LITTLE ROCK — James Meeks said creating a paper trail of the farm management practices on his tomato farm in southeastern Arkansas is a time-consuming and paperwork-intensive endeavor.
“You have to write everything down, and in triplicates,” Meeks said of the documenting process. “You have to verify, verify, verify.”
But Meeks, who cultivates 160 acres of tomatoes each year on his farm in Milo, wouldn’t have a buyer for his produce without the documentation that helps him obtain “food safety” certification.
National and regional retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in Bentonville or Kroger of Cincinnati have required their own food safety certifications for years.
But such certification, and being familiar with the process, will become more important to all types of farmers as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration continues building what it calls a preventive food safety system.
Experts predict that even small farmers selling to farmers markets will eventually be required to have written food safety management plans. At least one free, online tool to help farmers establish plans has already become available.
The FDA, through the Food Safety Modernization Act signed by President Obama in January, is seeking to reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses in fruits and vegetables, as opposed to just responding to outbreaks, and reports that each year 3,000 people die from preventable illnesses.
In Arkansas, about 31,000 acres are used to farm vegetables, fruits, nuts and berries, the kind of crops included in the Food Safety Modernization Act. That figure represents about 0.25 percent of Arkansas’ total farmland, which is an estimated 13.87 million acres, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2007 Census of Agriculture.
The act gives the FDA the authority to issue a recall when a retailer fails to voluntarily do so.
Illnesses from contaminated fruits and vegetables might be rare but they do happen.
Last summer unsanitary practices in a Colorado cantaloupe packing shed resulted in spreading a L. monocytogenes bacteria that killed 25 people and sickened 123 across the country, the FDA said in October, according to GrowingProduce.com.
As it stands now, preventive provisions of the act address the establishment of a written safety plan for some farms, frequency of on-site inspections and FDA access to a farmer’s or processor’s food safety plan records.
Farmers who grow produce normally cooked before consumption, like potatoes and artichokes, are exempt under the new law. Other exemptions include farms, packers, roadside stands and farmers markets with sales of less than $500,000, the Southeast Farm Press reported recently.
Local experts, however, say it remains unclear for how long those exemptions will remain.
Eventually, the Food Safety Modernization Act will require farmers selling at a farmers market to have a food safety plan, said Steve Seideman, a food processing extension specialist with the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
“Traditionally if you buy something from a farmers market ... a raw crop, no one checks those,” he said, because sellers “assume you’ll take it home, wash it and it will be safe.”
The only difference between a backyard farmer’s and a and a commercial producer’s written safety plan will be that a commercial producer will pay a private company, or the USDA, to “audit” or review it, Seideman said.
Before a food safety certification is issued or renewed, farmers must create, and implement, a food safety plan that gets audited every year. Audits can cost up to $900 to perform.
Several private companies perform the audits and have their own food safety certification standards. The USDA’s standards are called “Good Agricultural Practices.” Unlike the USDA, private companies also will create farm safety plans, and charge thousands to do so.
A free, online tool recently announced by the USDA and FamilyFarmed.org will help small- to midscale fruit and vegetable farmers create their own farm practices manual.
In a news release, the USDA called onfarmfoodsafety. org the first website of its kind and said a broad coalition of farm and produce industry partners participated in its development.
Jody Hardin, outgoing president of the Arkansas Farmers Market Association, said demand for information about the food safety certificate process will likely increase since retailers are becoming more willing to buy from smaller producers and “there are lots of farmers who are on the verge of” creating a plan and having it verified.
Farmers are waiting for the right tool. And “this might be the right tool,” Hardin said of the website.
National and regional retailers selling fresh produce have had their own food safety documentation practices in place for decades, experts say.
But over the last five years the recommendations used among larger suppliers, and their retailers, have become established safety protocols that are now trickling down to medium-size and smaller producers, said Ron Rainey, an associate professor with the UA’s Division of Agriculture in Little Rock.
Terry Walker, director of plant industry with the Arkansas Plant Board, said if a farmer has a plan in place, he can show all the things he did to promote food safety.
“And if something happens later, and the farmer is called into question as being the source of a disease outbreak, they can fall back on their records to show they did everything they could to maintain safe food,” he said.
Stephen Carter, owner of Royal C Farms in Crossett, said “no farm wants to sell a product that will hurt somebody.”
Carter farms 48 acres of tomatoes and 20 acres of cucumbers and said he has had a food safety certificate in place for the last five years.
Drafting the plan was overwhelming at first, he said, “but once we got through the initial plan, it became easier.”
A food safety certification and corresponding plan is “in place for protections for the consumer,” Carter said, it means a “safer product in the grocery store.”
To contact this reporter:
lwhalen@arkansasonline.com
Business, Pages 65 on 12/25/2011