Marketable produce wasting in fields

SASKATOON – Canadians appear to be quite choosy when it comes to purchasing produce. Once fruit and vegetables hit the supermarket, most of the less desirable has been graded out.

Producers in the country are held to a certain standard by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency; however it’s the consumers’ standards that keep most of this produce out of the grocery aisle.

“Sometimes I feel that we’ve gotten a little bit spoiled,” says Doug Waterer, a vegetable crops specialist at the University of Saskatchewan.

“Our food has become so good and so affordable that we’ve become incredibly picky. As a consequence, a large portion of our food actually never makes it to marketplace.”

Waterer performs trials on different vegetables to see which seeds are the most marketable, and to give insight on growing conditions to vegetable growers in Saskatchewan. For vegetables like eggplants, there is an extremely high rate of culls. In 2013, Waterer found that on average over 40 per cent of the eggplants he grew were culls.

Much of what keeps produce out of supermarkets is only skin deep; once the blemished portions are peeled the same quality fruit or vegetable is revealed.

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“Our climate here in Saskatchewan is well suited for some crops, and just really not well suited for others.”

Deformities can be caused by soil type, extreme weather, water flow or even pests. For example, a crooked carrot at some point in its growing process would have come across an obstruction, such as a rock or clay and grown the other way.

In efforts to avoid deformities and surface blemishes, producers will sometimes use more pesticides, and tend to gravitate toward hybrid seeds produced by large corporations.

For Farmers’ Market producer Wally Satzewich, culled vegetables mean dinner.

“Sometimes that’s all I eat, are the culls. The best quality stuff I have goes to customers. I do have a fair amount of it in the cooler, so that’s the stuff I eat or my friends,” said Satzewich.

Manageable for smaller scale producers like Satzewich, large scale producers are faced with more culled vegetables than they can eat. There are places that process these items for consumer use, such as the potatoes used for hash browns, or the vegetables in soups. They can also be used for pet food, or donated to the food bank.

However, Waterer says that the price many growers get from places that process culls doesn’t often offset the cost of shipping.

“A significant amount just ends up tossed off the back of the harvester back into the field.”