A close up Salmonella bacterial colony. Sourced from Wikipedia.org
Over the past few years, food safety recalls, and food related illnesses and deaths take center stage in the media. Food-borne pathogens such as E. coli, Salmonella, and Listeria persist in the environment and can easily contaminate food. Cooking foods thoroughly generally reduces (or kills) pathogens to a level that is safe to eat. However, the consumption of raw and pre-cut produce has increased the risk of consumer exposure.
In attempts to reduce the risk of food safety issues, the US Government and the Department of Agriculture developed and passed a regulation known as the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). FSMA is a law provides the first scientific backed produce and food safety regulations for farms across the United States. It provides guidelines for the usage of agricultural water, use of biological soil amendments (e.g. manures); sprouts, animals, equipment, tools, and buildings, and worker training, and health and hygiene. It does not apply to foods that are not generally consumed raw, food grains, or food grown for personal use. More can be found here.
2016 was the first year that large farms are to come into compliance and has created a lot of headaches in California Agriculture. This regulation requires a lot of reporting, with many mid-size operations nearly requiring a full time employee. This is especially true with fresh fruit and vegetables, and nut crops which are commonly grown in California. Water must be sampled and determined to be free of human pathogens, workers must be trained in proper hygiene, and manures must be properly composted to be safe for use. Varying size operations have different compliance periods with small farms having four years to meet requirements while large farms have two years.
Will this regulations be effective in reducing the number of food borne illnesses across the United States? I hope so. It is a tremendous amount of effort to meet these requirements. Am I happy about it – that’s a different story. The cost can be quite high, especially in the ramp up. I have hired a part time employee to document our actions to bring us into compliance. This is on top of the large amounts of annual analytical sampling, which isn’t cheap. I do believe that it will be worth it if it prevents one person from getting sick from eating our produce.
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