When the Covid pandemic hit and disrupted so many of our social and economic systems, a crisis within the crisis exploded: the number of people who were facing hunger grew catastrophically. News footage showed miles-long lines of cars at food banks with many of those people being turned away due to a lack of food. At the same time, quite a few farmers were dumping their crops because many of their major markets, such as restaurants, were closed.
The urgency of the crisis caused a small group of college students in Southern California to feel they had to do something. Their initial, modest goal of providing food to one local food bank grew astonishingly quickly, and became the Farmlink Project, a national operation redirecting millions of pounds of food to feed the hungry while highlighting the food system’s twin failures of food insecurity and food waste.
One of the students who co-founded the project is Owen Dubek, now its Creative Director. An avid surfer and documentary filmmaker, Owen captured the whole story in his inspiring, award-winning film: Abundance: The Farmlink Story.
In this interview, Arty Mangan of Bioneers discussed this extraordinary initiative with Owen and with Farmlink’s Director of Sustainability, Julia DeSantis.
ARTY MANGAN: The pandemic was obviously the crisis that awakened your activism and the activism of your colleagues, but what were the specific conditions that inspired you to act?
OWEN DUBEK: In the beginning of the pandemic, we were seeing billions of pounds of food going to waste on farms. It became front and center as a national news story. Right in our backyard in L.A. at some of the food banks near us, we were seeing mile-long lines. At the same time, many of us were being sent home from college. I had just graduated and had my first job, but work had really slowed down, and a few of us asked ourselves: What can we do to help?
So, we talked to the West Side Food Bank and a few others in our area. They said that they needed more food. With a few friends, we scraped a couple hundred dollars together, rented a U-Haul truck, and drove our first truckload of food from a local farm to that food bank. We didn’t set out to build an organization; we were just looking for one small way we could help. Julia joined us a little bit later, but during the pandemic she was working on an initiative that was getting groceries to older folks in her area. It turned out that there was a huge wave of young people who were privileged enough to have the time to volunteer who had the spirit and motivation to make a difference.
ARTY: What did you learn from taking action in that crisis? And what is your message to young people who are discouraged by the world’s seemingly intractable problems and feel powerless to address them?
OWEN: We’ve shown the film in a bunch of schools. That’s what I’m focused on because I think a lot of people, especially younger people, are a little cynical about the future and don’t know how to take the first step. They don’t know where to start. What we’ve learned is that— and it sounds like a cliché—but the power of collective hope is the reason that Farmlink exists. It’s the reason we were able to move 100 million pounds of food. Hundreds of people went to work every day doing the most that they could do to get as much food on people’s tables as possible. There was a deep sense of hope that drove people to drop out of school, quit their jobs and give it everything they had to get food to communities that were facing hunger.
There’s an interesting angle here too. Looking at the analytics of our videos that we put online, when we dwell on the negative, when we dwell on the crisis and emphasize how bad things are, we see people click away within five to seven seconds. They do not watch the video, and they’re definitely not inspired to take action. But when we root it in hope and highlight faces of young people who are hopeful, it really inspires people to do something about it. I think people are sick of hearing how negative things are, and they’re looking for ways to take action.
JULIA DeSANTIS: I studied Climate Communications at school because I went through that emotional cycle, when you learn about a problem and then you’re either overcome with paralysis or you develop a deep connection to the issue. I wanted to learn how to find a way to activate positive impulses, to imbue hope and the will to take action in many more people.
What Farmlink can be a demonstration of is that we were all kids that just got started somehow but were able to get a lot done. We were not a group of experts, but we were willing to support one another by taking action together. Especially with communicating about the climate, we don’t need to bludgeon people with the truth anymore. We need to catalyze people’s energy into a sustainable creative force – the problem-solving force of people who are excited to break a problem or a system down, delegate tasks, and try again tomorrow. I think that’s what gets momentum. Farmlink uniquely captured the spirit of students wanting to get out there with no prior expectation of how they should operate in the world. It’s the spirit of creative problem-solving combined with the joy of being able to learn together. I think that’s also something the climate challenge offers to everyone: we know the beauties of this planet and we want to continue to create a healthy life on it.
ARTY: A big part of your mission is to empower the next generation of changemakers. You responded to a crisis out of your instinctive altruism, but now, looking back at the successes you’ve had and the impact that you’ve made, have you developed a theory of change?
OWEN: We knew nothing about the agricultural space, and we were not experts in the charitable food space, but we knew what questions we wanted to ask and were not afraid to call industry leaders and other people in these domains, and ask them, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing, what do you think? Are we on the right path? You said we’re doing this wrong, how do we do it right?” And without that advice, counseling, consulting, none of this would have happened. Eden, who’s one of our founding members, said on a panel: “You’re going to fail along the way, but you need to set it up so that when you fail, you can bounce right back and build it stronger.”
Another thing that was really crucial—and I think a lot of companies and movements in their early stages can get this wrong—is that everyone had ownership over the project. It didn’t matter if you were the first person or the 500th person to join the project, it felt like it was yours. You can see that in our early news coverage. The same person never went on the news twice. It was always a different person because it was everyone’s project, and that made everyone work so much harder.
ARTY: So, it was a spontaneous startup enterprise, but entrepreneurial startups can be exhausting, exhilarating and challenging in regards to effective management. How did the internal systems develop in a way that was organizationally effective?
OWEN: In the beginning, it was literally just call up your friends. Hey, this guy knows how to build a website. This guy knows how to make videos. This person’s down to cold call 500 farmers in a day and has no shame or fear or rejection. It just ballooned into having 100, 120 people. We started looking for advisers, asking each other: “Does anyone have a parent who started a business?” And the advisers we found said things like, “You need a fundraising team; you need a food program team, etc.” So, we broke our work into four different pillars, and it was able to naturally grow through that.
There was a key transition point where all of these kids were going back to college. We had to figure out a hybrid model. We hired full-time a mix of industry experts and the student leaders who had started Farmlink while also making sure that there was a fellowship program that could usher in the next generation of change-makers. Right now, we have 26 full-time employees. Some of those are people who have left other large nonprofits because they were inspired to come work with us, feeling they could drive their vision for the future more readily at Farmlink. Some of them are the founders you see in the documentary, and we have a fellowship program with 50 to 60 students who play a major role in moving food, fundraising, storytelling, policy, all the things we’re working on.
ARTY: Things grew pretty fast. What were some of the obstacles you encountered? And what are the opportunities that opened up?
OWEN: The first major obstacle was we received all of our funding as a result of news stories. We were on ABC News World Tonight; we were in the New York Times, and we were on NBC. Tens of thousands of people in a twenty-minute burst were donating $10, $20 at a time, just everyday Americans coming together to support this project. But that model was not sustainable. There’s a limit to how many times you’ll get major media coverage, so we had to pivot to find corporate partnerships and different fundraising opportunities. That was a major challenge.
Another difficulty was figuring out where there are major surplus opportunities. You can see in the film that we called 100 farms that first day and no one had surplus food. We weren’t looking in the right places. Eventually, we found bigger farms, larger commercial farms that were wasting a lot of food, but it took us a while to find them. Now we’re at the point where we’re able to anticipate three, four months in advance when a major harvest might go to waste.
In the fall, we rescued 36 million apples that were going to go to waste. Due to the pandemic, contracts had been cut with farmers in an entire region of West Virginia. We were able to anticipate that far enough in advance to send hundreds of trucks to divert that food to hundreds of different communities. The biggest challenge in the beginning was finding food and getting there fast enough to collect it, and it feels like we’re getting a lot better at that.
ARTY: It sounds like there’s a lot of flexibility into your system.
OWEN: Totally, because I think that was the thing that wasn’t working with other organizations during the pandemic—they weren’t agile. They’d been doing things the same way for many years, but all of a sudden, we’re in this global pandemic and the supply chain looks nothing like it did yesterday, and they weren’t necessarily adapting as fast as our new organization of young people with no preconceived ideas could. That’s a big thing we need to be conscious of going forward. It would be very easy for us to grow and become an organization that’s kind of rigid, so we’re really trying hard to bake it into our DNA that we want to continue to be agile, especially as challenges with climate change come forward.
JULIA: I lead our sustainability team, and it’s really important how we respond to the existing system that is designed to over-produce, that has bubbles of surplus that need to be recovered and redistributed away from landfills to people who could really benefit from having access to that food.
At the same time, there are many different ways to approach growing food globally at scale, so part of what I really have our team focus on now is how we can explore ways that food can be grown more resourcefully and distributed more efficiently. I think there’s plenty for Farmlink to continue to learn to be able to be part of adaptive solutions that make sure that food is distributed in the most sustainable and humane way.
ARTY: You started out wanting to help one local food bank, and now you have the capacity “to feed millions of people with dignity.” What does it mean to feed people with dignity?
OWEN: Let me lead with a stat that fifty percent of people who are food insecure and know where their local food bank is, will not go there because of the stigma associated with it. That tells us that there’s a crisis in how we are delivering food to people. Waiting in line for hours in your car and being handed a bag of food that sometimes isn’t culturally appropriate and isn’t necessarily what you wanted can be a shame-inducing experience. We truly believe it should not be that way, so we try to prioritize sending food to organizations that are giving people choice in their food, where there aren’t patronizing processes or paperwork, where people can actually access the food bank easily, for example, in a community center. We love community organizations where food is built into everyday life.
In the documentary you can see a community center in Oklahoma, in the Cherokee Nation, where people go to for live music, dancing, and they can get fresh produce there as well. That’s so important that it’s baked into everyday life, and it removes that stigma a little bit, and in turn you’re reaching more people. So that’s what dignity means to us.
ARTY: Are there policies, either economic or political, that actually restrain what you’re trying to do?
OWEN: Yeah. The first low-hanging fruit, no pun intended, right off the bat, is that there are states where you can get a tax deduction for donating food to us, and then there are states where you don’t get a tax deduction. If those states did have tax deductions, farmers would donate hundreds of millions of pounds more food.
And we’re trying to get reimbursed for some of our transportation costs. If an entire harvest of food is about to go to waste in a state, sometimes the Department of Agriculture of that state will pay farmers for their work so that dozens of farms that have been there for a hundred years don’t go belly up. A lot of times, there is a requirement to donate the food in order to get paid, but there isn’t an easy pathway for them to donate the food. We’re trying to bake it into policy that when this happens, the state also reimburses the transportation, so that we can coordinate with the farmers in an ongoing, sustainable way.
ARTY: Let’s talk about overproduction. In one of your videos, Chef Nick DiGiovanni shows three tomatoes and explains why they’d been thrown away. One had a minor blemish; one was slightly overripe; and in the last case, a buyer had just pulled out of a purchasing commitment. DiGiovanni said that our current system is designed to throw away roughly 30 percent of the food we produce. Do you agree that the system’s actually designed that way?
OWEN: I don’t think there was a conscious decision to create a system that throws away 30 percent, but it’s the world we’ve built together. It’s not that people are evil or unjust and want to throw away food, but these are what the existing incentives are driving people to do.
As a large-scale conventional farmer, you need to be delivering a perfect-looking product that meets certain criteria dictated by the market. Your potatoes have to be just right, not too big or too small, with uniform color and no spots, etc. As a result, there are going to be a lot of potatoes that the farmer can’t sell, but a huge amount of food needs to be harvested just to find the 70 percent of it that will be saleable. In Mexico we saw 25 million tons of bananas that were perfectly edible go to waste because the supplier pulled out of the contract. There had been a cold front that swept through, and that had created a lot of little brown spots on the bananas. They were perfectly edible. I flew down there to film a video and ate a bunch of them, and they were great, but they didn’t look like what the market wants a banana to look like, so they all went to waste.
ARTY: Talk a little bit about the process of making the film at the same time you were running at high speed to try to build an organization to help feed people.
OWEN: I showed up on the first day to take some photos of my friends driving a U-Haul truck with some food to their local food bank thinking, hey, maybe we’ll get on the local news, maybe we’ll make an Instagram post out of this, or something like that. There was never an intention of making a documentary or starting an organization, but it quickly became clear in the first couple of days that footage and photos documenting what we were doing were going to be really important. You see a lot of it in the documentary—three months after I took those photos, ABC World News wanted the images of how we were trying to feed people and showed them to tens of millions of people.
After that, I began to think that maybe there’s a documentary here, but I wasn’t sure. I was filming in the background on important events, visiting farms just to continue to tell stories and send stuff to the news, but kids started dropping out of school and people starting quitting their jobs, calling their bosses and saying: “Hey, I’m working on something that’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” When that was happening, I realized that there was something truly special happening that went well beyond connecting farms to food banks. It was a surge of collective hope and empowerment during the biggest crisis in our generation’s life that made this topic worthy of a documentary.
ARTY: The crisis of the pandemic certainly shed more light on the food system’s systemic failures of hunger and of food waste.
OWEN: These problems had existed for a very long time, but the pandemic brought them front and center into the national conversation. A lot of people thought that when the pandemic was over, there probably wouldn’t be any more surplus food, but that’s completely wrong. There’s more surplus food than ever; this is the system we’ve been handed.
We definitely don’t want Farmlink to continue forever. We joke that we want to put ourselves out of business, but we are quite serious about wanting to help create real solutions that would make this project unnecessary. As long as there’s surplus food and there are hungry people, though, we’re going to do this for as long as we can.
ARTY: How has your experience with Farmlink changed you?
OWEN: It’s given me my best friends. I’ve been able to work on something that I feel is so important, dedicate all my time to it and become so close to the people around me. It’s given me a community that I never had before. It’s also connected me to a deeper sense of purpose. I drove around the country with a group of friends, visiting all the communities we had served, and that trip changed me in a lot of ways. We worked a twelve-hour day in a parking lot at a food bank, and at noon we saw nurses lining up, waiting an hour in line during their lunch break, to get food. I feel like that single moment changed me in how I look at the economics of the United States and the importance of bringing justice to this issue.
This included the time I spent with Anne Lopez, who’s running the somewhat secret network of food banks for undocumented people who don’t feel comfortable going to a food bank because they could be risking deportation. I felt like all of these experiences brought me from a person who makes social impact documentaries because I generally care about the world, to someone who now has a very deep personal connection to these issues and feels the injustices in my bones, and I think that deeper capacity for empathy will find its way into my film projects going forward.
JULIA: Farmlink has given me the opportunity to work with other people on a shared challenge we all care passionately about. It’s a defining opportunity that will mark us deeply and stay with us throughout our lives. Farmlink gave me the voice to articulate what I believe and to be able to work with brilliant, dedicated, resourceful, hilarious, beautiful, young energy to try and try again on something that we know without any doubts is worth our time. Farmlink was started by young people but is now made up of a diverse group of people across age groups who have a shared “if-not-now-when” energy. Whether you’re young or old, you’re constantly reminded that this is our time.
We are living in critically important times, so let’s get after it and do something cool with it and share the joy. We get to create something with a team to improve conditions that we are born into. That is a massive opportunity that I have been gifted and that I get to come back to every single day when I show up to work. It’s such a fun thing that I’ve been able to grow into radically, as someone who can think, research, test, and trial again. It’s such a gift to make mistakes and learn with a team. That has dramatically improved my problem-solving skills and my respect for other people’s opinions. I’ve learned that an expansion of creativity is possible when you give yourself permission to dare. I think those are just some of the many, many gifts that Farmlink has given me.
The post The Farmlink Project: Reducing Hunger by Reducing Food Waste appeared first on Bioneers.