In a Nutshell: Access to healthy and fresh food for all

A cold spring and extensive flooding led to a bad start for our local farmers this year. But now, the sun is shining and harvesting season is finally here!

We at North Valley Food Bank (NVFB) couldn’t be more excited as we will be piloting a new Harvesting and Gleaning program this year after our 2021 Community Needs Assessment confirmed that many community members lack consistent, reliable access to diverse and healthy foods. Forty-six percent of our customers said that they usually do not have fresh fruits and vegetables in their home. Because of that, we started thinking about long-term solutions to improve access to fresh and local food.

Many of our wonderful community partners, like our local farmers, Land to Hand, AERO, FVCC, and more recently Save Farmland, have done incredible work over the years to strengthen our community-based food system. At NVFB, we strive to learn from our partners and started purchasing fresh produce from local farms through forward-contracting with Wicked Goods to ensure more cooperative partnerships.

The idea for the new Harvesting and Gleaning program was born last summer when we visited Rebecca and Todd Ulizio at Two Bear Farm along with Gretchen Boyer, our friend from Land to Hand, to discuss future collaborations. The Harvesting and Gleaning program is a creative strategy to provide an abundance of fresh and local produce to our community of customers while also reducing food loss on local farms, building capacity to get food out of fields, and strengthening relationships between farmers and community members. Our AmeriCorps VISTA, Maddie Culhane, was brought on board for her year-long service specifically to develop this program and did a great job researching and learning from existing, similar initiatives across the country.

Gleaning is the act of recovering food. Our program focuses on gleaning from farmer’s fields and is unique in its nature as it is one of few implemented directly by a food bank rather than a third-party organization. This will be helpful as we can use existing infrastructures such as transportation, food storage and volunteer recruitment to ensure program sustainability. In our pilot year, we will work with Two Bear Farm and hope to expand to add additional partnerships next year. Our volunteers will have the unique opportunity to harvest and glean excess “cut and come again” produce left in the field specifically for NVFB and seconds that cannot be sold in the traditional way.

Imagine, for example, bruised cauliflower heads that may not make it into the produce cooler at the store but that will instead become delicious cauliflower soup after being processed in our community kitchen. Through this process, we can make use of what farmers already grow and build strong connections between farmers and consumers. We hope for our participants to develop knowledge of the importance of sustainable, local food systems while understanding the unique challenges faced by farmers here in the Flathead Valley.

Reach out to maddie@northvalleyfoodbank.org if you want to join us in the fields this summer and stay tuned for more program details once the harvesting and gleaning season is in full swing.

Sophie Albert is the executive director of North Valley Food Bank. Albert provides insights into happenings at the food bank, rural food insecurity, stories of the community and more in the monthly Whitefish Pilot column titled, In a Nutshell.