Farming Realities: Tough Decisions for Economic Sustainability and Food Loss

🌾 Farming full-time is hard, y'all. Sometimes this happens: A crop is destroyed with herbicide in order to plant a different crop.

This cucumber field was harvested several times, but one more harvest just wasn't feasible for the grower. What leads to this type of foodloss? Lack of a buyer, price too low to support one more harvest, quality in the field dropping, or the risk of rejection is high. *Economic sustainability*, one of the three pillars, is a real concern for farms, and they are sometimes forced to move forward with less than ideal plans in order to stay in business.

Think they were happy with this decision? If you think you know about the decisions that have to be made on farms, ask a farmer about what they go through. Understand that decisions are made with dozens of workers standing idle, with perishable products reaching maturity, or with prices dropping by the hour.

Then, work where ever you can to support farms by incorporating more freshproduce in your foodservice or institutional buying, developing more opportunities for processing, increasing fresh produce demand among consumers, and generally valuing fresh produce.

By Dr. Lisa K. Johnson


#foodwaste #postharvest #sdg12