Maximina Molina Sanchez is worried about going hungry this winter. She depends on a food bank in Huron to feed her husband and two kids. But with most agricultural workers out of jobs during the winter, demand is bound to increase, so she worries there won’t be enough food to feed everyone who needs it.
The Sanchez family is among the 22 percent of people in Fresno County who couldn’t afford the groceries they needed in the past year. Fresno ranks third in the country for food insecurity, according to the Food Research and Action Center.
At the same time, the county leads the nation in agricultural production. A new study from Santa Clara University revealed that a whopping one-third of the hand-picked crops grown in the state are left to rot in the field.
So why can’t this food get to the people who really need it? Food banks are addressing shortages on a piecemeal basis and startups are expanding sales of farmers’ surplus produce. But there is no solution in sight to bridge the food insecurity and crop overproduction that plague the Central Valley because it takes money and labor to harvest the surplus and haul it to food banks.
Todd Hirasuna, vice president of Sunnyside Packing Company in Selma, said he was not surprised by the study’s finding. The company regularly leaves a third of its produce in the field.
“When you lump the whole Valley together, it’s a pretty staggering number at the end of the day,” Hirasuna said.
Hunger in the Valley
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that 10.6 percent of households across the state were food insecure in 2018. In 2016, over a fifth of Fresno residents received food stamps and 10.6 percent of Californians. It’s unclear whether those are the same groups of people. However, according to the Food Research and Action Center, people on food stamps may still be food insecure because the aid doesn’t always cover the cost of the food they need. And many families with insufficient food have incomes higher than the threshold for food stamps.
Second Harvest Food Bank of Silicon Valley found that 27 percent of residents in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties are at risk of hunger even though they live next to two of the most productive agricultural valleys in the country. The food bank raised the issue with food waste researchers at Santa Clara University, who in turn quantified the amount of surplus in those fields.
“We wondered whether there may be some opportunities to salvage the food left in the fields and direct it to people on food assistance,” said Greg Baker, executive director of the Center for Food Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University.
Examining 20 hand-harvested crops on 123 Central and Northern California fields in 2016 and 2017, the researchers found that 34 percent of edible produce never makes it off the farm. Loss rates varied widely among crops; cabbage, romaine lettuce and strawberries were among the most lost. (Researchers refer to leftover produce as “loss,” not “waste,” because unlike food that ends up in a landfill, it can feed livestock or fertilize the soil.)
Loss rates are likely constant throughout California, according to Baker, but machine-harvested produce experiences much lower levels because the equipment leaves little behind. Produce that can be canned or converted to other foodstuff such as raisins also has lower loss rates.
Baker found that farmers tend to overproduce to fulfill their contracts with buyers. They plant about a third more than they need in case of weather, pests, plant disease, labor availability, field stability and over- or under-sized crops. If after delivering, the price is too low, they leave the rest to rot.
This year, Bowles Farming Company in Los Banos harvested close to 85 percent of its cantaloupes because market demand was high, according to Cannon Michael, company president. However, last year his company left about 80 percent of its cantaloupes in the field because prices were too low to justify harvesting.
“Food waste is a big concern of ours,” Michael said. “It’s really frustrating.”
Lisa Johnson, a researcher at North Carolina State University who specializes in food loss and waste, found that in the Southeast, 40 percent of crops are lost. This is particularly concerning, she said, because the losses stack atop the 30 to 40 percent of food USDA estimates is wasted each year in stores and households.
