Your ag tech expertise is essential to feeding hungry people, dramatically reducing the 40 percent food waste rate and concomitantly conserving precious natural resources.
Food waste reduction latest societal context is here: http://nyti.ms/2hJAPAa
And you can read about two food tech innovations here:
http://econ.st/2hyh4gT
http://nyti.ms/2hJCMN0
Ag tech helping hands are needed … and, of course, there are business opportunities herein.
At the California Food Waste Roundtable (a pro bono group of nonprofit, agriculture and state agency executives I co-founded in 2013), we are launching research to characterize on-farm food loss and the opportunities to reduce it.
We are collaborating with Dave Campbell, associate dean of the UC Davis College of Food and Agriculture, and Professor Ned Spang and their team of graduate students, who graciously volunteered to conduct the qualitative interviews with permanent crop and row crop growers.
Roundtable members venture capitalist Sarah Vared and California Board of Food and Agriculture President Craig McNamara are part of the ReFED initiative that discovered on-farm food loss is the last untapped source of food waste reduction.
Your opportunities culled from the initial research, from my prism of 15 years in ag tech and natural resources programs:
- On-farm food loss contains too many variables for a single, overarching characterization and best practices schema. Estimates of losses vary significantly from 5 percent to 50 percent of a crop, depending upon market dynamics, labor availability, weather, pests — the usual suspects. What are the variables, impacts and control factors?
- Developing a pathway to food banks for seconds and otherwise unused crops will most likely merit specific food loss control practices by region and crop category. How does “unusual but useable” food make money for the farmer to create a market?
- Creating markets for seconds is a way to generate revenue and harvesting practices that could in part go to increasing the supply line for food banks. What about the contract sale of imperfects to university food service providers?
- In the packing shed, there is what Andy Sousa, CEO of the six-county Community Food Bank of the San Joaquin Valley, termed “the point of interception” for food bank donations. How can California’s huge food processing industry improve food waste reduction while also paying farmers for the unusual but useable?
And kudos to JoAnne Berkenkamp, our research colleague from the Natural Resources Defense Council for coining “unusual but useable” food, and to Professor Wendi Gosliner of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources for conceptual guidance.
