Biblical Business Radical: Don’t Harvest to the Edge of Your Fields

[Reprinted here with author's permission and minor editing]

I admit, even though I’ve spent most of my life in the Midwest, I’ve never had to walk a bean field or detassle corn or any of the other typical crop-related tasks/chores for teens. Nor have I driven a combine or a tractor for more than 5 minutes. I grew up on military bases so my agricultural knowledge is sparse. I think I can still detect the difference between a pig farm and cow farm by its smell, however.

Recently, in conversations with friends, we were talking about gleaning. If you don’t know, it’s a biblical practice dictated by God to help the poor in a dignified manner. Gleaners—and there are some modern practitioners—go through the fields after the harvesters have done their work to pick up what was missed or dropped. God’s command came from His heart that people should have a means of being cared for that didn’t reduce their esteem or indicate that they were incapable. My friends and I were discussing modern equivalents in non-agrarian circumstances. We had been shown some examples of neighbors hiring sole proprietor/solo entrepreneurs to do work on their houses, in their yards or catering group meals that they would have done themselves normally. Examples were given of temporarily paying the poor/homeless to do work around businesses and churches.

For me, this wasn’t gleaning. This was passing along our earned income—subcontracting. It was like harvesting thousands of bushels of corn and setting aside some of those to pay people for mucking out the stables. Not quite the pure example of gleaning. The key, I believe, to gleaning is that we are passing on the opportunity to get more revenue. I’m not even sure individuals can offer gleaning opportunities; I think it has to come from ‘field owners’ aka businesses.

I think I have inadvertently practiced gleaning with some manufacturing companies I’ve owned and operated. Here are a few of the practices:

• Letting disadvantaged people haul metal scrap to the salvage yard for cash
• Letting disadvantaged people take good or scrap pallets for their small business use or to be used as firewood in their wood stove/fireplace
• Giving away past-their-prime-but-not-dead tools to people who use them in their money-making hobbies or small businesses—this was hand tools and larger equipment like welders, drill presses, etc.
• Giving away product ‘seconds’ that others could use or sell

In all of those cases, people had to transport the stuff themselves. There may have been other ways I accidentally practiced gleaning but I can’t remember them. I’d love to hear how your business does it. I know restaurants and grocery stores pass along ‘expiring’ food to food shelves, shelters to be given away, and maybe small neighborhood stores to be sold at a great discount.

I really struggle to figure out how service companies could do it. My only thought is that we pass on a certain percentage of contracts, really small contracts that our customers bring to us and let small businesses ‘pick them up’. We should also offer to help them win the contracts by introducing them to our customers and providing a guarantee...but in no way should we operate as the contractor and the smaller business as the sub-contractor. They win the contract, they develop the relationship with the customer directly and perhaps enjoy growth potential with that customer and any referrals from that customer for the work done. If we subcontract, we still hold the earning potential for future business, future referrals, etc.

What are your thoughts?

God set this up, not only to take care of the poor, but to remind us that He’s given us all the blessings and to remind us not to get too big a head thinking we’ve solely created our success. Even on the secular level, we know that we wouldn’t be as successful if we didn’t have all of us aggregating efforts for education systems that have trained our employees, building roads for transporting them and our goods...and so on. We have not made our own success. Let’s help our neighbor...be a Good Samaritan (which means helping those that you may not even like)...let’s figure out how to practice gleaning.