Boston Area Gleaners’ Usha Thakrar

In Fall 2019, Usha Thakrar was just settling into her new job as Executive Director of Boston Area Gleaners when Lisa Zwirn’s story on the organization graced our cover.  In her first two years at the helm, Thakrar has led the non-profit through the unimaginable challenges the pandemic presented, nimbly responding to supply chain issues, volunteer shortages and increased need. Amid these challenges, the team doubled in size, expanded a program to help farmers, and acquired a farm of their own. We asked Thakrar how they managed and what’s next.

-Rachel Caldwell, Special Projects Editor

Boston Area Gleaners Executive Director Usha Thakrar. Photos courtesy of Boston Area Gleaners

Pandemic Pivots

Normally after the season, we go quiet. Our quietest months are January through roughly April. Last spring when COVID first hit, we were in that time when not a lot of people are working, we’re doing mostly strategic planning, people are taking time off because that’s the time of year they can do such a thing. And then it became very clear very quickly that one of the ways that we can be helpful during that time was to help a lot of partner organizations get food from point A to point B. When the supply chain fell apart last spring, there were all of these places that had food that they were ready to deliver to schools, restaurants, other institutions, but it had a destination.

There were a bunch of food rescue organizations we worked with, like Food Link and Food For Free, that were happy to distribute that food, but they needed to get it. And so we have trucks and drivers, and like I said, everyone was not really working at that time, and so we brought in our resources and spent most of the spring doing just that, transporting whatever it was. We certainly expanded gleanings beyond produce. There was milk, there was frozen soup. For the longest time, there were these boxes of gnocchi; it was just an assortment of things. And our coolers were not being used at that time, so we were able to store stuff.

In May of last year, the USDA decided to put out the funding to support doing (produce boxes). So a box of mixed produce, kind of like what you’d get at a CSA, ideally mostly local, distributed directly to a nonprofit and that nonprofit—hunger relief, food pantry, soup, kitchen, whatever—could just put the box directly into peoples’ hands.

And then, as you might expect with a government program, it got more political…With each iteration, there was less and less money for Massachusetts, and therefore fewer and fewer boxes. And so by December, there was a significant gap within the emergency response system. So starting last fall, we started working with Food For Free to distribute a similar kind of box, but one that we had more control over. Since then we have been sourcing and packing boxes for them. We pack about 1,300 boxes a week and Food For Free distributes them across their network.

Gleaning, as it turns out, is an activity that’s reasonably possible to do and socially distance, right? Normally we put people in a row of produce directly across from each other so they can talk to one another, and we just staggered people so they were further apart. Obviously the pandemic sort of changed some of our volunteer base and people’s willingness to come out.

Volunteers packing food at Stonefield Farm

Weather Woes

But also, New England experienced one of the worst droughts that it has in recent decades. And so there wasn’t as much surplus. There also wasn’t as much surplus because there was such an emphasis on local. And so, a lot of our farmers were able to sell much more of their products than they may have in previous years.

We still distributed something like 750,000 pounds. It’s not like it wasn’t a good year, just compared to the prior year, it was different. And then this year, it’s been so wet that it’s also going to be different. A little early to tell, because the apples may come in strong, the squash may come in strong, but some of the early season produce like tomatoes can be impacted by the rain. Some of the mid-season greens have been impacted by the rain. So we’ll see how that all plays out.

Tomato glean at Applefield Farm

Help for Farmers

We also have a program called Boston Food Hub, which was nascent, in the pilot stage when (Lisa Zwirn’s story was published). One of the things we’ve learned over the years is that as much as we value the donations from farmers, that’s not what they’re in the business for, to donate.

And so we’ve done a lot of work looking at why is there a surplus. And it’s really very simple, there’s a surplus because the farmer can’t find a market, and that happens for a whole range of reasons. But for a lot of small farms, a lot of it has to do with just straight up resources, right? They don’t have the time to make 12 phone calls to 12 restaurants to find a customer. And then on the customer side, the restaurants may be interested in doing local, but they don’t have the resources to call 12 farms. So we have relationships on both ends of that equation. We serve kind of as a broker.

And so we’ve been developing this business model where we buy products from farmers at a fair market price, and we sell it at a lower price than the restaurants tend to get at the terminal.

Stonefield Farm, new home of Boston Area Gleaners

Buying the Farm

(Our former location in Waltham) used to be the University of Massachusetts’ agricultural extension school. It served us well for many years, but it was all very temporary because it was a rental situation, so we had started looking for a new space.

Last year—from a philanthropy standpoint—was really beneficial for organizations that work in food security; we all saw incredible amounts of philanthropy, and the contract we had with the USDA generated enough revenue that we were able to save some money and say, alright, maybe we actually buy something. The farm in Acton is a farm we’ve known for years….a long-shot dream. And we’ve just developed that relationship. I think COVID changed their calculus in terms of selling. They’re not young, the brothers on the farm.

We made an arrangement with the farmers: This growing season, they would go ahead and grow as they normally do, and our food hub would be their only customers. So they could farm the fields and they wouldn’t have to worry about the marketing and transportation and selling and all of that. And that’s working pretty well. They’re incredible to work with. They’re just a lovely, lovely family.

Our straight up hunger relief program where we’re gleaning, we’re bringing everything back to a central facility, sorting, repacking and sending it out—having it all in one place with a facility to be able to do that efficiently, just makes all of that faster and, in theory, will allow us to move more food through the hunger relief portion of our mission. And we’re that much closer to some of the farms now. It will also allow us to expand further west because most of the farms in Massachusetts are outside of 495, and being in Waltham, that was a distance. Now being in Acton, it’s actually not so bad.

Having both parking for those trucks and the ability to have a loading dock—we never had a loading dock in Waltham, and everything had to be hand loaded and unloaded—so that increases our efficiency.

Long-term, we need to do some strategic planning over the winter about the property. We have alternative ideas about how to use the farmland in a way that is mission-consistent.

We might just use the entire property, just grow exclusively for hunger relief. There are certain crops that are in high demand, especially in some of the more multicultural neighborhoods that are not really well-grown in New England, and so you don’t see a lot of them in the food pantry world. Garlic, okra, collard greens, certain types of spicy peppers.

Another possibility is to use the land to support landless farmers. There are many people who are interested in farming, have the skills to farm, but don’t have the capital to go out and either purchase or rent land in New England.

Our immediate plan, when things settle a little, is to try to convene a group of thought leaders, to put a question in front of everybody: If you had 50 acres of farmland to use and try to make a significant change within the local community, what would you do?