Second Harvest Column: Hoppers for the Hungry

You might find out that a hopper holds a lot of grain, some hold 100 or 200 bushels. Oops. Bushel. After watching a few episodes of “Are you smarter than a 5th grader” I realize that we might not all know what a bushel is and therefore may not get the full impact of a Hopper for the Hungry. A bushel is a large container – used to be a basket – about the size of those round plastic bins with plastic rope handles you can buy for laundry or use to store the kids’ toys. Sometimes you can see a bushel basket at a fruit market filled with apples or peaches. Filled with corn, wheat or soy beans it would weigh between 56 and 60 pounds.

With that in mind, you can picture a large piece of machinery, like a wagon with high sides that can hold the equivalent of 200 bushels of grain. Right now, farmers are harvesting winter wheat. In September they will bring in soybeans and corn, finishing up as late as December. They take the hopper to the elevator where it is unloaded. Don Villwock, president of the Indiana Farm Bureau, estimates that a 500 acre corn farmer empties his hopper 400 times a season. If the farmer wants to be in the Hopper for the Hungry program, she or he lets it be known at the elevator that one hopper or a portion of a hopper is to be donated. The hopper load is sold at the end of the day and the money is donated to the food bank of the farmer’s choice. Oh, an elevator is that group of silos or tall buildings where the grain is stored – sometimes you see them on the edge of town or out in the country.

Lest you think that we are talking about small change here, we are not. The donation total is equal to the price per bushel when donated, times the number of bushels in the hopper. If soy beans are selling at $8.00 per bushel then the donation would be $800 for a 100 bushel hopper. To translate that into making a difference for people in need, Second Harvest Food Bank can use that money to provide enough food to area pantries and meal programs for 4,000 meals for hungry people.

Scott Dehaven called my attention to this project highlighted in the Summer 2007 edition of the Hoosier Farmer Magazine. Scott is a grain farmer in Farmland who cares about helping all Hoosiers have enough to eat. Here in East Central Indiana we have 63,900 people eating food from area food pantries and kitchens each year. Of those, 22,365 are children. Scott sees Hoppers for the Hungry as a good way to get a lot of food on the tables of people in need.

In Don Villwock’s letter addressed to fellow farmers he asks, “Who better to solve hunger in Indiana than farmers?” Hoppers for the Hungry is Indiana Farm Bureau’s response to a “Harvest for All”. That initiative was formed by Villwock’s national body and ours – the American Farm Bureau Federation and America’s Second Harvest – on the first Hunger Awareness Day in June 2002. How fantastic that farmers in Indiana are pulling together in this way to make a difference in the lives of their neighbors in need.

Farmers should make sure their elevator operators are participating in the program and have the capacity to handle donations. Possession of the commodity must be transferred to the charity rather than the farmer selling the commodity on the charity’s behalf. The best time to donate seems to be in the year following the year in which the commodity is grown, and, yipes, you would only want to know why if you are a farmer. It’s about giving the crop a zero cost basis for the best tax savings and that’s all I have to say about that!