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SUNDERLAND — They came to Laurenitis Farm bearing reusable bags and cardboard boxes.
A killing frost had set upon the land weeks before, shriveling sugar pumpkin vines, leaving orange gourds dotting a field next to rows of cabbage. The hills above turned to rust. The growing season was over. It was time to gather up whatever remained.
They were gleaners, partaking in a modern adaptation of an ancient practice.
About a dozen volunteers wearing rubber boots and hiking shoes met Sarah Bluestein, community gleaning coordinator at Rachel’s Table, next to the farmstand along Route 116 on Thursday. Napa cabbage, green cabbage and sugar pumpkins waited for them at the end of a dirt road, she said. “There’s a good mix of crops.”
They picked for a few hours, then weighed the bounty so the farmer could write it off on taxes. And then they carried the produce to food networks formal and informal — the goods going to their neighbors, friends, churches, food pantries and survival centers across the region.
Those familiar with the biblical story of Ruth may be familiar with the concept.
But gleaning is not a familiar term for many, especially for those growing up outside agricultural communities, said Cara Michelle Silverberg, director of intercultural learning and land-based programs at Rachel’s Table, the nonprofit started more than three decades ago by members of the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts.
The Torah instructed ancient Jews not to harvest the corners of their fields. “You shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I the LORD am your G!d,” says Leviticus 23:22.
Since then, agriculture practices and the laws surrounding property and land have changed, Silverberg said. Western Massachusetts has a different culture.
“How it works is that we build relationships with farmers,” Silverberg said. “At this point, we have farmers reaching out to us, which is amazing.”
The gleaning program for Rachel’s Table has grown exponentially. When the program started in 2007, the group gleaned 5,000 pounds of produce. Last year, it collected 50,000 pounds from area farms. This year, it’s north of 70,000, Silverberg said.
In the Sunderland field, wind rustled cornstalks and a flock of birds looped over dry sunflowers.
“We’re going to start with Napa cabbage,” Bluestein said, demonstrating how to cut the head away from the roots with a knife. She would be around to answer any quality control questions, she told the group.
“It’s just kind of a scrappy way to do things,” Bluestein said. “Like, we don’t have designated trucks. We don’t have a dedicated storage facility.”
This glean was unusual. The volunteers encountered more produce then they could gather.
The farmer’s father came by in a black pickup truck. While he declined to be interviewed, he told Bluestein the group was welcome to glean the sweet corn, turnips, cauliflower, purple broccoli and kale that also grew nearby.
For decades, Laurenitis Farm would pack up some of the vegetables it grew and deliver them to the Amherst Survival Center, said Karina Laurenitis, who is the fourth generation of the family to cultivate this land. The 65-acre farm primarily focuses on flowers and garden plants, but also grows vegetables for the wholesale market.
Vegetables are always left over in the field, since standards for produce going to the grocery store are strict. As much as 50% to 60% of a field may be deemed too undersized or too oddly shaped to head to market, Laurenitis said.
But last year, facing a glut of squash, “I just did not have the bandwidth to distribute it,” she said, as she also holds a full-time job in IT. And by late fall, the number of people working the farm dwindles to three or four. That’s when a Google search led her to reach out to Rachel’s Table.
“Our ability to pick a few boxes of cabbage or something to bring over to the Amherst Survival Center … pales in comparison to getting a group of 15 people out who can go through a field in a few hours,” Laurenitis said.
Some of the volunteers spoke of their experiences.
Jean Gordon, retired Christian missionary, said she distributes food to a handful of churches in the Pioneer Valley. After a recent glean, she stuffed her red minivan full of Roma and Yellow Delicious apples and made deliveries in Westfield, Chicopee and Holyoke. “I was all over the place,” Gordon said, adding she made a stop at the Westfield Food Kitchen.
“It does get to the people that fall in-between the cracks,” Gordon said. “Not all people get to the soup kitchen or to the food banks.”
Anne Gelbard, who donned hedgehog earrings for her first glean, said she was impressed by the amount of food still left in the field. “That just floors me, how much is out here in November,” she said.
She said her town of Williamsburg had a small food distribution cupboard, a place that largely offers dry, nonperishable foods. “Maybe over the weekend I could just leave a few pumpkins out with a sign,” Gelbard said.
Jen Hagar learned about the gleaning program about three months ago from another homeschooling family. She brought her daughter, Victoria Rose Hagar, 3, who carried her own armfuls of produce to where the group placed the boxes.
“It’s free education while giving back, a lot of lessons all in one day,” Jen Hagar said.
“I see a lot of people that are hungry,” said Hagar, a psych nurse at a local hospital. She considered buying land and starting a farm to address food insecurity, but after learning about gleaning she realized, “Geez, the food is already grown.”
She loaded her pickup bed with pumpkins, which she said she planned to deliver to the Center for Self Reliance in Greenfield, which is close to a shelter.
Boxes of wrinkled, whitish-green leaves of Napa cabbage sat at the edge of the field. Some volunteers waded into the cornstalks to pick ears, their kernels still milky and sweet.
Bluestein recorded the weight of each box in a notebook. One case of pumpkins was 52 pounds. Another, 47.
More than 2,800 pounds of produce altogether.
Volunteers stacked boxes in trunks of cars, even filling the passenger-side seats.
After almost three hours, their gleaning was done. One by one they drove away to make their deliveries stretching from Springfield to Northfield.