed' people, or the focus on the article being the farmer/wife's generousity.

People who have helping out those who have less. People who have less actively working to obtain a little more.

Disturbing? No, not by my measure. I find it quite heartening.

Yep, I agree. Most stories can be written from at least two different viewpoints. These days, it seems "doom and gloom" sells more than positive spin. Personally, I think the reporter made an assumption (that the turnout might be based on the economy) without stating WHY that was his/her thought. There are lots of non-economy reasons why the turnout was greater than expected. If this was the first time the farm made such a generous offer, there really is no precedent to measure this turnout against. If they HAVE done this in the past, it is possible (as has already been mentioned) that more people are tuning into freebies, and more plugged into newsgroups and networks that spread this kind of news around.

The free Dr. Pepper from this weekend is a good example. I read a post here on HT on how to claim a free bottle of soda. When I tried, the Dr. Pepper website was not responding. Later in the day I read an apology from the company for the earlier problems, stating that the response was greater than they expected. Seeing that *I* heard about it on a public forum (and later found links on other forums I belong to as well) it wasn't surprising that the news traveled so fast and that the response was overwhelming.

Being what I consider a fairly optimistic person (who has her negative moments), I really like your lead-in better.

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Ever tried? Ever failed? No Matter, try again, fail again. Fail better.

- Samuel Beckett

I saw this on the CBS news tonight. I think the farm that did this runs a market on the farm, has agri-tourism, etc., so they probably drew a lot bigger crowd because of their standing in the community. If they were just a plain old commercial farm that sold to a processor I'll bet they wouldn't have gotten that number of people. But being who they are, people looked at it as a fun outting to go there.

The article said at one point they had a 30 A field full as a parking lot. I really bet they did get that 40,000 crowd they thought they did.

I'm another one who thinks this kind of thing is good for the country. People need a shake up once in awhile, and if it takes a national downturn, well, might not be the worst thing.

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-Northern NYS

I just hope the farm recovered from all that car traffic!

That's what I was thinking.

I also believe the majority of the folks there were like-minded as Myself and like to save money, not destitute people starving and needing food. They saw an opportunity to have a free day out for a change.
The price of gas has come down but it has already wiped out most families cushion or money they had available for extras like weekend trips.

Fresh air, good weather, little sun on your back and sweat on your brow/exercise- that all spells fun in my book. Free veggies to boot; who doesn't like coming back from their efforts with something to show for it.

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Having a deep emotional conversation with my quilted buddy..........

I have to share this story with you all. My DH is the site manager for our local landfill. About a year and a half ago, he had a truck driver show up at the gates on a Friday afternoon, after the landfill had closed for the day. In this truck (refrigerated) was 40,000 lbs. of baby carrots, already peeled and in the bag for a grocery store shelf. The reason why the truck was at the landfill? The driver had missed his delivery time by one hour, and the store refused to take them because of this. DH got home and was telling me about this whole truckful of carrots sitting there, refrigerated, waiting until the next morning to go into the landfill. The driver was going to leave the refrigeration on until 8pm that night, and give us to get rid of some.

We started calling all the local food banks that we could find numbers for, the local homeless shelter, etc. People said that they would call us back and never did. Others said that they didn't have any storage. We couldn't even get ahold of anyone at the homeless shelter. We could not find ONE SINGLE TAKER, for even a few bags of these perfectly good carrots. We started calling the homeless shelters and food banks for the large city that was about an hour away from us, offering to fill up our pickup and bring them to them. Nobody, absolutely nobody wanted any! After 4 hours on the phone, we had to give up, and a 8am the next morning, they were dumped into the landfill.

I agree this may not be the economy- many truly poor can't get the gas money to get out there- but a surge in folks thinking like us. Yeah us!

I always wondered why we had welfare etc so people could buy chicken at the grocery store when the area was overrun with rabbits. 100 years ago the rabbits would feed a lot of those folks. Are we better off?

Heck we usually have a nice garden every year, but I'd still would've taken you up on the offer. We didn't grow any peas this year, but one of the farmers told us to come pick what we want. We shelled and froze a couple of gallons. Another neighbor had free pears and muscadines that we made jams with.

We're always appreciative of any offers and give back some of what we make as a thank you.

Luv livin in the country. You'd be hard pressed to find the same generosity in New York City.

GR

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www.muddyriverfarm.com

Not disturbing at all. Ive seen this done every year that I can remember. A sweet potato farm near hear does that every year. After the illegals harvest all the unblemished etc ones the field is full of potatoes that have a small slice on them etc and hundreds show up and walk off with around three or four tons of potatoes.