The Glean Machine: Design of A Harvest Aid to Reduce Food Loss (2020)
Turn Field Losses into Profits (2019)
Putting Dollars to Waste: Estimating the Value of On-Farm Food Loss (2019)
Is the harvest over when the price drops? Deciding to stop when there’s still a crop (2019)
Benefits to Farmers of Donating Fresh Produce to Food Banks (2018)
Potential Buyers List for Edible but Unmarketable Produce (2018)
Finding Opportunity in the Field: Estimating losses to improve yield, Sweet Potatoes (2018)
Finding Opportunity in the Field: Estimating losses to improve yield, Cucumbers (2018)
How to Determine the Potential to Increase Vegetable Yield through Estimating and Reducing Field Losses (2018)
Cucumber Harvest and Processing Flow Chart (2017)
Journal Articles
Making a market for on-farm food loss: Exploring food banks as a market for Southeastern produce (2020)
Farmer harvest decisions and vegetable loss in primary production (2019)
The topic of food loss and waste has risen in importance since the revelation that an estimated 40% of food in America is never consumed. Losses at the field level, however, are not well understood, and economic and growing conditions that dictate decisions made by fruit and vegetable growers can determine how much food is left unharvested. Many strategies have been suggested to reduce food loss and waste, but their development has been informed by concerns at the consumer level, and may not motivate growers to reduce losses.
Accurate estimation of on-farm losses for fruits and vegetables can inform ongoing national food loss and waste discussions and farm-level business decisions that hold potentially positive impacts for farm viability and resource-use efficiency. This paper describes a straightforward methodology for field-level measurement and demonstrates its utility on six vegetable crops harvested in 13 fields of a 121-hectare North Carolina vegetable farm.
The available estimates of edible produce lost in the field are based on assumptions and estimates, rather than field data. Therefore, this project aimed to measure losses in the field in order to understand if estimates are accurate. Sixty-eight fields of eight vegetable crops were evaluated on nine North Carolina farms during the 2017 production season, using a sampling and scaling method.
Outreach
- Is the Harvest Over When the Price Drops? Deciding to Stop When There’s Still a Crop. Southeast Regional Fruit & Vegetable Conference. Savannah, Georgia. January 10-13 2019.
- Supply Chain Strategies to Manage Farm-Level Food Loss. National Direct Agriculture Marketing Summit. September 15-18, 2018. Washington, D.C.
- Field Measurement and Qualitative Inquiry Indicate Need for Reevaluation of U.S. On-farm Food Loss Estimates. No Food Left Behind Conference, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, Mar. 2, 2018.
- Measuring and Estimating Food Loss in North Carolina Vegetable Crops. USDA-ERS Workshop on Farm-to-Retail Food Loss in Produce, Washington, DC. Dec. 12, 2017.
- Opportunities to Market a Wider Range of Produce Quality. Vegetable & Fruit Expo, North Carolina Vegetable Growers’ Association Annual Meeting, Myrtle Beach, SC, Nov. 28, 2017.
- Whole Crop Harvest: Increasing Farmer Returns and Reducing Food Waste. National Value-Added Agricultural Conference, Little Rock, AK. Nov 15, 2017.
- Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic’s Building Infrastructure for Farm Level Surplus Working Group, webinar, July 18, 2017.
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Glean Machine Used at North Carolina 4-H and Society of St. Andrews farm gleaning events, September and October, 2019.Putting Dollars to Waste: Estimating the Value of On-Farm Food Loss. Agriculture & Applied Economics Association annual meeting, July 22-23, 2019.