COLUMN ONE : Reaping What Others Leave Behind : Gleaners pick through farm fields in a kind of second harvest. The volunteers, mostly retirees, salvage unsalable produce to feed the hungry.

Growing up, Polly Turner swatted bugs from tobacco leaves, grubbed weeds and spent backbreaking hours picking peanuts on her family farm in North Carolina.

She hated it.

But 40 years later Turner returned to the fields in California--voluntarily.

Wearing jeans and a red sweat shirt, with one chewed-up sneaker lined with a plastic freezer bag, she and a dozen other retirees trudged through the mud of an Oxnard farm to pick carrots one recent morning. The dirty, monotonous work reminded her of childhood chores.

Only this time she loved it.

For 15 years, Ventura County volunteers such as Turner have been slogging through farms at sunrise as an act of charity. The gleaners, as they’re called, rescue fruits and vegetables that farmers have cast aside to rot.

Gleaners salvage undersized cabbage, mottled oranges and the odd kiwi fruit. The produce may be blemished or unsuitable for shipment to distant markets. Or a farmer may simply deem it uneconomical to send a crew in to pick the remnants of a slow-to-mature crop.

Regardless, the fruits and vegetables, everything from apples to zucchini, are all edible, and Ventura County gleaners collect 4,000 pounds a day to feed the poor and the hungry.

Accounting for one-fifth of the supplies at Food Share Inc. in Oxnard, which feeds 92,000 low-income residents each month, the county’s gleaning program is one of the nation’s most active.

Gleaning programs flourish in other agricultural pockets throughout California, including rural counties outside Sacramento, San Jose and San Francisco.

And the granddaddy of gleaning, the Society of St. Andrew, galvanizes 5,200 volunteers throughout the Eastern Seaboard to salvage a million pounds of produce a year from orchards and farms in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, North and South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida.

“People everywhere are always concerned about hunger, especially when they hear that 50% of the hungry (in America) are children,” said Jeff Allen, director of the society’s gleaning program. “This gives them a hands-on way to fight it.”

The recession has given gleaners across the country new impetus.

In the past few years, the number of needy has soared--as many as 30 million Americans suffer from hunger, some estimates say. At the same time, the economic downturn has forced donors to skimp on charitable contributions.

Reeling from this double whammy--more demand and less supply--food banks are increasingly turning to gleaning to fill the gap.

“All of our programs have felt a real increase in need lately, and it hasn’t let down at all since the so-called recovery began,” Allen said. “Gleaning is definitely a way of trying to meet that need with food that would otherwise be wasted.”

Perhaps the world’s first hunger-relief program, gleaning has been around since the Old Testament urged farmers to leave the outer edges of their fields for impoverished widows and weary wayfarers to harvest.

But whereas biblical gleaners took for themselves, modern-day crews take for others.

The gleaners’ fresh-picked corn, grapefruit and cauliflower pour into charities throughout the United States by the truckload, a welcome addition to the traditional food bank diet of day-old bread, canned soup and slightly stale crackers.

“To me, it’s a pleasure to be out here in the fields, and when you realize you’re helping to feed the poor, why, then it’s really something special,” said retiree Jim Reiner of Port Hueneme, flashing a gold-studded smile as he yanked carrots from a sodden furrow and chucked them into a grungy plastic bucket.

Retired high school teacher George Langston, 77, started gleaning several years ago, when he realized that golf and tennis “were fun, but they were things I was doing for myself.”

He sees gleaning as a natural extension of his work as a teacher and guidance counselor in the San Fernando Valley: “For 32 years I was in the business of giving,” Langston said during a recent pick on an Oxnard farm, “and it’s a hard habit to break.”

Instead of writing checks that may help pay a charity’s administrative costs or electric bill, gleaners have the satisfaction of donating healthful food targeted for those in need.

“At the end of a few hours, they have filled a truckload of vegetables that they know will go to feed hungry people,” said Chris Rebstock, director of network services for Second Harvest, a Chicago-based charity that certifies food banks nationwide.

Proudly spry as he lugged a bucket across a rutted, fetid Camarillo cabbage field, 76-year-old Virgil Plummer said volunteer gleaning “keeps me alive.”

Across the country, the millions who rely on food banks might echo his sentiment.

For the 110 families who pick up daily groceries from God’s Storehouse in Danville, Va., gleaned produce provides vital nutrients--and welcome flavor.

“They really get excited about it when they see we have fresh corn and tomatoes for them,” said Candy Boettcher, manager of the church-sponsored charity. “They don’t have the extra money to buy this stuff themselves.”

To encourage charitable gleaning, several states--including California, Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina--have passed laws protecting growers from liability if volunteers are injured on their property. Other regulations grant farmers tax breaks for donating produce.

Despite fears that gleaners will stomp on sprinklers or encourage unauthorized poaching, thousands of growers across the country routinely turn over the straggly remains of their fields.

“We feel better about it, knowing the produce can help someone,” said Durston Williams, vice president of Deardorff Jackson, a major California vegetable producer.

Williams estimated that growers typically abandon up to 5% of each crop. If the gleaners didn’t take the leftovers, “we’d destroy them and go on our way,” Williams said.

Occasionally, farmers write off whole fields--acres of top-quality produce that matured at a bad time, when market prices were too low to cover the harvest costs. In such cases, even dedicated gleaners can’t salvage everything.

Farmers are quick to point out that produce abandoned in the fields does serve a useful role as fertilizer, decomposing into mulch.

But the sheer tonnage of food plowed under each year horrifies many charity directors, who continue their gleaning programs even though they could gather food more efficiently through donations, said Steve Mangold of the Second Harvest Foodbank of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.

“If there’s any way we can rescue that food and get it to poor people, we’ll go out and do it,” Mangold said. “We’re not here just to feed the hungry, but also to prevent waste.”

In an increasingly popular offshoot of field-and-grove gleaning, many food banks also organize neighborhood picks, in which volunteers walk from house to house stripping back-yard fruit trees laden with more than their owners can consume.

After Hurricane Andrew ravaged parts of Florida last year, back-yard gleaners collected and canned thousands of peaches for the victims, said Allen of the Virginia-based Society of St. Andrew.

Although gleaning remains vigorous nationwide, some California food banks have had to scrub their programs in the past few years.

Between the long-running drought and several devastating freezes, farmers in the Santa Barbara area have had little to offer local gleaners, so the county food bank canceled its program two years ago. Now the charity gets most of its produce donated from a storage shed in Santa Maria, spokeswoman Louise Polis said.

The Golden Empire Gleaners in Bakersfield abandoned field operations after farmers complained about troops of strangers tromping across their expensive irrigation systems.

Instead of opening their farms to gleaners, Bakersfield growers offered to donate produce straight from the packinghouse. “We now get a hundred times more than we could pick from the fields,” director Marie Smith said.

Not all charities are so lucky.

Forced to cancel its program after a flap about the ethics of “paying” low-income gleaners with bags of food, the Survive Foodbank of Riverside has had a tough time finding cheap fruits and vegetables. As a result, fresh produce makes up only about 5% of the groceries distributed, director Daryl Brock said.

Ironically, even as the recession has boosted demand for free food in Riverside, it has also restricted the supply of volunteers.

“We’d like to start our gleaning program again,” Brock said. “But in this economy, if people have a job, they’re not willing to give time up to pick food for charity. They’re too busy trying to put food on their own table.”

Although these three food banks have pulled back from gleaning, half a dozen California charities maintain active field programs. And nationwide, more food banks are expressing interest, said Hugh Masterson, a spokesman for Second Harvest in Chicago.

“The demand is definitely up and our core donors do not have as much surplus as they used to,” Masterson said. “Gleaning is one of the ways to make up the difference. We’re looking at ways to tap new donors, and gleaning is really a type of donation.”

Where gleaning programs flourish, senior citizens usually form the bulk of the volunteer cadre.

With 2,000 volunteers in the 50-and-older bracket, Senior Gleaners of Sacramento has run a highly regarded salvage operation for 16 years. The group gets enough donations to survive without gleaning, but the volunteers, including one 92-year-old, refuse to give up their 6:30 a.m. picks, board member Lonnie Beard said.

Younger volunteers also thrive on the camaraderie and exercise.

Sue Thornton, 32, used to pick neighbors’ fields for pocket change as a child in rural Michigan. Now a Californian, the mother of two dons her rattiest clothes and sifts through muddy fields for free, enjoying the chance to blow off steam with some hard work in the early morning sun.

Like Thornton, gleaners everywhere describe their work as therapeutic.

As director of a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in San Jose, Sid Haro encourages his patients to glean. Not only do they replenish the local food bank, which stocks the center’s pantry, but they gain self-confidence and learn to handle responsibility.

“It gives them a chance to feel like they’re doing something for the community, and it ups their self-esteem,” Haro said.

Wayne Stephens, 70, a longtime gleaner, agreed: “There’s something about working out in the fields that’s good for your psyche.”

Having grown up on a Kentucky farm, Stephens suggested that city slickers couldn’t understand the allure of getting “sloppy and dirty” in the fields.

But former Camarillo officer worker Michelle Gero, sitting on an overturned bucket with mud-caked tennis shoes and sunburned face, insisted that she had fallen for the agricultural life after only five mornings of gleaning.

“To be the most help to the food bank, I really should be doing data entry in the warehouse,” Gero said. “But I’d rather be in the fresh air, goofing with the guys. This is a lot more fun.”

For Information on Where to Glean

For more information about gleaning, call (800) 532-FOOD and ask for phone numbers of your local food banks. Other numbers: Sacramento, (916) 971-1530; Bakersfield, (805) 324-2767; Ventura County, (805) 983-7100; Butte County, (916) 533-5482; Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, (408) 266-8866; Contra Costa County, (510) 676-7543.