Reducing Food Waste at the Farm Level

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Home & Garden, Education, Leisure, How To

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2023

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens to potatoes that aren’t perfectly fit for the grocery store? They end up in cow feed. In response, Ty and the team at his farm started Ugly Potato Day, where they raise money for local food banks and give away many thousands of pounds of potatoes that would otherwise be wasted. Epic Gardening Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/3Pxmng5 Botanical Interests Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/3EA7YtA Book Collection Page: https://growepic.co/3ZbMht3 EG Homesteading Book: https://growepic.co/486kz5d Learn More: Potato Growth Stages: How Fast Do Potato Plants Grow? Connect With Tyler Heppell: Tyler Heppell is a 5th generation Potato farmer from British Columbia Canada. He grew up on the potato farm but when he left for University he said he was never going to come back. After 10 years he returned to the family farm with a goal to reduce food waste and educate others about how farming works. He now has over 600,000 followers online posting daily farming content. Instagram TikTok Website Shop the Store As an exclusive for listeners, use code THEBEET for 5% off your entire order on our store, featuring our flagship Birdies Raised Beds. These are the original metal raised beds, lasting up to 5-10x longer than wooden beds, are ethically made in Australia, and have a customizable modular design. Shop now and get 5% off your first order. Get Our Books Looking for a beginner's guide to growing food in small spaces? Kevin’s book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening, explains the core, essential information that you'll need to grow plants, no matter where you live! He also wrote Grow Bag Gardening to provide you with specialized knowledge that can bring you success when growing in fabric pots. Preorder Kevin’s newest book Epic Homesteading if you are looking to turn your home into a thriving homestead! Order signed copies of Kevin’s books, plus more of his favorite titles in our store. More Resources Looking for more information? Follow us: Our Blog YouTube (Including our Epic Homesteading and Jacques in the Garden channels) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Artming in general is a great way to reduce your food waste from the grocery store.
0:07.0	If you're growing it yourself, you tend to put more emphasis on that and you tend to
0:11.0	want to use it.
0:12.0	It feels sort of painful to throw that food away, but at a farm level, I often wonder how
0:17.7	much is wasted before it even gets into the market, the farmer's market, et cetera.
0:22.7	So we have Thai back on the show, potato Thai, fifth generation potato farmer for BC Canada.
0:28.7	I've seen a lot of your videos Thai on the drop kicker, 5,000.
0:32.8	I've seen all sorts of different ways that potatoes potentially can go bad.
0:37.7	You mentioned actually in yesterday's episode, the shrinkage rate on potato storage is
0:42.6	about 5% with your guys' techniques, which at your scale of many, many tens of thousands
0:46.8	of potatoes, it's a lot of potatoes, right?
0:49.0	And so how serious is the waste stream, I suppose, of the farming process?
0:56.0	Yeah, it's not great, Kevin, and that was one of the first things that I noticed when
1:00.5	we came back was how much food was wasted, how many potatoes went to cow feed.
1:06.8	And I guess that's what something I want to clarify is, we try to be a zero waste farm,
1:10.9	so at the end of the day, any potatoes that we don't sell for human consumption go to cow
1:14.8	feed, which is okay.
1:17.2	But a lot of times, Kevin, the potatoes are perfectly fine.
1:20.7	I was the majority of the potatoes that the cows get to enjoy on, get a munch on.
1:26.2	Our finalists have a little bit of cosmetic damage to it, or they don't look perfect,
1:30.9	or the sizing is a bit off, and that really blew my mind when I came back to the farm.
1:36.9	We throw it about, or we get rid of about 1.5 million pounds of potatoes a year that
	...

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