 Thank you. Good afternoon. How's everybody? How's everybody heard of gaps? Just a few of you. All right, fantastic. So Dr. Trinklein is absolutely right. One of the things that we're really trying to do as we work with producers across the state is educate them about the steps that they could take to reduce the possibility of microbial contamination to specifically fresh fruits and vegetables. So anytime you hear about gaps or sometimes called gap-gip, GHP, good agricultural practices or good handling practices, we're really talking about a USDA program. Now gaps is a food safety certification program for producers and producers of fresh fruits and vegetables. That's not to say that there aren't other food safety certification programs that are out there. In fact, there are probably seven that are commonly used across the country. And typically those are used by larger growers who are selling into probably much larger wholesalers than what typical Missouri fruit or vegetable producer is selling into. So having said that, I've worked with producers who have pursued gap certification as well as producers who have pursued those other third-party certifications, which for the record do tend to cost a little bit more than a USDA gap audit. And it's important to point out that the gap audit or food safety audit is something that's voluntarily undertaken by a producer. Now you may not necessarily be volunteering to do it because perhaps the wholesaler or the entity that you're selling into, in some instances farmer's markets, may require that you have some sort of food safety certification. So if that's a requirement of your outlet, then you'd probably better volunteer to do it. But there's not anything legislatively mandating producers of fresh fruits and vegetables to pursue this sort of third-party audit verification. So that may happen. We're not exactly certain what the Food Safety Modernization Act is going to look like whenever it comes out, but we are keeping on top of what that's looking like, what that process is looking like. That law was actually supposed to come out in January and we're still working on what that might look like. For the time being, it is a voluntary program. So I'm not going to talk about those other proprietary certification programs, but just know that they are fairly similar to what the USDA's GAPS program is. And the USDA's GAPS program is based off of the FDA's Guide to Minimizing Microbial Contamination to Fresh Fruits and Vegetables which is a publication that's available on the FDA's website. And if you are fortunate enough to navigate the USDA's AMS website to find the GAPS stuff, it's also posted there as well. So what is it? It's a quality assurance tool. It's really a way for communication, for producers to communicate to the people that are buying their product, but it works really between all the players. And certainly there are more players in food distribution, particularly as we start talking about international food supplies than what's just shown here. But for the purposes of this presentation, I think this kind of illustrates for the most part what we're talking about. It's a quality assurance tool that really allows for farmers to communicate to the people that are buying their products, that they're taking steps to at least reduce the chance of microbial contamination to the food that they're producing. So if you are certified, then there's at least that knowledge that your consumer or the individual that you're selling to is aware that you're doing at least some steps to reduce the threat of contamination. But it also works the other way. So it's a way for distributors to know that the food that they're buying and aggregating in their warehouses has been produced with those same thoughts in mind. And of course it works further just from the consumer standpoint. So where does the demand for all of this come? Currently it's right here. So and there are a few direct to market markets that do require some level of certification. But for the most part, people who are pursuing gap certification or any other food safety certification are doing it because they're selling to a wholesaler or a large retailer who says, we're not buying it unless you can prove to us that you're certified. And so right now that's kind of where we're at. But having said that, and we'll have a slide about this later on, there are things that go along with good agricultural practices that we should all be undertaking on our farms. And we'll talk a little bit about some of those specifics as we go. When you look at the gap certification program, there's a number of parts. And in order to pursue certification or to get certification, doesn't matter what you're doing, you have to do the general question. So this is just kind of the canopy question. General questions have to be completed by anybody who's pursuing certification. And then really like the first three are generally what we see producers in Missouri going for. And in many cases it's just the first two. If you have a packing facility, certainly you're going to be interested in part three. But then there are a number actually, I think about a year ago, there were more wholesale distribution centers or terminal warehouses that were gap certified than there were farms in Missouri that were gap certified, which I thought was interesting. So everybody has to do the general questions, but you get to choose which ones beyond that. So you may choose parts two, part one, two and three, or maybe just part one and two as a producer. So the general questions, this is kind of what they go after. They look for the implementation of a food safety program, which means that you've developed a food safety plan. And we'll talk a little bit about what a food safety plan is, but understand that in a 20 minute presentation we're not really going to get into too much of that. And to be fair I usually give this presentation over the course of about three and a half hours. So look me up if you want to come to one of those. So one of the things about the food safety plan is one of the first things that it does is it identifies an individual on that farm that's going to be responsible for the implementation of that program. Which means that that individual is going to have to be intimately involved with the development of the plan and know exactly what steps are being taken so that they can ensure that the things that need to be logged on paper are getting logged on paper. Every single part, the general questions part one, two, three, four and five include a feature for traceability. Traceability used to be its own part, a part of its own, but they actually decided that they were just going to eliminate traceability and incorporate it into every single part that exists in the audit. And for the general questions, the traceability bit really boils down to you have to have a procedure in place and that procedure is going to be a part of your food safety plan and you'll also have a documentation indicating that annually you have successfully conducted a recall. So you ought to be able to at least say, call somebody that you sold your produce or your fruits or vegetables to tell them, hey, I'm just conducting a mock recall. Can you identify where this product is, if it's still on your floor or in your kitchen, wherever it might be, and if they can successfully produce it because you labeled it appropriately, then you've successfully conducted a mock recall. Another huge thing, and this is really the nuts and bolts of the certification, is worker health and hygiene. So there's a couple of things that we really focus on there and hand washing is one of them from a worker health and hygiene standpoint. So that's you and me and anybody else that's on the farm, but any employees as well as any visitors that might be around on the premises. So that really means that you have to have signage in the restroom. So we've all seen those in the restaurants that we go to. It's just a continuation of that kind of protocol. So let's talk about number one, part one, the farm review. There's a number of things and this is probably one of the more difficult or the more lengthy aspects of the audit or of the food safety plan to go through. You have to identify your water source and identify how you use it. So you may have multiple sources of water on the farm for different uses. And there are regulations on what kind of water you can use and where you have to use potable water. So if you're using surface water and you also have to be able to document that you've tested this water, unless of course you're on a rural municipal supply and people test it for you, you just keep a record of what that test indicated. If you're using surface water, it's recommended that you test it monthly during the season of use. So if you're pulling water out of a stream river or a pond, that water needs to be tested and we're testing for coliform bacteria, which is a relatively simple and straightforward test. It's not particularly expensive and it's relatively simple to undertake. And then there are limits for how you use water depending on what the results of that test show. So if you're using over head irrigation water and it's going to be touching the edible part of the plant, for instance, there's a rule in there that says that the test that you conduct on that water needs to identify fewer than 236 colony forming units of coliform bacteria in order for you to safely apply it to the edible portion of the plant. If you're over head irrigating or using other form of irrigation where that water's not going to come directly into contact with the edible portion of that plant, then you have a threshold much higher at about 570 colony forming units. So there's intricacies that are like that throughout all of this and I'm probably not going to use examples on all of them, but that's where it starts to get kind of meticulous. But I just want to communicate to you that it's really simple to find out what those intricacies are and if you have trouble, I'm always here for that. Other things include identification of possible water related risks. So it's one thing to say that you've gone through and actually tested the water, but it's another thing to make sure that you've got steps or standard operating procedures in place to reduce further contamination of the pond or of the stream and usually that includes the exclusion of animals, wildlife, livestock and things like that and making sure that if your house is on a septic system or if your packing shed is on a septic system that you're taking steps to make sure that there isn't an issue that's going down into the water source. The Farm Review also includes questions as they relate to manure and municipal biosolids. Municipal biosolids are not acceptable in any way, shape or form. And then manure also is quite regulated and basically the USDA with their gaps program has adopted effectively the same sort of standards as the Organic Standards Board has. So what's that mean? Does anybody know what that means? Fresh manure applied for 12 months. Okay, I haven't heard that before, but close. And I would actually lean your way. So he said 12 months between application and harvest. Organic standard is 90-120 days. So if you're using fresh or aged manure, manure as it is, and we'll talk about what manure is in a minute, those crops that the edible portion of the plant doesn't touch the ground, you can harvest those within 90 days or after 90 days after application. Those crops whose edible portion does touch the ground, you have to wait 120 days to harvest after application. So that's the 90-120-day rule if anybody was ever wondering. Other things on the Farm Review include land use history. So you want to document what the historical use of the land is. And of course there's traceability that's in there as well, and those are specific questions. Part two, field sanitation and hygiene. This pre-harvest assessment is something that wasn't initially in the GAPS protocol, but it is now, and that's basically somebody, whoever's usually in charge of implementing the food safety program, has to go through the field that's to be harvested the day of harvest or within a reasonable timeframe prior to harvest. And just scout for any potential contamination. So usually this individual will have some flags, and if there's any sign that there was contamination, like for instance if there are deer droppings or other droppings that are on the plants, a flag goes in the ground, maybe you've got a standard operating procedure in your plan that says if there's a flag in the ground on harvest day, you don't harvest anything within, say, a three-foot circle from there. And that includes bird droppings as well. Toilet facility availability. You're not going to get points for this unless you have a toilet facility, one per every 20 employees, which is usually not a problem, but no more than a quarter mile away from where those employees are located. So the theory there is that we want toilet facilities relatively close to where the workers or the harvesters are going to be, because if it's close, they're more likely to walk to the toilet as opposed to walk into the corner of the field. And also from a field sanitation and hygiene, you just want to make sure that you have a standard operating procedure in your plan that helps you deal with issues, and so if something does arise, you know exactly what you're going to do to deal with it. Field harvesting and transportation. There's a whole host of things, but mostly they just relate to the containers that you're using. You're not sitting them on the ground while harvesting and then stacking them on top of other produce, because you're transferring potential contaminants that may be in the soil to the fresh fruits or vegetables. Harvesting tools and equipment are kept clean. You've got policies and procedures or SOPs to respond to contamination events, and you've got things as they're being harvested and delivered to the packing facility that are labeled so that you know what field that they came from. Again, you can kind of get the feel that a lot of these things were developed with relatively large farms in mind, so these things aren't nearly as intricate for a small farm as they would be for a large farm. So real quick, because I'm not real sure that I covered it, but I did want to go back to talking about manure real quick. When we talk about those manure applications, we want to make sure that we define the difference between manure and compost. And so composting through the Good Agricultural Practices Program is again viewed in the same light as it is in the National Organic Program, which is to say that you have to document how hot that pile gets and for how long it gets, and if it doesn't get over 122 degrees for 15 days and it's not turned at least five times during that period, then it's not compost. So if it has manure in it and it's not compost, it's manure, which means that you have to follow that 90-120-day rule. So I just wanted to clarify that. Yes. Municipal biosolids, is that compost that some of the cities make themselves out of leaf and grass? No, it's from sewage treatment facilities. So if you're using compost that's strictly from plant material, nobody really cares if it gets to 122 degrees or not. You can just call that leaf litter or whatever, but it's not manure if it doesn't practically get composted. So that's what we're talking about is if you're producing compost, specifically if you're producing compost on the farm with manure, you have to log that 15-day period with when times or temperatures were checked and when the pile was actually turned, which really gets down to the essence of what this entire thing is. It's the implementation of this plan, this food safety plan, which really requires just documentation. And to make this easy on you, horticulture specialists, including a few agronomy specialists with University of Missouri Extension and Lincoln University have gone through some trainings where we've gotten together with auditors and we've sat down for days on end talking about these sorts of intricacies that exist. And as a result of that, one of the things that we did was we compiled just log sheets. So bathroom cleaning log sheet, compost temperature and time log sheets, and there's literally like 30 log sheets that we've got. So if you are potentially going after GAP certification or if you just want to implement some of these practices on your farm, maybe without going for the official certification, get ahold of us and we'll hook you up with those log sheets. You don't have to create them yourself. All right, let's talk briefly about Part 3, which is the house packing facility. There's a number of things. This kind of gets into some more interesting stuff because it's not just in the field, but we want to make sure that we have a diagram in the plan, in the food safety plan that shows the flow of product on a map of the facility. So we want to be able to document where that product is coming in, what process it's going through, and where it's coming out the door. And then in the practical implementation of it, we want to make sure that we've got procedures in place for what's supposed to happen when, you know, the forklift comes in with the crate of melons or whatever happens whenever the product is coming in the door. And then whatever happens when it's going to the sorting table, you know, how often is the sorting table cleaned and sanitized, and of course you can guess that those things are also logged. Packing house worker health and hygiene again, another big thing, but really we're talking about clean facilities, easy access to restrooms that always have soap and paper towels and things like that. This is an interesting one where we're looking at several structural guidelines, and one of the things that we talk about is overhead lights and doing what we can to keep birds out of the facility. And also doing what we can to keep rodents out of the facility. And so that means if you've got, you know, a bunch of stuff stacked up against the wall, one of the things you might do is bring it out three or four inches so that whenever you have to do a pest control check, because you're going to have pest control devices throughout the facility, you can look right down between the wall and the row of boxes or whatever it is and check to see if there's any activity. Real quick, just about the lights. You got to have something up there so that if a light bulb breaks it doesn't just fall right down into the product. And of course traceability is another thing. So we're talking about simple labels that just indicate what field the product came from, what data was packed, and the name, cell phone number and address of the farm. So how do you know whether or not you passed this? Well, each one of these parts has one of these aggregate sums. So you just say, all right, well, in part two, for instance, there's a total possible 185, but maybe some of those don't necessarily apply to your operation. So you don't get discounted those. Those get taken out of the possible total. And if you get over 80% then you pass. Now with global gaps, which is something where the USDA has worked with those private entities that do those third party audit programs to maybe make it a little bit more streamlined and maybe really to benefit people who sell to multiple outlets, say Walmart and price chopper, just examples. They may, a farmer who sells to those two entities may have to pursue a food safety certification through whoever Walmart wants as their certifier as well as whoever price chopper wants as their certifier. So global gaps is an effort to reduce that redundancy. And in global gaps, they don't actually give you a score. They leave it up to whoever's buying your product to decide if you have met a satisfactory level of food safety on the farm. There are things that exist that will give you an automatically unsatisfactory immediate food risk present that could be something as simple as the auditor watching somebody walk out of the bathroom and finding evidence that they didn't wash their hands. Automatic fail. You're not going to get certified. There are other things that are included in there. There's a number of things that it takes but really the top one here, the total management commitment and making sure that everybody who's on the farm, whether they work there or visiting, are aware of the things that they need to be aware of as it relates to your food safety plan. So we kind of already talked about who might benefit from it. But I guess this is a different slide. We'll talk really quickly about why you might consider it. Well, you might consider certification because it could potentially open a door for you from a marketing standpoint if you're at a scale large enough where you think you might want to start selling commercially at a wholesale level because a lot of those wholesalers are requiring some form of food safety training and even more are requiring certification. So if you are interested in becoming certified there are a number of steps but certainly building that farm food safety plan is at the top of that list. And one of the best ways to do that is simply just to go through the audit itself which is what's nice about the USDA. They give you the audit. This is what I'm going to be auditing you on. Build a farm food safety plan around it and generally those auditors are good enough to say if you want to send me your plan before I come and do the audit give me a couple of weeks heads up, send it in, I'll take a look at it. If anything is glaring I might make a comment here or there but keep in mind that they do have to maintain their third party status so they're not going to hold your hand through the audit itself. The other thing is that this audit if it's done for certification purposes has to be done while these activities are occurring so you can't become gap certified until the middle of January for tomatoes. They'll actually have to see the tomatoes growing, they'll have to see the producer or the worker harvesting and they'll have to see those tomatoes go into the packing house and they'll have to see them come out of the packing house and have to see the whole process in order to become certified. So the audit has to occur during the season which makes winter a great time to start getting together that food safety plan and start thinking about what sorts of steps do you have to implement or change in your operation to be in reason or in compliance. So there's a number of resources that are out there of course there's that guide to minimizing microbial food safety hazards for fresh fruits and vegetables which is that FDA guide but then probably the most important thing that you can use if you're pursuing a USDA audit is look at the USDA checklist and if you have any questions as it relates to doing those putting those steps together and actually coming up with a plan you may get a hold of other extension people because we're here and ready to help with that and ultimately we feel like even if you don't have to pursue a certification sooner or later you may very well end up having to have that plan like you may have to have that plan and so it's kind of a good idea to go ahead and work on putting it together while you don't have to rush around if a mandate does fall down the line. So the question was about gap certification in the future will you have to pay to keep the certification up and the answer is yes. So generally what in my experience the initial audit is the one that takes the longest and so with the USDA you actually pay an hourly rate to the auditor and that's usually the first one is the one that takes the most time because that auditor has to get to know you has to get to know the farm has to get to know the kind of operation that you've got annually and you do have to write an update to the plan which is usually one maybe two pages unless you drastically change the operation so yes you will have to do it but it doesn't take nearly as long as it's less costly. People have a big recall are insurance companies requiring this or could that have been prevented it turned out it was their processing where they were packing. That's a good question is that insurance companies have started mandating food safety audits or certifications though I wouldn't be surprised if that is the case after some of the things that we've seen but to be clear that cantaloupe farm was gap certified. Gap certified for tomatoes so you have to be gap certified for specific crops. That's right so you do have to be gap certified for specific crops. He asked if you have to be gap certified for specific crops and the answer is yes. So you can pursue certification for vegetables in general or say you're a market producer and you produce a ton of different kinds of things but you're interested in maybe going on a wholesale level with a couple of things and whoever it is you're selling wholesale to is interested in that being certified you wouldn't necessarily need to go and certify the entire farm and really just be interested in certifying those crops. So the question is does it need to be done each year for each crop and the answer is yes. So it's not like you would have to go through four audits if you had four crops unless those four crops were seasonally different. So generally what we say is one audit for a host of different vegetables and I've seen and you can get on the USDA's AMS website and you can search to see what farms are who I guess is gap certified that includes farms as well as wholesale and terminal outlets and it'll show you what they're certified for. So in many instances it's one, two crops but there's a few farms that are out there that have 15 crops that are listed and I'll bet you that it probably costs about the same to have 15 crops certified as it does to have two.