 I'm Nita Kerman Skilsen. I'm one of the co-founders of ProduceGood. We're a food recovery nonprofit. We source, glean, and distribute excess fruits and vegetables all over San Diego County and distribute those to the food insecure. Gleaning has a lot of history, but what you really need to know basically is that gleaning is the idea that those who have surplus crops share with those who don't. And what we're doing here, we're bringing gleaning into the 21st century. So we are using that same concept of harvesting excess and bringing it to those in need. If you live in an area that has a long-growing season like I do in San Diego, you know how much of the fruit around you is going to waste falling on the ground. Actually 40% of all food is wasted in the US and that is almost half. While one in six people is food insecure, which means they do not know where their next meal is coming from. It's a ridiculous and insoluble problem. And what we are here to do is to try to solve that by our work with gleaning. What if I were to tell you that there was more than enough food in the US to feed everybody? The problem is not that we don't have enough food. The problem is that we don't have enough access to the food by the people who need it. And what we're trying to do here at ProduceGood is to solve that problem and we are reducing waste and hunger in one sweet step, as we like to say. Our volunteers harvest excess fruit and vegetables from orchards, backyards and farmers markets and they take that excess bounty to local food agencies. We work with hundreds of backyard growers, farmers and volunteers to make this happen. So we also work at four farmers markets in San Diego. We collect all the produce that the vendors cannot sell. Our volunteers hand out branded bins to farmers at the end of the market. We collect all of this incredible bounty and then we transport and deliver to local food agencies. Hungry people are receiving nutritious fruits and vegetables that would otherwise go to waste and the farmers get a tax receipt for their generous donation. These crops took time, water and love to grow and the farmers are so happy to be able to have this option to donate their bounty and not let it go to waste. By sourcing, picking and transporting the fruit in the same community, we are empowering communities to feed themselves. Our decentralized community-based model can be replicated anywhere in the United States where there's trees, farms and people who want to share their bounty. So if you're interested in starting a cleaning group of your own, you might want to first check to see if there's somebody already out there doing the same thing because you don't want to double your efforts. So first of all, see if there's an existing group and then if you can't find one, here are some good tips. First you identify the grove or the trees or the yard where the fruit is. You need to find out where it's located. Then you want to contact the owner of the trees and make sure that it's okay that you come and pick the fruit. You might want to also explain that there is a Good Samaritan Act, a federal law that protects them from liability so that they can donate in good faith and they don't have to worry about being sued. You also want to make sure that you have a place to distribute the harvest. Unless you're going to be eating it all yourselves, you definitely want to contact a group that can take this excess bounty. I would check local churches, food pantries, shelters. Those are great places to start. Then you need to set up a time in a day for the gleaning, preferably morning. That's usually a good time. You need to be able to let your gleaners know what day and where to meet. When you get to the property, be very respectful. Remember this is someone's property. You want to treat it as you would treat your own and leave it as good or better than you found it. Sometimes the tree owner wants to pick their own fruit and that's great. Then you can act as the middleman in picking up the fruit and you are taking it to a local agency for them. So to start gleaning, you're going to need some equipment. At the very least you're going to need a bag or a container to put your gleamed fruit in, clippers, and gloves if you have them, and also a picker pole. These are wonderful if you have high fruit and places that are hard to reach. So one of the easiest and my favorite method to pick citrus is the pull and twist, which is exactly what it sounds like. You are going to pull and twist and if the fruit is ripe it comes right off in your hand and into your bag. The second method is if you'd like to use clippers and sometimes you will need to use them for more fragile fruits, you will take your clipper, you will clip it right at the base of the fruit so you have just not very much stem showing and that is the cleanest way to do that. So one of our favorite pieces of equipment here at Produce Good is the picker pole and if you're able to it's a wonderful thing to have to glean because it gets the fruit that's very far up or out of the way and this is how it works. It's a telescoping set up so you pull and then you twist it and then you can reach that unreachable fruit tada and there it is. Since 2010 Produce Good has recovered 650,000 pounds of edible fruits and vegetables provided almost 2 million servings to the Food and Secure of San Diego while keeping 325 tons of perfectly edible produce from the landfill. We have done all this with three staff members and thousands of volunteers. This just shows what a good idea can do, how powerful a good idea can be. We can all produce good every day.