A New York food bank was offered a large donation of fresh fish last month - but the gift came with a complication.
LocalCoho, a New York salmon farm that was closing, wanted to give 18,100 kilograms of coho salmon to the Food Bank of Central New York.
The high-quality protein could feed thousands of families.
However, the gift fish were still alive and swimming in the farm's large tanks.
The organization needed to find a way to remove about 13,000 salmon from the tanks and, later, process them into food.
And the food aid group needed to do all this quickly, before the business closed permanently at the end of January.
Thanks to many volunteers, the group was able to empty the tanks in time, place the fish in cold storage and transport them to a processer.
Brian McManus is the food bank's chief operations officer.
He said that the short amount of time to complete the operation made activities difficult.
But, he said, "I knew that we had the will. I knew we had the expertise."
Food waste has been a big problem around the world for years.
More than one-third of the food produced in the United States is never eaten and much of it ends up in landfills.
Christina Hudson Kohler was among the volunteers who got into the water to collect the fish and put them into the cold storage containers.
"It's a little bit different," Kohler said during a break. "In the past, my volunteer work with the food bank has been sorting carrots or peppers…."
LocalCoho was a new company that had been developing a sustainable salmon farming system.
The system employed recirculated water.
The company had been supplying coho salmon to buyers, including restaurants, with the goal of building farms across the country.
But company officials said they could not raise enough money from investors to grow and become profitable.
So, they decided to close the business. Adam Kramarsyck was the salmon farm's manager.
He said the company did not want the fish to go to waste so it sought a way to donate them.
Kramarsyck said of the effort, "It's 'lemonade out of lemons.'"
The expression means to create good from a bad situation.
The donation is expected to provide more than 26,000 servings of hard-to-source protein for the hungry.
"Protein, animal protein is very, very desirable. We know that people need it for nourishment and it's difficult to get.
And so this is going to make a very large impact," said McManus, the food bank chief.
"I don't anticipate this being here very long,'' he added. "We've had salmon before, but not like this."
I'm John Russell.