American Family Farmer

Marc Santucci is the owner of Santucci Farm, in Travers City, MI. He says a Federal Regulation has forced him to let 40-thousand perfectly-good tart cherries go to waste. There is nothing wrong with the cherries, but the regulation requires him to dump them, to allow the import of 200-million pounds of cherries from overseas. Santucci said that tart cherries imported from Turkey and Eastern Europe have made up increasingly larger portions of the market, and limiting the amount of domestic cherries makes it worse. He posted a photo of the rotting cherries on Facebook, and so far it has been shared over 60-thousand times. In the U.S., up to 40 percent of the food that 19s produced never gets eaten. Each year, about 7 percent of what 19s planted on farms isn 19t harvested, according to a 2012 Natural Resources Defense Council report.