Harvesting Sacramento

On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, a group in the Sacramento area was working to make their goal of turning their community into a better one. Soil Born Farms is an urban agriculture and education project that has been working in the Sacramento area since 2002 with the goal of reconnecting urban folk with healthier food and how it is grown. Harvest Sacramento sprouted in 2009. The mission of this project is to harvest fresh fruit from trees of neighborhood homes that would otherwise have been wasted. The group then donates it to food assistance agencies in the local area.

The event kick-started with words of inspiration from the director of Harvest Sacramento about how the group can make their community better with fruit. The director moved on to some fresh healthy icebreakers for the group by pairing them up and asking them questions about their favorite produce and how fruit affects their life. The large crowd of approximately 150 volunteers broke up into groups with leaders, some generously donated equipment, then headed out. After they squeezed dry all of the orange trees for the day they headed back to the MLK community center to drop of the fruit of their labor from the day to be sorted. Harvest Sacramento then provided a hearty, healthy, meal of homemade soup, salad, and bread for the hardworking volunteers. The lovely donors of Sacramento helped provide over 2,000 pounds of fruit that day.