Harvesting can be a messy business; every year some 16% of the crop never leaves our farms. In Kent, Jo Caird meets volunteers who have revived the ancient art of gleaning – gathering wholesome but unwanted crops and delivering them to people in need

Photos: Sheradon Dublin

It’s muddy at the edges of the orchard but, in among the trees, there’s grass underfoot. Still wet with dew, it conceals windfall apples that I try not to tread on as I reach for a shiny Braeburn.

In the time it takes me to select my apple and carefully twist it from its twig without damaging the tree, those picking beside me – experienced members of the East Kent Gleaning Group – have stripped the branches and are moving to the next tree over. This orchard, on Selson Farm in Kent, has already been harvested by a team of professional pickers, but you wouldn’t know it. Farmer David Bradley estimates that around 15% of his crop is typically left unharvested – too small, too big, too green or with too many marks to meet the specifications of the supermarkets. It’s a source of frustration for him: “The goodness inside the apple is just the same.”

That’s why the gleaning group is here: Bradley would much prefer his apples to be eaten than left to rot into the ground. The gleaners will make that happen, picking some of that remaining 15% and distributing it to those in need via community kitchens, food banks and primary schools across East Kent.

Food waste in farming is an issue all over the UK, with 10–16% of food crops wasted before they leave our farms, according to research by the campaigning charity Feedback Global. It’s not just supermarkets’ specifications that are to blame. Overproduction is built into the system so that farmers can guarantee supply in case of poor harvests. Further waste occurs as a result of supermarkets changing their orders at short notice. That 10–16% wastage equates to up to 37,000 tonnes of food annually. When you consider that there are five million people in the UK in food poverty – unable to afford or access enough food to make up a healthy diet – and that food poverty is worsening, with a 33% increase in food bank use from April 2020 to March 2021, this wastage is especially shocking.

Gleaning – the gathering of crops left over after the main harvest – dates back thousands of years. There are references to it in the Bible, with God directing farmers to leave their “gleanings” for the poor as an act of charity. In this country, from around the 16th century, the rural poor relied upon gleaning to supplement their incomes, with women, children and the elderly in competition for leftover cereal crops in particular, which were used for baking bread. It was only the introduction of mechanisation, which increased harvest efficiency, that saw gleaning tail off in the 20th century. It had entirely disappearing by the 1950s.

Now it’s back, but with a twist: volunteer groups such as the one I’m picking with today are gleaning not for themselves, but for those in need, and to help address the challenge of food waste. The scale of the 21st-century gleaning movement is difficult to judge – there’s no national authority for this hyper-local community activity. But Feedback Global, which set up a network of gleaning groups in 2012, estimates that the dozen or so groups it has directly supported gleaned around 640 tonnes of produce in 2021. With many more groups working independently, the real national figure is likely to be far higher.

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REWARDING WORK

“Gleaning combines all the things I like: being outside, picking fruit, being with a community group and doing something for wider society,” says retired teacher Rosie Ball. It was Ball’s friend Philippa Burden, a retired health visitor, who introduced her to the group in 2021, after Burden started gleaning during the first Covid-19 lockdown. “I get to play on a farm and there is zero responsibility except to keep yourself safe,” says Burden, as she gently bats Ball’s hand away from a particularly lovely apple and twists it off the tree herself.

I can see the attraction. My fingers are aching from the cold but it’s glorious in the orchard: the sun streaming from a clear blue sky, the chatter of unseen birds in the trees. It’s not always so bucolic, says retired GP Jill Kent: “This is easy work compared to what we do in the winter with cabbages, bending over and lugging bags a long way.” Even so, she always looks forward to the gleans: “I feel I’m really making a contribution.”

In 2021, the East Kent group picked over 45 tonnes of fruit and vegetables, their regular midweek gleans attracting mainly retired folk, with weekends drawing a more diverse crowd. The gleaning calendar varies according to harvests – weather can have a massive impact – but for the East Kent group, picking typically begins with cauliflowers, cabbages and other leafy greens in March, and these crops continue through spring and into summer. July is cherry time, followed by damsons and early apples in August, then pears and more apples into the autumn. October is a big month for squash. The gleaners are kept busy December through February sorting through piles of pre-harvest potatoes.

Some members of the group have been doing just that this morning, arriving with car boots already loaded with potatoes. Spuds are always well received, says retired IT director Stephen Wakeford, one of the volunteer organisers. “Everyone knowshow to deal with a potato,” he says. “It’s a baseline for a lot of organisations.”

The group picks to order – this week it’s 310kg of apples and 265kg of spuds – so although there is still fruit on the trees, Wakeford calls time. Munching on the most delicious Braeburn I have ever tasted, I help load bags of apples into Wakeford’s car (other members of the group will deliver the rest of the haul) before setting off in convoy to Our Shop in Ramsgate.

GRATEFULLY RECEIVED

Run by the community interest company Our Kitchen on the Isle of Thanet, Our Shop sells healthy food far cheaper than the supermarkets. It caters to parents who want to feed their children healthily but lack the money or the knowledge to do so.

“The need to go around a supermarket, fearful that you haven’t got enough money to pay, is just an extra anxiety the young mums can live without,” Our Kitchen founder Sharon Goodyer explains. “Here they know they have enough money to pay.”

Gleaned produce makes up a small proportion of the food sold at Our Shop, with the rest coming from local growers and the food industry, or via food distribution charities such as Fareshare.

Gleaning is just one of the tools in the fight against food poverty, both locally and nationally. It doesn’t offer a long-term solution to the challenge of food waste – campaigners want to see a complete overhaul of the food production system, one that will design wastage out altogether.

Until then, there are the gleaners. “If we had a responsibility to clear the fields,” says Julie Kirby, a semi-retired seamstress, “we would feel that we had failed. If we feel that anything that we can do helps to reduce the scale of the failure, then that’s good. We are providing something that is at no cost to anybody, neither the farmer nor the user, and we’re not paid for our time,” she adds. “It’s a gift throughout the chain, which I think is brilliant.”

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Jo Caird is a freelance journalist based between London and the Suffolk coast. She specialises in wildlife and lifestyle stories with a strong community focus.

See jocaird.com

GLEANING IN ART

You might not have heard of gleaning before but you have probably seen it depicted in art. Some of the leading European artists of the 19th century, including Jean-François Millet and Vincent van Gogh, embraced gleaning as a way of exploring rural poverty in their work. This wasn’t always well received, at least in the case of Millet, whose 1857 painting The Gleaners (left) was interpreted by some as a socialist protest about the condition of the peasantry. The English painter Thomas Gainsborough, whose work tended to idealise life in the country, painted his daughter in the costume of a young peasant girl for Miss Gainsborough Gleaning (1756–9, far left).

HOW TO BECOME A GLEANER

Find your local gleaning group by visiting the website of Feedback’s Gleaning Network (gleaning.feedbackglobal.org), which lists groups organising gleaning days all over England. If there’s no group operating near where you live, the website has a resource-rich toolkit to help you set up one of your own, with all the information you need to identify and get in touch with farmers in your local area, recruit and manage volunteers, and find beneficiaries for your produce. Or you can help tackle food poverty by volunteering at a food bank or community kitchen. The food poverty charity Fareshare lists volunteering opportunities, such as driving and packing, on its website, as does national food bank charity The Trussell Trust.

Photos: Getty