About Calgary Harvest, and Why Is It Needed?

Calgary Harvest is a fruit gleaning project that connects Calgarians looking for fresh fruit with landowners who are generating surplus fruit on their properties and who would like to see it used. Calgary Harvest maintains a registry of fruit trees within the city, and during the harvest season, community fruit-picking events are scheduled for everyone interested in harvesting fresh local fruit.

Our organization exists to play a role in helping create a local food system and sustainability in Calgary, through the promotion and celebration of Calgary’s local fruit supply. It does this by engaging with various members of the local food system to increase awareness of local fruit availability, and by creating opportunities for harvesting quality surplus fruit.

Calgary Harvest is an important part in the local food economy in Calgary, and since its humble inception in 2009, it has created hundreds of community harvesting events, with upwards of 30,000 lbs of fruit harvested to date.

Calgary Harvest is accountable to at least two actors in Calgary’s local food system:

• Tree owners who have registered their trees. The tree owners who have registered their trees after hearing about the project did so mainly because they find it difficult to see their surplus fruit go unharvested and eventually wasted. For Calgary Harvest, we consider ourselves accountable to facilitating a better use for this unused fruit, and we feel we need to improve our ability to harvest much more fruit than we currently are.
• Community members who are interested in obtaining local fruit. The second group of people Calgary Harvest is concerned with are community members interested in picking local fruit. This group of people have signed up as pickers mainly because they are attracted to acquiring larger amounts of fruit that would otherwise require access to an orchard. Others arrive because they feel harvesting fruit locally is a sustainable choice (of good quality of fruit).