Farmers partner with Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank to help families in need
Bags of sweet corn are ready for people to enjoy at the Harvest Valley store in Gibsonia, but the ears of corn being sold don't compare to how many Harvest Valley Farms gives away to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.
Co-owner and farmer Arthur King said it’s not unusual for volunteers from the food bank to gather 20,000 pounds of corn in a year from 17 acres of land.
"I do like seeing the volunteers. It's such a wide variety of people and being a volunteer they are always special people to me," King said.
King said the process of getting the corn is called gleaning, which is when there's food leftover after a farmer picks what can be sold.
"It's good food that would go to waste," King said.
Lori Diefenbacher is the produce and agricultural programs coordinator for the food bank.
"The last thing that the farmers want is for all that, the fruits that they worked so hard to grow to just go to waste or get tilled back into the soil," she said.
The ears of corn volunteers get are sometimes smaller, shaped differently or there is just too much corn leftover.
"Helps the farmers, help us, help the people that we serve and it's just win, win, win all around," Diefenbacher said.
She said partnering with local farms gets the food bank one step closer to reaching its goal of providing 50% of fresh produce to families in need.
"I drive a 16-foot refrigerated box truck and then we go through that field. We harvest as much good viable delicious corn as we can, and we put that into bins and then I drive the truck back to the food bank. Then we distribute it through our network," she said.
"I know that their demand is way up so they have a lot more people to serve and so they need more products like that," King said.
After decades in the fields, King is retiring next year.
“I've been farming all my life,” he said.
He said he'll always hold on to memories of knowing he was able to be a part of feeding people in the Pittsburgh area, especially during a pandemic.
"That's why this program is dear to my heart because we can do that," King said.
King said Harvest Valley has been working with the food bank to make a difference in peoples’ lives for 20 years.