Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT
(N/A)
BURLINGTON,VT 05405
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
This project builds on a successful nine-year-old, multi-state food safety education and outreach program called Community Accreditation for Produce Safety that helps small and mid-size farms in the Northeast adopt practices consistent with the Food Safety Modernization Act. The goal of this project is to develop education materials, deliver in-person and online trainings, and provide individual technical assistance to farms with limited financial and management resources to support their adoption of low-cost, scale-appropriate produce safety and employee management practices. Anticipated results include: 12 new educational materials are produced, 60 farms write produce safety plans and 45 become CAPS accredited; 600 farmers attend 24 educational events, 300 farmers report gaining knowledge; 150 farms receive technical assistance, 100 farms report adopting new produce safety practices.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The goal of this project is to develop education materials, deliver in-person and online trainings, and provide individual technical assistance to farms with limited financial and management resources to support their adoption of low-cost, scale-appropriate produce safety and employee management practices.Specifically this project will:Provide training and technical assistance on use of the CAPS platform to small farms in Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York with less than ten acres in production (a proxy for limited resources).Design and deliver eight educational events per year on produce safety best practices for small and mid-size farms. There will be four webinars and four on-farm workshops annually; there will be no fee for attendance.Provide individual, intensive technical assistance to 150 farms, 75% of which have less than 10 acres in production. This assistance will be ongoing, typically over multiple months per farm, delivered using a combination of on-site visits, phone, text, and email.Develop a dozen new educational resources (fact sheets, guides, standard operating procedure (SOP) templates, and farm case studies that describe the implementation of low-cost, effective practices tailored to small farms.
Project Methods
This project builds on a successful nine-year-old, multi-state food safety education and outreach program that helps small and mid-size farmers adopt practices consistent with the PSR guidelines. The CAPS program has a user-friendly platform that supports writing and documenting prodice safety plans. Supporting educational programs will be developed that focus on peer-to-peer learning by facilitatngsharing of produce safety challenges, solutions to problems, and innovative best practices developed by farmers. Farmers will share their knowledge and experience by presenting at produce safety webinars and workshops, allowing their farms to be featured in case study documents and videos developed by the project, and opening their online CAPS farm pages to the community sharing system that allows other CAPS farmers to view best practices used by their peers. Technical assistance will provide ongoing, individualized support for farmers, especially small-scale, under-resourced farmers, to identity priorities related to produce safety, obtain supporting information resources, and take action to implement best practices.