In May 1990, the local agricultural community saw a need to join forces with food assistance agencies to funnel donations of fresh, surplus produce to food banks and community pantries in California’s Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties.

Ag Against Hunger was the brainchild of three Santa Cruz County residents, Jess Brown, Executive Director of the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau, Willy Elliott-McCrae, Executive Director of Second Harvest Food Bank and Tim Driscoll of Driscoll Strawberry Associates. They were interested in developing a system to distribute the abundance of surplus crops grown in the tri-county area to the hungry. Their simple solution has become a model for produce recovery and distribution programs.

The program is simple. When growers have a surplus they notify Ag Against Hunger.
Our truck collects the produce from approximately 50 different growers and shippers in the tri-county area. It is then distributed to food banks that make our fresh produce donations available to more than 240 nonprofit human service agencies and feeds 75,000 low-income people in the tri-county area each month and hundreds of thousands more throughout California and the West Coast. Click here for a full chart showing where our produce donations go.

When local food banks are satisfied, Ag Against Hunger provides California Emergency Foodlink, a statewide food distribution program, fresh produce which is distributed to over 50 food banks and community pantries in other parts of the state. After state organizations receive all the produce they needed, Ag Against Hunger works with food organizations in Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Utah to feed people throughout the West Coast. Click here for a full chart of where our produce donations go.

Ag Against Hunger is not a food bank. We’re a produce recovery program that collects and distributes produce to food banks and pantries. Ag Against Hunger is strongly supported by the agricultural community through donations of crops, and is independent of any single food assistance program. Therefore the amount and diversity of produce made available has grown enormously since the program’s inception. In 1990, 500,000 pounds of produce were distributed. Today an average of 10,000,000 pounds a year is shared with people in need.

Ag Against Hunger’s gleaning program coordinates the picking of crops left behind after commercial harvest and the donation of the food. In 2007, volunteers harvested over 77,000 pounds of produce that would have otherwise been disked underground. After harvest, there is an abundance of high quality, marketable produce left in the fields which cannot be harvested economically or does not meet commercial standards. Typically, it is tilled under in preparation for planting new crops. If you’re interested in becoming a gleaning volunteer, please visit our “How can I Help?” page.