I don't know where you live, but where I am, the various food banks compete to pick up unsellable groceries from the stores and then give them away to whomever asks. "Unsellable" often means "a day or more old."
Might be different in Iowa.
Might be different in Iowa.
They can do meat, milk, and produce.
You were asking them to take on a labor and space intensive project they didn’t ask for, that might require additional food production safety training to maintain legal compliance. Do they have enough fridge space? Do they have access to a commissary kitchen to process it? Do their customers want it?
If you offered them ready to distribute bags of veg from your plants I’m guessing they might take it.
Charities often run into this problem of someone offering something they didn’t ask for or need, and having to deal with it.
Externally it can seem like an obvious thing: of course the food bank wants greens!
Internally it looks more like: this guy wants to give us an indeterminate amount of his garden veggies, which we might have to process, and aren’t produced in a facility that we can guaranty is safe. we normally only accept donations of dry and canned goods and source our own fresh food for these reasons. Is it worth our time to make an exception?