{"id":3757,"date":"2014-04-14T03:20:41","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T03:20:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/?p=3757"},"modified":"2016-04-06T11:44:28","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T11:44:28","slug":"farm-focus-food-waste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/farm-focus-food-waste\/","title":{"rendered":"Farm Focus:  Food Waste"},"content":{"rendered":"There is growing attention on the topic of <b>food waste<\/b> in sustainability and food security circles.\u00a0 It\u2019s estimated that 40% of the food grown, distributed, and sold in the United States is wasted. In our own sunny California, it\u2019s estimated that 80,000 tons a day are wasted.\n\nThese figures are staggering and alarming, but not necessarily a big surprise to us. As growers of perishable food with multiple sales channels, we have an up close and personal view of the food chain from field to our various markets, which include wholesale, retail, and direct markets.\n\nAbout 30 percent or 500,000 pounds of our annual harvest is not considered acceptable for sale to regular retail channels due to cosmetic challenges like slight bruising, surface scarring, irregular size or being too ripe to withstand the retail shipping and handling chain.\n\nWe are committed to finding the right home for all of the food that we grow. We divert about 300,000 pounds of this cosmetically unacceptable fruit to our Farmers Market customers and to you, our CSA members.\u00a0 We ask you to bite into or eat around a picking bruise, not to be bothered by a knick or scar on the skin, to accept large or small pieces of fruit, and to enjoy fruit that is sweet, juicy, and tree ripened \u2013 a perk almost impossible in the retail market.\n\nThe fruit that is too ripe or too cosmetically challenged to be eaten out of hand makes its way to our farm kitchen and to our drying yard. Combined, about 115,000 pounds of fruit a year turns into conserves, filling for pastries, and into our fantastic sun dried fruit.\n\nThe remaining fruit that can\u2019t be eaten one way or another is an essential nitrogen source for our compost, which in turn feeds our trees. So, in a way, we end up eating those composted fruits too.\u00a0 That\u2019s regenerative agriculture at its best!","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is growing attention on the topic of food waste in sustainability and food security circles.\u00a0 It\u2019s estimated that 40% of the food grown, distributed, and sold in the United States is wasted. In our own sunny California, it\u2019s estimated that 80,000 tons a day are wasted. These figures are staggering and alarming, but not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[486,230,558,559,139,560],"class_list":["post-3757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-farm-focus","tag-climate-change","tag-compost","tag-food-security","tag-food-waste","tag-sustainability","tag-value-added-products"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5HwAU-YB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3757"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5013,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3757\/revisions\/5013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}