How the “Queen of Glean” and others are fighting food insecurity in WMass

If you set out alone to collect leftover vegetables from a field and pick an already harvested potato patch in, say, Northampton Meadows, you will most likely manage it alone.

On two clear and warm afternoons recently, there was no one else on the dirt roads that crisscrossed the flood plains between the Connecticut River to the east and Interstate 91 to the west. No one except the farmers at Szawlowski Potato Farms in Hatfield and others at Valley Spud over in Hadley, who harvested tons of potatoes and then drove away in trucks.