Tilling food under: Barriers and opportunities to address the loss of edible food at the farm-level in British Columbia, Canada

•Farmers overproduce to hedge against uncertainty and risks.•Practice theory offers a useful lens to analyse farming practices.•External factors influence the decision by farmers to leave food on the field.•There are many barriers to implementing common solutions to address food losses. Reducing food loss is key to improving farmers’ economic well-being and the sustainable management of water, energy, labour, and other resources. To develop appropriate solutions, we seek to identify the reasons for farm-level losses, and more specifically, why edible food intended for human consumption does not reach the intended recipients and remains unharvested in British Columbia, Canada. The study also explores the barriers to adopting solutions such as gleaning, food donation tax incentives, and selling “ugly” fruits and vegetables. We conducted forty interviews with farmers and stakeholders in the food and agricultural industry and found issues of overproduction due to power imbalances, gaps in infrastructure, rejected produce due to stringent aesthetic values, precarious labour, and economic and environmental reasons for farm-level losses. In this paper, opportunities to address food loss are also identified by farmers and other agri-food stakeholders. Drawing from practice theory, a wide array of structural factors beyond the farmers’ control often limits their scope for reducing food loss. As such, focusing exclusively on changing farmers’ practices is unhelpful. Recommendations from this study include investing in processing infrastructure, connecting farmers with alternative markets such as “farm to school” programs, focusing on the “food as a right” paradigm, and revising policies such as the current donation tax incentives in Canada, which fail in the long term to benefit many farmers and food-insecure households.