Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
California has a majority of all farms covered by FSMA, and California has also revised its directmarketing laws to require all direct marketing farms, regardless of size, to implement GAPs. This iscreating increasing demand for food safety education and guidance tailored to the small farmcommunity. The Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) has been conducting outreachand education on food safety to small, minority, disadvantaged, immigrant, and organic farmers inCalifornia for the past five years. In that time we have reached over 2,000 farmers in workshopsand helped 200 farmers complete on-farm food safety plans. We have collaborated with a variety oforganizations in this effort, including UC Cooperative Extension, ALBA, CCOF, Hmongorganizations, and various buyers, and we have at different times translated materials andworkshops into Spanish, Hmong, and Chinese. This Food Safety Outreach Project seeks to expandour program by 1) incorporating material on FSMA into workshop presentations, handouts,webinars, and on our web site; 2) working with UC Cooperative Extension and CDFA to developan appropriate strategy for food safety education for these smaller farms in California; 3) offeringworkshops in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, where we have had only a limited presenceand where there are additional immigrant groups; and 4) creating materials specific to organicfarms. We have started on this last task with a Western SARE grant that includes UC, Oregon StateUniv, CCOF, and Oregon Tilth, which will help us collaborate with the Regional Center at OSU.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
50%
Developmental
50%
Goals / Objectives
Increase the understanding of FSMA, GAPs, food safety issues in post-harvest handling, the intersection of FSMA rules and National Organic Program (NOP) rules, and emerging food safety standards among small and historically underserved farms.Create approachable, understandable food safety educational tools and techniques to serve small and/or organic farms.Increase the quality (translating when necessary) and availability of food safety resources available to small, underserved and immigrant farming communities.Expand food safety outreach and education into new and underserved regions including the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys.
Project Methods
1. Stakeholder involvementCAFF represents many of the relevant stakeholders in this instance. We are in contact with about 9,000 farmers in California, including the 4,000 direct market farmers throughout the state. For the past three years, we have sent an annual letter to the direct market farmers in the state about food safety; the most recent letter discussed FSMA and the various exemptions, which has led to farmers contacting us, seeking clarification and assistance.We will use this network of farmers as we disseminate more information about FSMA and advertise workshops. We will also rely on the cooperating NGOs and specific buyers to help us access particular groups of farmers and disseminate resources. We expect to hold many workshops on farms and work with those farmers to participate in the planning and execution of the workshops.2. Proposed project activitiesThe following activities will occur during the two years of the grant project period, starting in the fall of 2016:Hire and train Project Manager - food safety project manager (Project Manager)Meet with cooperating organizations for planning, including commodity groups, CDFA, UC Cooperative Extension, CCOF, ALBA, Wild Farm Alliance, select buyers (Project Director and Project Manager)Organize material, including: FSMA rules and exemptions (Produce Safety Alliance 8 hour training not appropriate for most of this population; we are working with FDA, NSAC and UC Davis on alternatives); Organics and FSMA; GAPs updated for FSMA; Post-harvest wash options for conventional and organic (materials reviewed by Trevor Suslow)Translate key resource documents into Spanish (contractor)Work with specific crops and minority groups on targeted outreach utilizing assistance of Cooperative Extension Small Farm Advisors, commodity groups, and NGOs, e.g.CAFF can reach:Beginning farmers with help from Jennifer Sowerwine at UC Berkeley, Soil Born Farms, Farmers Guild, Center for Land Based Learning, ALBA, Farmer-Veteran Coalition, and UC Santa Cruz.Hmong farmers with help from Cooperative Extension and packing houses in Fresno.Latino farmers with help from ALBA, packing houses, and the Strawberry Commission (Project Director and Project Manager)Conduct workshops and have them evaluated by the participants--use evaluations to improve workshops and to determine who needs follow-up (Project Director and Project Manager and some translators)Conduct one-on-one follow-up with farmers where needed (Project Manager)Respond to inquiries from farmers (Project Manager)Send annual letter to direct market farmers in California (Project Director)Call back farmers previously assisted one-on-one to follow up (Project Manager)Update website as new materials are developed, and share them with cooperators and stakeholders (Outreach Coordinator, Project Manager)Compile outcomes and share them with cooperators and stakeholders (Project Director and Project Manager)Reporting and invoicing (Outreach Coordinator and Finance Administrator)3. Techniques to be used and their rationaleWe have come to stress the need for farmers to perform a risk assessment on their farms as a first step toward a food safety plan appropriate to the farm; often certain elements of standard food safety plans are irrelevant on particular farms, and really every farm is unique. We have developed materials that we utilize in this work that we believe are appropriate to the scale of these farms, which are on our website:http://www.caff.org/programs/foodsafety/templates/http://www.caff.org/resources/foodsafety/In the past we budgeted large amounts of money for workshop expenses but found that most workshops were organized by various partner organizations and that we should focus our resources on providing materials, presentations, and one-on-one advice. We learned that translation was often necessary with immigrant farmers and that we should translate written materials into Spanish but not Hmong; we are translating more documents now into Spanish and putting them on our website in anticipation of this project.We try to hold workshops on farms, if possible, as we limit the presentations to a few hours and then go out and walk around to look at food safety issues up close. This often allows for the incorporation of farmer-to-farmer extension, which is one of the more effective ways to convey information, since farmers who have actually implemented food safety practices are the most credible sources of information for these types of farmers.For the farmers who are actually subject to the Produce Rule or Preventive Controls Rule, there will have to be more presentation of material, but we are still working with FDA and NSAC to determine how to go about this. FDA has acknowledged that alternatives to the Produce Safety Alliance presentation--8 hours with over 280 power point slides--will have to be developed. The PSA provides useful material but the one-day format of pure presentation is not appropriate for these small farmers, who do not have hired food safety personnel and often have a limited education and/or limited English ability.