An Australian fruit and vegetable "rescuer" is renewing pleas to the nation's biggest to when it comes to accepting fresh produce from our farmers. Josh Ball said he's saving approximately 4,000 kilos of avocados alone every week, which would otherwise have been "sent to a paddock to rot" after being . Ball, co-founder of Farmers Pick, told Yahoo News Australia some 30 per cent of all produce grown on our farms won't end up in stores due to retailers' strict policy on "blemishes and sizing", meaning Australia wastes a mind-blowing 2.
4 billion kilos of fresh fruit and vegetables every year. Farmer's Pick sells imperfect fruit and vegetables direct to customers at reduced prices. He said amid intense and widespread , this figure is unacceptable and, not only is the waste devastating for farmers, it may well be driving up prices too.
Ball said "until the end of the season", he expects his team will save thousands more kilos of avocados weekly, in addition to other slightly marked produce. Images taken at a Queensland farm earlier this month shows a whopping 1,600 kilos of avocados dumped for landfill because they were rejected due to having minor marks, despite being fresh and perfectly edible. "The avocados we salvaged had a combination of skin blemishes and were irregular in size and shape," he told Yahoo.
"This is something we see all the time and for many supermarkets, this is all it takes to reject fresh produce. "Another example is citrus fruits, around 50 per cent of citr.