Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
While specialty crop growers and professionals know field equipment sanitation is important, we lack a clear framework for describing what it means, how to validate it, or the economic tradeoffs of cleaning and sanitation approaches. Our SCRI planning grant will address this multifaceted problem by developing a transdisciplinary team of researchers, surveying existing grower practices and needs, creating an annotated bibliography, and the development of a USDA SCRI CAP proposal on the development of a unified framework for specialty crop equipment sanitation. Our project directly addresses SCRI legislatively mandated priorities 2 "Efforts to identify and address threats from pests and diseases" and 5 "Methods to prevent, detect, monitor, control, and respond to potential food safety hazards in the production and processing of specialty crops, including fresh produce". It aligns with USDA Strategic Goals 2 "Ensure America's Agricultural System is Equitable, Resilient, and Prosperous and 4 "Provide All Americans Safe, Nutritious Food." Our project will develop: 1) an transdisciplinary field equipment sanitation Community of Practice (COP), 2) a survey of industry needs and opportunities, 3) a field sanitation annotated bibliography, and 4) a USDA SCRI CAP proposal for a future RFA. These outputs will be produced through a series of online meetings and an in-person meeting to be held at the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Campus.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
100%
Goals / Objectives
Our project seeks to address one of agriculture's "elephants in the room," field equipment sanitation. The elephant in the room is that we KNOW that each piece of machinery that is moved from one field to the other is a potential vector for food safety, soil pathogen and weed problems. Furthermore, like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the problems presented are highly variable. For some this is an issue of food borne disease, for others one of soil borne pathogens, and for yet others a source of invasive or herbicide resistant weeds. Ultimately, all these concerns can be solved with adequate cleaning and sanitation programs, but a question that remains is, adequate for what purpose/s?Our SCRI planning grant will address this multifaceted problem by developing:1) a transdisciplinary field equipment sanitation Community of Practice (COP), 2) a survey of industry needs and opportunities, 3) a field sanitation annotated bibliography, and 4) a USDA SCRI CAP proposal for a future RFA.
Project Methods
Our project will develop: 1) a transdisciplinary field equipment sanitation Community of Practice (COP), 2) a survey of industry needs and opportunities, 3) a field sanitation annotated bibliography, and 4) a USDA SCRI CAP proposal for a future RFA. These outputs will be produced through a series of online meetings and an in-person meeting to be held at the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Campus. All project materials, the bibliography, survey results, associated presentations and reports will be made available to the community of practice through a shared One drive space.Bi-weekly meetings will begin when SCRI funding is announced -anticipated in August 2023. These meetings will be used to develop the sanitation survey and bibliography as well as to identify key academic and industry partners that will attend the grant planning meeting. The proposal developed by the first two meetings will be used to identify additional potential members for the COP. The next three meetings will focus on the development of the survey and annotated bibliography of peer reviewed and industry publications that provide the state-of-the-art in specialty crop field equipment sanitation. Subsequent meetings will focus on the delivery of the survey and development of the in-person planning meeting.The project survey will be delivered in November 2023 to identify field equipment sanitation opportunities and needs with an emphasis on determining commonalities across commodities, regions, and scales of operations. We will survey specialty crop growers, extension/outreach personnel, food safety and organic certifiers and sanitation and pest management industry representatives, leveraging project team networks. The survey will be limited to no more than 20 questions with most questions following a Likert scale (Likert, 1932) and a minority of questions provided in open ended format. Survey results will be summarized prior to the December in person team meeting and serve as a starting point for the development of the SCRI CAP proposal. The annotated bibliography will be developed as a parallel process and provided to meeting attendees prior to the meeting.The annotated bibliography will serve two important purposes: 1) it will ensure that all team members share a common reference frame when developing the SCRI CAP proposal and 2) it will serve as the blueprint for our SCRI CAP Proposal introduction. The bibliography will be created using an "scoping review" approach led by the team leaders. Our search strategy will include a search of electronic databases (e.g., Web of Science and Agricola) to identify relevant studies published between January 2000 and September 2023. Initial search terms will include "sanitation," "agricultural field equipment," "cleaning," "disinfection," "sterilization," and their synonyms and be expanded upon by the project team. The search will be limited to studies published in English. Based on this process team leaders will independently screen the titles and abstracts of the retrieved studies based on their disciplinary expertise. Full-text articles of potentially relevant studies will be obtained and assessed for inclusion using eligibility criteria defined by the project team and will include but not be limited to studies that focus on the cleaning and sanitation of tractors, harvesters, tillage, and planting/transplanting equipment. Studies that report on the effectiveness of different cleaning and sanitation methods for human pathogens, plant pathogens, and weeds, as well as the attitudes and perceptions of farmers and workers towards sanitation will be included. The findings of the scoping review will be synthesized and presented using a thematic analysis approach, identifying common themes and patterns across the included studies with an emphasis on providing linkages among the studies in the bibliography. The project team will use a shared Zotero (www.zotero.org) reference library for collection and annotation of collected papers and this collection will be included in the online repository (materials existing under copyright will not be included in this database to ensure compliance with intellectual property law).The capstone event of our planning project will be an in-person meeting held In December 2023 at the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus. To increase the accessibility and reach of our meeting we will offer online participation using video conferencing. The focus of this meeting will be the development of a USDA SCRI CAP SRS and Proposal. The meeting will be attended by academic and industry team members. Meeting participants will be provided with the annotated bibliography in advance of the meeting. The meeting will consist of a half-day presentation of background information and survey results, with the remaining one and a half days focused on finalizing CAP objectives and the development of writing teams. Most of our budget focuses on funding participant travel.