Seattle’s City Fruit sells some of its harvest to become financially sustainable

Sustaining an Urban Fruit Gleaning Program. Photo by City Fruit.

So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit

By James
City Fruit
August 31, 2010

Excerpt:

One of the main reasons we started City Fruit was to develop ways  to become more financially sustainable, rather than depend on an ever-shrinking pool of grant money for funding.

As part of that, we’re experimenting with selling a small portion of the fruit we harvest – with a goal of selling no more than 20% of the usable fruit we harvest. So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit and have sold 448 lbs., so about 8%.

We always talk to home owners before selling fruit from their trees, explaining that the sale of this fruit goes directly to funding the neighborhood fruit harvests next year. We aim to be as transparent as possible and so will again release an annual report early  next year detailing how much we earned from fruit sales and how much it costs to organize our harvests.

See the complete blog post here.

Overview of City Fruit

City-grown fruit is a resource for the entire community. Because most residential tree owners can’t—or don’t—use all the fruit produced on their properties, much of it falls to the ground and rots.In addition, much of the fruit grown in urban landscapes is infested with preventable pests.

City Fruit works neighborhood by neighborhood to help residential tree owners grow healthy fruit, to harvest and use what they can, and to share what they don’t need. City Fruit collaborates with others involved in local food production, climate protection, horticulture, food security and community-building to protect and optimize urban fruit trees.