Farmers – Host a Gleaning Day!
Are you a farmer with surplus produce? Gleaning Network are appealing to farmers across the UK to join in and allow volunteer gleaners to harvest their unsold produce for charity! It’s free and minimum hassle, and ensures your surplus produce gets to people in need!
For more info on how to host a gleaning day, just download our info sheet:
Gleaning Network – Info Sheet For Farmers
Contact Us
If you’re interested in hosting a gleaning day, or for more info, please get in touch with James at James@feedbackglobal.org
Gleaning in Farming Media
Gleaning Network have been featured in a range of farmer’s publications, including:
- Farmers Weekly
- Fresh Produce Journal
- Farming Online
- South East Farmer
- Produce World won a Waitrose Way Award for their work with Feedback’s Gleaning Network in 2015.
- Feedback was the official charity partner of the London Produce Show 2016.
Getting Your Unsold Food to Charity
When you host a gleaning day, we ensure your produce gets to a fantastic cause, helping people in need. Here are some of the main charities we donate gleaned produce to.
FareShare are the largest redistributor of food surplus in the UK, and work with all the major supermarkets – last year they saved 12,336 tonnes of food from going to waste, equal to 25.8 million meals, and served it at 5,589 charities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JW4H_KhNV0
FoodCycle are a national charity that combines volunteers, surplus food and spare kitchen spaces to create tasty, nutritious meals for people at risk of food poverty and social isolation. They run over 29 projects across the UK.
Resources
- Feedback’s Gleaning Network – Info Sheet For Farmers
- Case studies of farmers who’ve hosted gleans
- Guide for farmers to spread the word about gleaning
- Gleaning Network – Powerpoint Presentation for farmers – email James@feedbackglobal.org for a copy of this
Want to Spread the Word to Other Farmers?
If you love gleaning, and would like to spread the word to your friends, here’s some ways you can do it – click on the links for some templates which you can feel free to personalise!
Speaking Out About Food Waste
We provide a safe platform to speak out about buyer practices which may lead farms to waste food – this is entirely optional.
If you’d prefer to speak anonymously, there is also the option of anonymously contributing to our research on food waste. For instance, see our report on food waste in Kenya. This research helps influence food waste policy around the world.
Feedback have high level meetings with supermarkets to pressure them to reduce their food waste, so if there are any concerns you have, we can relay those problems (anonymously if you wish) and push for policy changes to ensure a higher proportion of your crop gets to market. For instance, as a result of its Kenyan investigations, Feedback managed to convince Tesco to change its policy on trimming green beans, saving 135 tonnes per year of food from being wasted.
If you’d like to speak out publicly, we may be able to arrange a media platform for you to speak out – some of our previous gleaned farmers have appeared in the Independent, Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast and BBC1’s Big Food Rescue.
If you believe you are the victim of Unfair Trading Practices, like last minute order cancellations or changing of quality specs, then we recommend you report it safely and anonymously to the Groceries Code Adjudicator.