Techniques for Harvesting Crops by HandWhen farmers allow volunteers into their fields and orchards to harvest vegetables or fruits, they naturally want to avoid damage to crops providing their livelihood. Meeting with the farmer ahead of a gleaning event is vital when the farmer won’t...
Talk straight, be available and amenable, and use infrastructure to your advantage, if you can handle food by the pallet you can benefit from relationships with larger farms that can save labor and other costs.Talk straight by doing exactly what you say. When working with...
The main framework of a Victory Gardens program is that outreach is done to connect with local gardeners, who are told that they can donate produce to their food banks. Then they are given information about where to drop off donations. It is good to...
Economical harvesting tools can be found anywhere. It is possible to come up with a useful tool for any type of harvesting. When trying to come up with tools they typically fall into two categories: knives and others. KnivesKnives are extremely useful as they can be...
Permaculture for Sustainable Food SourcesMother Nature did it first, which experts recognized while developing permaculture as an agricultural system. Basically, food growing areas are designed to mimic nature, with integration of land, water, and plants. Efficient use of resources maximizes food production while minimizing ecological...
Resources to Contact Local GrowersState agricultural extension officesLocal business and organizations that work with the agricultural communityFood co-opsState agricultural insurance companiesFood banksIt is important to first contact these established groups with information about your program, and then ask them to either pass-on information directly to...
Many partnerships have been formed through the work of this year’s VISTA. However, the most strategic of these partnerships are those around volunteer resources. With so much potential to use the cannery depending on the availability of volunteer groups, the VISTA acting alone could only...
Yes, you are collecting thousands of pounds of produce with hundreds of volunteer hours in order to benefit countless families in need. In order to garner real awareness and visibility, you’re going to need to learn how to tell the story of your project and...
Skagit County Community Action Agency SCCAA, is the Community Action Program for Skagit County. Community Action Agencies (CAA) are local private and public non-profit organizations that carry out the Community Action Program (CAP), which was founded by the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act to fight poverty...
All of the produce sourced into the cannery project comes from Northwest Harvest (NWH). Relations with Northwest Harvest as a donor have been extremely important to the vitality of “Yes, we CAN!” as a reliable source of produce for the coalition’s food banks. The VISTA cultivated...