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BURLINGTON - A cool breeze periodically breaks the morning heat as volunteers pick pound after pound of tomatoes at Iseley Farms. A young helper wanders through the rows, offering a cold water bottle to his family.

A woman wearing a sun visor straightens up periodically, hand on hip, to give her back a break. Nearby, 9-year-old Justin Mofield holds up his latest find: “It’s a pretty nice one. It’s nice and solid.” He pitches it into a box brimming with red, green and in-between-colored tomatoes.

In about an hour, the 18 volunteers collect more than 1,600 pounds of fresh produce to donate that day to food pantries and needy neighborhoods.

“It’s really unfortunate when people aren’t able to afford good quality food,” says Katie King, 21, a member of First Baptist Church of Elon.

Food banks are reporting a 75 percent increase in requests for help, making food from such “gleanings” even more important, said Emily Reeve, coordinator of the 12-county Triad Area chapter of the Society of St. Andrew.

First Baptist provided most of the volunteers for that day’s tomato gleaning, named for the biblical practice of gathering the remnants of crops to give to the poor.

Last year, Triad-area chapter gleanings at 18 farms took in nearly 91,000 pounds of food from 24 types of crops, such as apples, sweet potatoes, watermelon and turnip greens.

Food pantries get most of the produce, which sometimes represents the only fresh fruit and vegetables some of those families seeking help get, Reeve said.

“It’s a great, great, great, great help,” said Valerie Marshall, assistant food director for Greensboro Urban Ministry. The nonprofit uses fresh food from gleanings in its soup kitchen, which serves 450 to 500 people daily, and in bags of food given to needy families.

There’s nothing wrong with the food gleaned, but size, shape or color makes it unmarketable. Sometimes farmers overplant a crop, or what it costs to harvest would exceed the market return, Reeve said. She urges farmers to consider donating to the Society of St. Andrew in those instances. Farmers get a tax credit for a percentage of the market value of donated food.

“Please, please don’t let it go to waste,” she said.

Since 1979, the Society of St. Andrew has sent volunteers into fields across the country to glean food. Gleaning networks operate in 20 states, including North Carolina where one of seven regional offices opened in 1992.

Volunteers in the Tar Heel state harvested nearly half of the food gleaned in the nation over the past eight years, according to the Virginia-based nonprofit group. That doesn’t include separate donation programs, such as the Potato Project, where potato chip makers donate truckloads of potatoes that don’t meet their standards but are otherwise OK for consumption.

The amount of food donated or gleaned has fluctuated over the years. During the past eight years, gleanings reached a high of 9.8 million pounds in 2001 in North Carolina. By comparison, volunteers gleaned 5.5 million pounds last year.

Few actual gleanings, where volunteers collect the remnants of crops, take place, Reeve said. More commonly, donations come from farmers such as Jane Iseley, who started planting extra rows at her Burlington farm specifically to give away.
But Reeve will take the free food either way.

Tucker’s Farm and Nursery in Madison this year donated about 500 pounds of strawberries to the Reidsville Outreach Center, which serves 250 to 260 Rockingham County families each week.

Reeve knew the center would be handing out food the next day, so she connected the two groups.

“Finding agencies to give out food, that’s not really a problem,” Reeve said. “The problem is can (they) take it when we have it. And we never know when we’re going to have it.”

Donations have dropped at the Reidsville Outreach Center because of the economy, said Clara Gunn, president of the center’s board of directors. Most of what they get is canned, so fresh produce is especially welcome.

“I tell you, it’s just a blessing to us,” she said. “I don’t know what we’d do without it.”

A week before the tomato gleaning, about a dozen people collected potatoes from a Stokesdale farm. A group of church members banded together and started planting crops on land that had gone fallow specifically to donate to the Society of St. Andrew.

Lana Mitchell brought her four homeschooled children, ages 6 to 17, to pick potatoes.

“They don’t want to leave. This is fun,” said Mitchell, 40, of Winston-Salem. “And it’s a good learning experience for them.”
Faith Mitchell, 17, said she enjoyed getting out of the city.

“It makes me feel like I’m doing my part,” she said. “That I’m helping somebody.”

That day, volunteers collected about 1,000 pounds of red potatoes. The entire haul went to the Reidsville Soup Kitchen, where manager Ophelia Brown eagerly planned ways to prepare the spuds.

“Boil ’em. Stew ’em. We have several ways we can fix ’em,” she said, eyeing the crates of potatoes laid out to dry on a table in a storage room.

The center serves lunch to about 65 people every day and provides dinner on Sundays.

“That’s a big help with the economy today,” Brown said.

The Rev. Mark Mofield encouraged members of his church, First Baptist of Elon, to join in the recent tomato gleaning. He took two trucks packed with boxes of tomatoes into lower-income neighborhoods near the church, knocking door-to-door with the offer of free, fresh food.

Joyce Gadson, 51, called the Iseley tomatoes “a blessing from the Lord.” She planned to share with members of her church.
Rob Cox, 48, picked out a bag full with plans to create homemade spaghetti sauce.

“This is a wonderful ministry, very practical,” he told Mofield. “When people are hungry, every little bit counts.”

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com