Farmers

Yes – you can receive food donations to feed your animals at no cost.

We rely on farmers to commit to picking up donated products at least once a week. Depending on the number of farmers in your area, we may be able to schedule you for more than one pickup a week, if desired.

When you are signed up to the program, you will receive an email detailing the charity hub you will pick up from, as well as the time window.

The amount of food you will receive varies by location depending on how many stores are donating to the charity hub in your region. The amount of farm feed can range from 50 kg to 400 kg in total per day (for all daily farmers to share). We try to schedule the appropriate number of farmers per day to ensure that there is enough farm feed for everyone. You should be able to take as much feed as you need, but if you find there is too much or too little, please let us know and we will adjust the schedule accordingly.

The majority of the feed will be fresh produce along with some bread and dairy. There will be some food you receive that may be past the consumption period for your animals and best for compost. If this exceeds 20%, we encourage you to communicate directly with your charity hub

Yes. Most food will be bagged at the food hub, but please bring containers to place the food in to avoid leaking or bag breakage.

Yes. Each charity hub in the program is qualified and trained to implement best practices in food redistribution. That means keeping a cold chain, and sorting the food as best as possible. Meat products (salad with bacon bits, etc.) are separated out to avoid contamination.

There will be some depackaging involved. Produce comes from the grocery stores in its store packaging, so there may be some plastic punnets, metal twist ties and elastic bands around some of the produce. Produce such as apples and tomatoes may still have stickers on them. It is the farmer’s responsibility to check all food for packaging before giving the food to their animals.

It is essential that you provide as much notice as possible if you cannot make your pickup. We have a backup list of farmers for each region who are willing to be contacted for extra farm feed pickups, which will be provided to you. Please reference this list to try to find someone to cover your pickup. If you are unable to find anyone, please inform us before 12 pm on the day of your pickup so that we can try to find someone else.

Farmers who have missed two pickups without notification may lose their guaranteed day and be replaced by another farmer on the waitlist.

We are adding stores across Canada all the time, so please join the network and we will be in touch with you once we are in your area.