The Cal Poly Crop Science Department works with students all year to produce fruit and vegetables and now during the pandemic the department is giving back to the community.
In a normal year, students take part in the whole crop production process, including sales at local grocery stores and farmers markets.
Student labor has been reduced and so have outlets for selling the product so the department is donating 10,000 pounds of mandarins to a local food bank.
"We really want to help out the community as much as we can during this time of need so we're trying to make none of it goes to waste," said Dan Chesini, the plant science operations manager at Cal Poly.
The department hired a labor crew to harvest all of the mandarins at once.
They store them in coolers and have been donating three to four thousand pounds each week to the food bank.
