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Climbing the Produce Safety Ladder
59 Plays3 months ago
In this episode, we're joined by Produce Safety Technicians Landen Tetil and Micah Hutchison to explore the concept of the "produce safety ladder." They discuss small but significant decisions you can make to climb this ladder and improve produce safety on your farm.
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Transcript
Introduction to Produce Safety
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Agri-Food Safety Produce Bites Podcast, where we discuss all things produce safety and dive into the rules and regulations surrounding the Food Safety Modernization Act Produce Safety Rule.
Meet the Technicians
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello everybody, yeah this is Landon Teedle, Produce Safety Technician, located in Marquette County, servicing the Upper Peninsula. And I'm here today with my colleague, Micah. Hi, I'm Micah Hutchison. I am a produce safety technician at the Genesee Conservation District.
00:00:35
Speaker
And I serve Southeast Michigan and the thumb.
Decision Making in Produce Safety
00:00:38
Speaker
So, Landon, today we're going to talk about making good decisions. And I think a great place to start is with your theory of a produce safety ladder. Can you explain more about that?
Understanding the Produce Safety Ladder
00:00:52
Speaker
I can. I would love to, in fact.
00:00:55
Speaker
But I think we should first clarify that when we say we're here on this podcast today to talk about making good decisions, we're not talking about, oh, which variety of tomatoes should we plant. We're talking about how to make good choices that will positively impact the safety of our food. So the microbial food safety of our food.
00:01:18
Speaker
The way that I really like to explain produce safety that makes the most sense to my brain is this concept called a produce safety ladder. And it's very similar to other similar concepts I've heard of, such as, you know, produce safety is a continuum or produce safety is... It's like a culture.
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, like a culture. It's like this ever evolving thing, right? It's not stagnant. It doesn't exist in isolation. um And so that's kind of where my ladder theory or how it came about. And so if we think of a ladder, so first we have to picture a big deep hole in the ground. And down in that hole is a ladder and the ladder is all the way down in the ground, reaches the ground level and then continues to rise up into the sky. And so we can picture ah basically this big giant jack in the beanstalk size ladder and a hole in the ground. And when we think about food safety practices, we know that the absolute bare minimum that we should be striving for are the standards laid out in the
00:02:31
Speaker
FSMA produce safety rule, which is the federal standards for growing fresh ah produce. I consider that to be ground level. So that's where the ladder comes up out of the ground out of the hole, but isn't quite up in the sky. So we can think of that as ground level. That's our bare minimum requirements. That's you know everybody on the farm washing their hands. and using clean containers to pick their produce and using clean water sources, ah bare minimum things. Now, sometimes, of course, practices can fall below those those minimum federal standards, and that those are the practices that would be on the ladder below ground.
00:03:13
Speaker
And then above ground as we move up to the ladder would be practices that exceed
Continuous Improvement in Food Safety
00:03:18
Speaker
the bare minimum. So um oftentimes we would associate above ground practices with things like third party audits, like go to agricultural practice audits or primus audits, things like that, things that are that exceed the standards in the produce safety rule. How do growers know where they are on the ladder? What's the metric for that?
00:03:39
Speaker
like I don't want to sort of associate the produce safety ladder with a score per se. like you know like you've got to You've got to reach wrong number 83 to be a food safe farm sort of thing. It's it's more of just like the general concept of this is the direction we always want to be moving. right so if I'm a farm who is ready to make some upgrades to my wash pack. So say I've been ah perhaps washing in a three bay sink system that happens to just be a line of three laundry tub sinks, which is a perfectly acceptable sink option, but I'm ready and able to upgrade
00:04:24
Speaker
What I don't want to do is choose equipment that is going to take me lower on the ladder. I always want to think about moving up the ladder as I'm making new choices. That makes sense. I really liked your example.
00:04:41
Speaker
and thinking about it, there's a lot of ways that farms can kind of go up that ladder. I can see how a farm could have that baseline of having an annual employee training and maybe they implement monitoring system would be climbing another ring to make sure that employees are doing the practices the way they were trained on. I could see going up another level being integrating like small training sessions, be it weekly or monthly, to keep, you know, your farm workers engaged in the training they learned. I think that's a great idea. It definitely takes kind of these big overwhelming practices where it's you get all of this information and sometimes, you know, we kind of stick to that top standard, but I like this letter because it makes it really digestible and gives growers steps.
Exceeding Safety Standards
00:05:36
Speaker
It does, and it also, at least to me, in my mind, it takes away some of the pressure of having to do it all at once. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. um you know even Even if the step you take today doesn't actually get you above ground, it's still better than you were before. It can be discouraging to discover that some of your practices aren't quite up to the standard. Absolutely.
00:06:05
Speaker
I mean, I feel like everyone out there is trying to do the right thing. So having someone have to tell you that, you know, definitely is scary. And I think that this applies to everything. So like I mentioned, uh, new equipment purchases and you mentioned increasing worker training frequency and maybe even adding on a monitoring step to ensure practices are being followed. Say a farm currently only ah washes and sanitizes their harvest bins once a season. I mean, increasing that to twice a season is still ah a step up the ladder. I don't i don't know for sure that that would twice a season would be enough, but it's it's better than once a year. But yeah, it's getting into that habit of doing it, like say,
00:06:55
Speaker
cleaning a wash pack area, starting at making sure you're doing it once a week and then can you do it three times a week and then maybe ever it's every harvest day, then maybe like that top step is separating it between covered produce and uncovered produce. Yeah and you know cleaning out your cold storage like I mean, whoever thinks to clean out their walk-in cooler, adding adding that to your cleaning and sanitizing list even once a month can make a big difference.
00:07:29
Speaker
I also like the latter because I think in some cases, the minimum standards that are set in the FSMA produce safety rule can sometimes feel a little lackluster. And so it also gives growers the encouragement to say, you're on the ground level, but you don't have to stay there. You can keep moving up if you want to do things even more or even better than what the produce safety rule requires.
00:07:58
Speaker
So say you're implementing a cleaning and sanitizing schedule, making that good decision to implement it, as well as support it with like the necessary steps. So using soap to wash down, maybe harvest bins or if any food contact surfaces. That's me making a good decision.
00:08:20
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And even choosing the right kind of soap and the right kind of sanitizer, they're they're not all created equal. So depending, especially for sanitizers, depending on what kind of materials your surfaces and equipment are, ah that's really going to impact what kind of sanitizer is going to be the best choice for you.
00:08:42
Speaker
So if you have aluminum tables, I would probably steer clear of a chlorine-based sanitizer because you're going to get a lot of rust. And I don't know about you, but rust is really hard to make food safe. Using maybe surfaces that are cleanable, an alternative is something like, say, carpet on packing lines.
00:09:04
Speaker
yeah Yeah, that's a great example. Or carpet-lined trailers ah to harvest out in the field. If you're going to buy it a new wagon or a new trailer, don't line it with carpet. That's a step up the food safety ladder. Another step would be adding a cleanable and sanitizable surface on maybe cooler or storage walls. Yeah, and then to go even a step further with the cleaning and sanitizing example,
00:09:34
Speaker
we can implement something that's called a master cleaning and sanitizing schedule where we have basically all of the surfaces that have to be cleaned and sanitized on the farm set to this like monthly calendars according to how often they need to be cleaned and sanitized. So some things might be daily, some things might be weekly, maybe monthly if it's something that doesn't get as much traffic or dirt but implementing a farm-wide cleaning and sanitizing master schedule will take you even farther.
Equipment and Container Safety
00:10:05
Speaker
What are some other good decisions, Landon? You talked earlier about making good equipment choices. I think that also applies to harvest bins and packing containers. I mean, you want something that's cleanable. You want something that's cleanable, preferably a smooth non-porous surface, which happens to not be wood.
00:10:29
Speaker
But it can be cleaned. It can be cleaned. It cannot be sanitized. It cannot be sanitized. And I think if I was a farm investing in, say, new harvest bins or a packing containers, I would definitely try to make the choice for something that could be cleaned and sanitized versus just clean.
00:10:50
Speaker
Right, we want we want to make our lives as easy as possible when it comes to cleaning and sanitizing, so we are more likely to actually do it. You know, we can pull in some of the like lean farm principles as well, streamlining things to make it just easier. Putting tools where you need them, color coding, cleaning. Yep. Apply, so say a brush that is used for your pack house floor is not used in the bathroom.
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, ah you know what, the same broom that you use to sweep the floor is not used, like stuck inside your but your barrel root washer to pull the potatoes out. True. I think another area to make good choices is around soil amendments. You know, there are so many different kinds of soil amendments out there that making a decision to make sure that it has been treated in a way to reduce pathogens and starting to like ask that information from suppliers.
00:11:47
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you. um if Especially if we're going to choose to use um biological soil amendments. So ones that come from manure or bone meal and feather meal and blood meal. Animal-based soil amendments are super great for your soil fertility, but they also come with a different set of risks than chemical-based fertilizers. And that is because animals can carry human pathogens and if they can carry them, they can spread them. And so we want to make sure that all of the amendments we're using are safe enough to use on food.
Risks of Animal-Based Soil Amendments
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah. Or used in a way like raw manure where there's going to be enough time between application and when that harvestable portion of the crop shows up to kind of prevent that contamination.
00:12:38
Speaker
Coming around a little bit full circle, I think that there is tremendous power in being able to identify these risks and potential routes of contamination. And it's going to really set us up in a place where we are better suited to manage those risks, make good decisions. So what we're saying is making good decisions stands with the baseline. You need to know what you must do and then kind of envisioning pretty safety on your farm.
00:13:08
Speaker
as a ladder is kind of a way to take a very overwhelming concept and break it down so it's really easily applied at the farm.
Resources and Final Thoughts
00:13:18
Speaker
And the bonus is we get to to look back and see the cumulative effects of climbing up that ladder one little step at a time. Looking down from the top feels good. It does, it does, doesn't it?
00:13:33
Speaker
I'll let you know when I get there. Yeah. and i And as always, for Michigan growers, reach out. We would be happy to to come and help identify those risks on farm with you. Links to anything referenced in this episode are provided in our show notes, which can be accessed on the website at canr.msu.edu slash agri-food underscore safety. Thank you to everyone for listening. And don't forget to tune in next month for another episode of our Produce Bites podcast.