A major factor in growing food and maintaining a small farm is understanding best practices for safety. Our Local Food Systems and Small Farms team has gathered a wealth of information for not only producing safe food for consumption, but also safe for the growing environment.
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Best Practices
- Food Safety for Fruit and Vegetable Farms: Jennifer Coleman, Indiana State Department of Health and Elizabeth Maynard, Purdue Horticulture & Landscape Architecture. Publication discusses good agricultural practices growers can follow to reduce the risk of contaminating produce on the farm. Cooperative efforts between Purdue University Extension and University of Illinois Extension.
- Driftwatch - National Speciality Crop Site Registry: DriftWatch™ is a tool for identifying specialty crop sites and to further enhance communications between producers of specialty crops and pesticide applicators that promote awareness and stewardship activities to help prevent and manage drift effects that sometimes occur from spray operations.
Audits
- Global Gaps
- Primus Labs
- Scientific Certification
- USDA GAP GHP Audits
- USDA Harmonized GAP and Harmonized Plus+ GAP
Other State Programs
- GAPs - University of California
- MSU Michigan Food Safety
- Penn State Food Safety
- PRODUCE SAFETY ALLIANCE
- UMass - Food Safety
Record Keeping Templates
- Balancing Food Safety and Organic Requirements for Recordkeeping - Full Covered Farms: Organic growers already keep a variety of records required by the National Organic Program (NOP) Regulations. Some of those records can fulfill recordkeeping requirements for farms that are fully covered by the Food Safety Modernization Act’s (FSMA) Produce Safety Rule. CAFF Farmers Guild. January 2018.
- Mobile Digital Recordkeeping with Google Docs: Michigan State University Extension
- Produce Safety Program Grower Information Binder: University of Rhode Island College of the Environment and Life Sciences. September 2017
- Records Required by the FSMA Produce Safety Rule: Information from the produce Safety Alliance. 2019