CARIBOU, Maine — An Aroostook County potato grower will be shipping what potentially could be an estimated one million pounds of potatoes to those in need in the Boston area thanks to a pilot project overseen by the Maine-based Good Shepherd Food Bank.
The Maine organization, which acts as a clearinghouse for food donated to hungry families from Fort Kent to Kittery, helped broker the agreement that will have Irving Farms of Caribou ship thousands of pounds of potatoes a month to the Greater Boston Food Bank in Massachusetts, the largest food bank in New England.
The new agreement stems from a program called Mainers Feeding Mainers, which was started by Good Shepherd in 2010 as a way for farms to connect low-income families with local produce, according to Melissa Huston, director of philanthropy for the Good Shepherd Food Bank in Northern Maine. Huston said Thursday that what started as the food pantry connecting the hungry with locally grown fresh produce four years ago has now branched out across state lines.
She said that in talking to other New England food banks, Good Shepherd officials learned that the Greater Boston Food Bank was buying more than 8 million pounds of produce from Canadian farmers and that it was being trucked right through Maine.
“Good Shepherd realized that Maine growers could have provided the product at a lower cost,” said Huston. “So we partnered with the Greater Boston Food Bank so that our trucks will get the potatoes from Caribou and store them for [the Boston-based food bank] in Brewer or Auburn, and their trucks will travel the other half distance.”
The Boston food bank will negotiate its own price for the potatoes from Irving farms, and Good Shepherd will negotiate a separate price, Huston said.
She hoped that the pilot project will lead to additional brokered agreements between Maine farmers and other food banks in the coming year.
Ann Cote, product management director for the Greater Boston Food Bank, said in a prepared statement that the agency now will receive half of its potato acquisition, or roughly 20,000 pounds a month, from Irving Farms. The food bank plans to increase the shipments in the future as it works toward obtaining the one million pounds agreed to under the pilot project.
As the largest hunger relief organization in Maine, the Auburn-based Good Shepherd Food Bank distributes food to 600 partner agencies across the state, including food pantries, meal sites and youth programs.
Irving Farms has been involved in the potato industry for five generations, providing fresh potatoes to various grocery chains and markets throughout the eastern United States.
Noah Winslow, marketing coordinator for Irving Farms, said Thursday he was pleased to see his fresh produce go to the food bank.
“Maine has had a relationship supplying food banks for years now, and that is a good thing,” he said. “You never want to see your product go to waste, especially if someone is in need.”
Both Huston and Winslow said that such relationships with the food banks also are an excellent distribution solution for the potatoes grown that don’t meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture standard to be sold as U.S. No. 1, which is the size and quality found in bags on supermarket shelves.
“The food banks take the potatoes that aren’t U.S. No. 1 because they aren’t perfectly round or they have a defect here and there, but still look and taste fine ,” said Winslow. “Otherwise, they would go to be made into starch or sent to a processing facility. It is nice to know they will not go to waste.”
Huston said she hopes the potato program will experience the same success as the Mainers Feeding Mainers program, which last year purchased 1,048,000 pounds of Maine-grown produce and received 1,003,000 pounds of donated farm product from Maine farms, while investing nearly $500,000 in Maine’s agricultural sector, according to its website.