 I'd like to welcome you to the first of 10 Wednesday weekly webinars. So once you've gotten this figured out how to get into the system, we're going to use that same link every week for the next 10 weeks. I'm Julie Gardner Robinson. I'm a food nutrition specialist with the Department of Health Nutrition and Exercise Sciences and an extension specialist for NDSU. And I'll be introducing Keith Knudsen a little bit more closely in a couple minutes here. But I have a couple logistics I'd like to share. So these are the upcoming webinars. Please note these on March 2 next week, Todd Weinman, an extension agent in Cass County. We'll be presenting on using high tunnels to extend the growing season. And you can see the remaining age after Todd. So please plan to join us. And I hope that these are very helpful. This is kind of a new endeavor for at least my subject matter area. So we're always wanting to improve. So let us know. One thing I will ask you to do is fill out a short survey. And I'm going to drop that into the chat pod at the end. And we'll also send it out by email. So a few logistics. It looks like you're figuring out what to do if you've never used this before. You found the smile in the hand, most of you. Be sure to look for that chat pod if you have questions as we're going along as Keith is progressing in his talk. Just type your questions in that and Keith will take all your questions at the end. Everyone will be in listening mode so that we don't get any feedback. So again, we'll have a short survey. I promise it's really short. And one nice thing you'll be able to print out if you like is a certificate of completion at the end. And I also popped in a little prize survey. So if you enter your name and address into the separate survey that pops up after you finish the really short survey, then you have a chance to win a prize. So I hope that's a little enticement. We really need your feedback because all of this was sponsored by a grant proposal. So again, today's presenter I'm happy to introduce is Keith Knudson, who is a Farm Business Management Instructor at Dakota College at Botno. And he'll tell you a little bit more about his main areas of specialization are farm business management, sustainable vegetable production, and aquaponics operations. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to Keith. And again, type your questions into the chat box. Hello, everyone. This is Keith Knudson from Dakota College at Botno. I always enjoy talking about food safety because I think it's important to a lot of everyone that I visit with all time, especially producers. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about the Food Safety Modernization Act. And I'm not going to talk about rules and regulations and all of that, but rather I'm going to kind of pick those special main topics that the Food Safety Modernization Act looks at and try to go through those with you so that you have an understanding of those different areas. I just want to step back a little bit. Julie mentioned that I'm a Farm Business Management Instructor and I am through the North Dakota CareerTech and Education Program. I work mainly with specialty crop producers and small farmers across the state of North Dakota, especially crop producers, mainly with vegetable and fruit production producers and helping them write business plans and record keeping and year-in-the-nest analysis and planning for the next year. So that's one of the main areas that I cover. I also cover a vegetable-sustainable vegetable program here at Dakota College. And a few years back, the legislature decided to select areas for centers of excellence and Dakota College was selected for the entrepreneurial center for agriculture. And so we do have a great vegetable-sustainable vegetable program. And this year we just started an aquaponics program. Aquaponics is two things. Aquaculture, which has to do with raising fish or aquatic life. And then hydroponics, which is probably most of you know is growing plants in a soil-less type environment with some kind of a substrate with nutrients that fall by it. The aquaponics is not new by any means, but it's something that seems to have caught on a lot of people are interested in how that all works. With that, I will proceed. If there's any problem that you have with hearing me, please just type in the chat box and we'll work there. Otherwise, I'll put your questions in and then I will get to those at the end of the slide section. First thing I want to talk a little bit about is definitions. You've probably heard of gaps or good handling practices or good manufacturing practices. Good manufacturing practices, you've probably heard the word or the, it said it again for that type of thing. And so just want to go through those today with you. Good agriculture practices is mainly what we're going to talk about today in this session. And that has a lot to do with raising fruits and vegetables on the farm. And good handling practices then typically falls in place after we harvest the produce and going forward up to the plant where we sell it to the consumer or we sell it for manufacturing purposes. And then, of course, that falls into good manufacturing processes, which typically is something like carrying your fruits and making juice or pastas or that type of thing. And then the final definition I want to talk about, which is what we're really here today, is the Food Safety Modernization Act. In fact, in January 2011, Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act. And it's actually taken us a few years since that act was put into place to really get an understanding of what it means to everybody and to make sure that everyone, whether you're a producer, you're a manufacturer or you're an inspector, can all live with the requirements that we have in place. We've gone through a number of sessions over the last two or three years trying to define what each one of the requirements means exactly. When it first came out, there was a lot of skepticism, a lot of scare up on what it really meant. But I think we've worked through most of that now. And as I proceed through this webinar, you'll see that it's probably not as scary as who you originally thought it would be. So the Food Safety Modernization Act really covers six areas. And the areas we're going to talk about is the first five areas. The sprouts I'm not going to say much about today, but the Food Safety Modernization Act really kind of selected sprouts out. And the main reason for that is, is the way sprouts are grown. They're grown typically in a controlled environment with a temperature and humidity conditions that are really similar to what a lot of microorganisms, pathogens like. And so there's a lot of extra precautions that we need to do when we do consider raising sprouts. So I'm not going to talk much about, I'm not talking more about sprouts than that because I think the other areas are what most of us are concerned about. So the other areas, worker training and health and hygiene, agricultural water, biological soil amendments. And biological is just a part of the, we will actually talk about soil amendments in general. Domesticated wild animals and equipment tools and buildings. So let's get right into the meat of this. When we think about food safety, whether there's a regulation in place or not, as growers, it's our responsibility to recognize any sources that we would have for contamination. And the new Food Safety Modernization Act looks at things differently than we have looked at things in the past. In the past, we've talked about corrective action and corrective action being, okay, we've got this problem. Where did the problem come from? And where is all the contaminated, we'll say in this case, tomatoes? Who's got those? And how can we segregate those? How can we get those back up, get those away from the consumers so that they do not consume that tainted produce? The Food Safety Modernization Act goes one step further and it goes into what we call preventive action. Preventive action is when we're looking at what are the possible issues that we can come up with on our farm or in our business that may affect the food itself, affect contamination, food safety, that type of thing. So the Food Safety Modernization Act really wants you to think ahead, to think about what you're doing today, what you can do to put things in place that will prevent issues with food safety. The other part of that is, and it's not really in the Food Safety Modernization Act, but it's really, really important when you think about it, especially as a producer, we want to reduce our risk. And so risk management is a very important part of this whole picture. And so we do certain things on our farm to reduce risk at all times. And I'm not just talking about getting my ability insurance, I'm talking about how we do things on farms so that we ensure that our food is safe. And we'll talk more about that. So let's get right into some of the areas. The first one that we talked about mentioned was worker hygiene. And workers are actually the major source of pathogens, and mainly it comes because of our hands and we're handling the fruits and vegetables all the time. We're handling other types of processed food, so we need to make sure that we have proper hygiene right from the very beginning. And when we talk about that, we talk about toilets and we talk about hand washing stations, those are all very important. And of course, along with that, in order to ensure that we know we're doing things consistently and a lot of times we want to keep records. We want to say, yes, we check this, we check this every day or we check this every week. We check our cooler temperatures every day or we check our cooler temperatures every week. And here's proof that we do it. And it's a good way for us to say, oh, wait, we missed yesterday. Let's make sure we get back on track. And so it's part of that whole preventive measure. So when we talk about health and hygiene, let's just go through some of the things. Sick employees. Sometimes we don't always know when we have a sick employee around us, like in a small producer, we may be the only employee that's there running. But it's important that if we do have a sick employee that that individual is not handling produce or the food. So that doesn't necessarily mean that we need to send them home. There may be things that they can do outside of handling the food or harvesting that would not affect the food safety itself. And so there may be things like sleeping or maybe a mowing or something outside of the regular handling of the foods that we could have an employee do. Some employees may not tell you they're sick just because they think you're forcing them to go home. So we don't want to get in that situation either. So we want to know when our employees are sick. We want to know how to best handle the situation, whether they want to go home or they want to continue to work. Employees with open cuts or scrapes is another issue. They may be working, picking produce, they get cut. We want them to stop right away, of course, and let us know about that. And we always want to try to contain bodily fluids as much as we can. So if they're bleeding, we want to make sure they stop and we want to make sure that they pick some food that may have blood on it that we are able to segregate that food and get it away from the other food so we don't contaminate everything. That's not to say then, again, that we have to send them home. We can send them off to do something else. If they're not bleeding real bad or if they're bleeding to stop, the best thing to do is put a band-aid on and maybe have them wear rubber gloves or something so that they can continue doing what they're doing. But it's always important that we first take note of the employee's safety and then also make sure that we segregated anything that may have been contaminated. The third one I just threw in there, but it's amazing how much we touch her face during the course of the day. And so that potentially is a source of contamination, not necessarily. There have been times when I had people tell me that inspectors have told them they must wear gloves when they're picking food. Yet at the same time, I see them touching their face. So there is always that issue of contamination. So when we're talking to our employees or we're thinking about ourselves, those are things that these type of things should come to light to us and we try to minimize it. It's not that we're going to totally control the situation and eliminate the problem, but we minimize it, which is most important. Of course, we have employees who sometimes, you know, wash their hands after using the restroom. It's important that we constantly tell them to wash their hands. We don't always tell them after they walk out of the restroom. It's much better to tell them in a session, in a training session before that happens. So anyway, anytime they come to work with hands, if they're having produce, they're pulling weeds in the morning, early morning, and then later in the morning they go out and pick produce. It's always wise to let them know that they should wash their hands and then you need to provide that kind of a wash station for them, too. So handling areas where we're keeping the food, we should make sure that that area is clean and sort of holding is another one. It's often times where we probably went to work one day in the next day. Slip on the same clothes and come back to work again. If you have employees, always advise them to wash their clothes and put clean clothes on every day. They don't need to have clothes that are in perfect shape, but they should be washed and clean. Here's just a little chart that you could put up if you've got a bath in some place. It just goes through the steps of hand washing. A lot of times I think we think if we just rinse our hands in water, we're good to go, but that's not necessarily the best thing. First of all, we use soaps a lot of times and soaps help sanitize, may help sanitize when we get most of dirt out. But we should also remember that we need to scrub our hands really well and do it for at least 20 seconds. Of course, sanitizing is important, and then drying and then trying to reduce any contamination as much as possible by turning off the tap water with the towel that you just used. I mentioned a little bit about an outside workstation, and so if you have employees and you have them using or asking them that type of thing, make sure that you have something available for them to wash their hands. This is just a very simple type of situation. I've seen this on the in dates of pickets where you've got a water, kind of a free-flowing type of water jug where you can actually lift the lever and let the water flow over both hands at the same time and then drops it back down. Of course, you've got to have a catch pocket. A catch pocket is important because otherwise you get modern, you get contamination, you get tracking back and forth to the fields and to the areas where you have your production. Soap is important, paper towels, and of course, garbage can is important. All of that is almost a must if you're going to have employees and you're going to have them doing several different things, including working with food or produce out in the field. Very simple, though, with making sure that you take care of water contamination. The next section, water. Water is probably the most rapid way of getting everything contaminated that you could ever imagine. One example that I've seen over and over again is that we have wash stations where we're maybe dipping our lettuce into the wash station and we're rinsing off the dirt, but at the same time if we had an issue, a contamination issue, maybe some pesticide overflow or something, we dip that lettuce into that water and then the water is not contaminated. So from that point on, that issue will be with anything that we dip in there. But I'm just going to go through these. Irrigation is always one of those things that we may have contaminated water. We have hoses or pipes that we use for irrigation. It's always important that we make sure we drain our pipes, try to get them as dry as possible because inside that pipe, if we have some water sitting, then there's potential for microorganisms. The next time you use your sprinkler system, then you're sprinkling up microorganisms and not to say that all microorganisms are bad, most bacteria is not bad, but it's just an opportunity for something to happen. So we need to watch our irrigation. Along with that, a lot of times we'll use water hoses, and we may use water hose if we use chemicals or fertilizers, that type of thing where we need to use water. We may use the same water hose for irrigation as we use for filling a sprayer tank. So what happens when the end of that hose gets thrown into the sprayer tank? We actually get some contamination. So it's always important to be thinking about irrigation and are we using equipment that is clean. The second one is the fertilizer and pesticide sprays that I want to talk a bit about. We do, of course, use water for fertilizer and pesticide, and I remember growing up on the farm and I know that when we used fertilizer a lot of times, we would stop by a pond and fill up our tank through a filtering system that wasn't filtering out microorganisms or bacteria and then we'd fill up our sprayer tank and we'd mix it in chemical and we'd go again. And so that is a potential right there for contamination. And then we go out and we spray that on the fields and so now we've got that issue all over our field. I do want to say one thing about sanitizing, though. Sanitizing our best sanitizer that we have is the sun. So we have a way of reducing or eliminating a lot of microbial activity, especially if it's exposed to the sun and to the air. So given time, a lot of that does go away anyway, but it's important that we think about if we're going to use fertilizers and pesticide sprays that we use water that we know is good potable water or potable water. Washing and rinsing the same thing. Make sure that we use water that we know is good clean water that's clear of bacteria. And I'm going to go through a few more things on that as we go along here, but those are three critical areas when we talk about water. Water sources. We have three main water sources that we use. I mentioned earlier about a pond or river surface water. And that's actually our greatest risk because we have livestock. We have wildlife that are coming up through the water, drinking water, walking in the water. We have a watershed area that usually, and by that I mean it's the area where the rainwater comes off and it flows into a river or to the lakes or ponds. And so whatever is on that runoff or in that runoff area also carries less contaminants into the lakes. Surface water is your greatest risk. Now I'm not saying don't use it. We'll talk a little bit about when we do use it, some of the safeguards that we need to take there. Well, water has a moderate risk. And the main reason for that is that we're not constantly sanitizing the water or applying anything to the water. So I've seen situations particularly on the springtime when we have a lot of runoff and there's potential for organic matter that's breaking down. And of course, some organic matter a lot of times comes in harmonious and nitrates and nitrates. And so we get some of that potentially that can get into the groundwater through holes or maybe along the well casing that type of thing. So we need to be concerned about wild water also, especially police checking it once a year. And then of course, public water has a very low risk because that is being treated all the time. One thing I do want to say about public water is that it's treated, but it's treated right at the site where the treatment is going on. And that's great. But say we're two miles down the road, we potentially could have something in our pipelines, some type of a bacteria growth. And I know I've experienced it on my farm from the well to the house. I've experienced some bacteria growth that needed to be treated. And I think the same thing can happen. When they put the treatment in the water and you're two miles down the road, that treatment wears off. So it should be, if you're a ways away from the treatment plant, you really should think about once a year just maybe testing the water to see what that water is, how that water is. The testing that we do typically is bacteriological and nitrate or nitrate testing. And so we have some general guidelines. Now, I just want to go off a little bit on a tangent here and talk about the Food Safety Minorization Act. And the way that is written is that if you're going to use surface water, you need to be able to prove that that surface water is acceptable surface water for irrigating, particularly irrigating and probably spraying for pesticides and fertilizer. So at first, when you use surface water for the Food Safety Minorization Act, you need to test it on a regular basis. And not just three times a year, but more often until you can prove that that surface water is not harmful. So that is something where the Food Safety Minorization Act is a little bit different. It's very similar with well water where we need to test that more often for a period of time and then we gradually go away from that and we can go to less testing on a manual basis. But surface water, you should really check it three times a year. And I strongly recommend that you check it in the springtime when you first start to use water for irrigation or for other purposes for your field or your produce, then check it in the middle of the summer and then also check it early in the harvest period for that time, some placing earlier in that period of time. And then well water, I strongly recommend that you check it in the early in the growing season. Usually if there are issues, particularly with bacteria and nitrates, nitrates, it's earlier in the season. And the public water, you know, you can always ask for a report and those are available to the public. So as you can see, all the public water tested if you're using the public water and that's a good record to keep. And if you're thinking longer term about some of the food safety modernization acts and participating in that particular program, this is something you want to keep. Testing is really not that expensive. Bacteriological nitrates cost anywhere from $20 to $55 and usually the ones in the lower range are your health districts. They are usually put a bit lower than some of the tests you went out for. It's one I strongly recommend that you do at least once a year, especially if you've got wells. When you take a water sample, you want to be able to take it at the location where you're using the water. So if you decide that you're going to use your well water for your field or your game, find that source, that spot, that hydrant where you're going to be connecting up to and take your water sample at that point. Don't take it in the kitchen. Don't take it out in the shop and take it where that closest location will be. That will give you the most accurate reading for what you need to know. When we do the testing, there's usually a set that you can get from the health districts. If you're going to the health districts or there's a kit you probably can get from a testing lab. And be sure to follow the instructions really close on that test kit. First thing you'll notice when you pull out a bottle, there's probably some stuff in the bottle. Don't pour that stuff out. Don't rinse the bottle off unless the instructions tell you to. But 90% of the time, don't do anything with that bottle until you're ready to put your sample of water into it. And typically what I recommend you do is at that location, let the water run for just a half a minute and then go ahead and take your sample. So there may be something right at the end of the spout that you don't really want to. Which isn't considered a sample for taking testing. Just here are some of the different locations. One thing to also remember is that these samples can change very quickly. So you want to try to get it to the lab as quickly as possible. And if you can get it to the lab within hours, that's great. I would never ever say it's acceptable. It will be on 24 hours to getting it to the lab. So typically our mail system doesn't work real well. It's almost exactly where you need to take it right directly to the lab. The other thing along those lines is try to pull the sample early in the week because the lab may be swung. And if you pull a sample Thursday afternoon or Friday morning and bring it into the lab, a lot of times those labs are really, really busy and they may not get to it. So just kind of give that some consideration. We'll talk a little bit about soil amendments. So a soil amendment is anything. I don't care what it is. It's sand. It's fertilizer. It's compost. There are anything you add to the soil that's considered a soil amendment. Biological soil amendments typically are those amendments that are organic. They break down in the soil. It requires some type of bacterial activity or biological activity. Micro-organisms are working. Papagens are working. So to break down that organic matter. So that's biological. But we also, in addition to that, have the inorganic or the chemical amendments that fertilize a lot of inorganic type fertilizers out there. And we're not so concerned about inorganic fertilizers because there's really not a lot of biological activity. A lot of them tend to be on the salty side. So bacteria does not do real well in that type of activity. In fact, we may end up losing some soil like some of those types of fertilizers. But it's important to make sure that when you do put in a soil amendment that you've thought about that soil amendment, particularly if it's a manure or compost, it's been properly processed. And when I say properly processed, I'm talking about going through a kill stage. And the kill stage typically is where you heat something up to 130 to 150 degrees. And at that point, a lot of microorganisms are killed off. A lot of weeds need to be killed off at that point. And so there are great examples out on the internet. And I always feel free to email me if you want a process on an organic matter and how to make sure that it's properly cared and properly taken care of and processed. But it's important that we remember that we do get that kill cycle and that we try to kill as many microorganisms and see weeds as we can. A little bit on equipment. We need to make sure that the equipment we have is clean when we take it out on the field and take an example of this picture here. We know a lot of old equipment, maybe have drips on it. Maybe when we breeze a piece of equipment, sometimes there's extra bees left on the outside. So it's important that we wipe that before we go into the field so that we don't get that breeze or oil or other contaminants on the fruits and vegetables and the plants and cells. We can also talk a little bit about disinfecting. Normally when you have storage bins or you have bins that you brought into the field and you pick produce, those bins should be just used out in the field. They should not be used when you bring them inside for cleaning produce. So we want to make sure that we try to segregate some of the storage bins and some of those type of bins from the field bins to make sure that we're using clean bins after the produce has been cleaned. A little bit about disinfecting. We try to disinfect bins as much as possible and in our tools as much as possible, especially that that's touching produce. The recommended procedure is first of all try to wash off any dirt or oils or contaminants that you can see on your tools or bins. That's the very first important part. And of course we usually use a soap or detergent at that point. And then the second part is to rinse those. So at this point we really haven't sanitized anything, but we want to maybe sanitize. So the next point is that we take and we dip those tools in some type of a sanitizer. And of course chlorine is a great sanitizer. We use that a lot of times to sanitize our tools. Typically we'll have a barrel or a tub or a sink that's got water in it and we'll put in so much chlorine bleach. There's a formula that you can go to, but we want to be at about 100 to 150 parts per million. And then we want to be able to let those tools and those bins actually sit in that sanitizer for a minute or so, half a minute to a minute so that that sanitizer can do what it needs to do. Along the same lines and we want to rinse that off. And we want to change the sanitizer regularly, especially if you're doing a lot of cleaning. Because that sanitizer does wear out. And so we either want to add additional, in this case, chlorine, or we want to dump the water and start over again. So it kind of depends after a while. I think you probably get a pretty good feel for how often you need to change your water. If you're doing very little, maybe once a day is great. If you're doing it more often than if you wash a lot more utensils and equipment then you probably need to do it more often during the day. Soil hazards, you know, there's not a lot we can do to control the wildlife that goes through the area. And I remember when the food safety minorization actors came out, everybody thought that we're going to need to put up 10 foot tenses around the fields so that we didn't get any type of animals or livestock into the fields. And that's great, but that's not very cost effective. So it's one of those things that we need to look at a little bit differently. And I'm glad that that has changed in the Food Safety Minorization Act. So today I think the things that we need to think about when we think about a field or a garden plot or even a high tunnel is what can we do to reduce the amount of traffic that we have going through those areas. And just to give you an example, one of the things we can do is actually have a buffer strip around the field. And that's typically an area where that's kept mowed or maybe cultivated. And a lot of small animals typically don't like to be exposed to those type of conditions so they don't always cross it. But it's just one way of reducing the traffic into those fields. Another thing may be to use some type of flags or scareclaws or that type of thing. And of course there's different types of equipment with different types of sounds and that type of thing too that reduce the amount of traffic that you have in an area. When you go out to harvest in a field, one of the first things you will want to do is to walk around that area to see what kind of traffic's been in the area. So if you've had a deer trail go through and you've got deer manure in particular spots, you'll want to probably work around that area and harvest around it in your first and then come back to that area afterwards. And I would never recommend that you use that as food. But I would recommend that you pick that produce after you're done picking all the other produce so that you don't contaminate produce with your hands that way. Like if you call a way back and talk about our hens are one of the best sources of contamination that we have. Contamination, contaminants will often colonize in the soil and in particular when you're talking about manure or that type of thing where it sits in a pile. So it has to try to remove that from the field as quickly as possible if you do have those issues. Particularly don't want to necessarily chill them in right away but to try to remove them totally so that you don't have that colonization going on. So a little bit more about animal hazards. We know that animals have four feet in most cases, birds have two, but we also know that they're not particularly careful about where they walk and where they've been. So we want to make sure that we do reduce that traffic as much as possible if there are manure and that type of thing that do get deposited in the fields. I'm sure to take that out and also reduce that opportunity for that to happen. I've seen it over time and time again where we have pests in the garden and it's a really difficult thing because we think of it as one of ourselves but we really need to be very careful about allowing our pests to come into the... Our pests, excuse me, sorry. Our friends to come into the gardens with us are cats so we should be very careful about that. I have a dog that just loves to sneak in when I'm not looking and he knows what he's supposed to be but it's kind of funny to watch him sneak in five, ten feet into the garden and then I chase him that guard again. We probably want to maintain some records if we do have an animal control program in it. He usually ends up being more along the lines of maybe mice in a wash and pack facility, that type of thing where we say we set traps and the records would indicate how often we set traps and maybe if we're catching mice on a regular basis in one particular area the records would indicate what preventive action, what things we're doing to reduce the amount of mouse traffic in that area but there may be some records that you will want to monitor to keep on those lines and of course the very last thing is don't ever mix contaminated produce with other produce with produce that has not been contaminated. So the question I often get is, well I know this produce is contaminated but I wash all my produce. Well to be honest with you I still would not do that because we don't know from that point we know that once we put something contaminated in a fruit basket everything in there is probably contaminated and so every time we handle that we're handling the contamination and moving things around. It's best like I said earlier to come back and get that contaminated fruit after you're done picking the produce that you know has not been contaminated. Stories and transportation. One of the areas that if you have a cooler it's always recommended that you keep track of what your cooler temperatures are and nowadays we seem to have a lot of digital type instruments that will keep track of us. But then that's great. So if it comes to a point in some time in your future where you decide you want to follow or you want to become certified, GAP certified, this is one of the things I will come up with. What does your records look like? And cooler records is one of them that will always come up. You need to show that your temperature is maintained at what you say it's going to be. You need to make sure that you're cleaning your cooler when you say you're going to clean your cooler. So if you say clean your cooler once a month and you've got record of it, that's a good starting point. And if you think you use your cooler more often and you clean more often, that becomes kind of your instructions by your process and your record should show that. If you have someone that's hauling produce for you, make sure that they are able to show you the last load that they had on the truck. Make sure that they can show you that there's some cleaning records so that you know that they've cleaned the record and it always is with your time to walk into the truck and walk around and inspect it to make sure that they're cleaning and per your standards. And then also make sure that they've got temperature logs on him so that you know when that produce leaves your yard that it's going to be properly cared for until it gets to the consumer or to the retail store or the distributor. It is your responsibility to make sure that it gets to that distributor to that retail store. So make sure that those hauling your produce know what they're doing and have the proper records. When we talk about records, you know, a lot of it has to do with reducing your liability. So what can you do to reduce your liability? Only keep records. And that's one of the ways if something were to happen or we were to go to court, we could say, okay, we checked our cooler. Here's our records. Here's the date. Here's our sign off on it. We know that our produce is being kept at this temperature all the time. We developed those guidelines. We developed guidelines so that if we need to show someone or train someone on what records to keep on how we do things, those guidelines are there as kind of a set of instructions or there as a set of training tools and they're great for calling back and saying, okay, here's the records we keep and here's the guidelines we follow to keep those records. So it's just a great way to reduce your liability. Of course, we just talked about training. Training is always important. I work a lot by myself as a producer and I go through my food safety policy manual once a year and I do it for two reasons. Number one is a refresher because at some point several years ago I said I was going to do it this way. Well, am I still doing it that way? That's the second point. If I need to change my policy manual, then it gives me an opportunity early in the season to say, okay, this is how I think I should do it. I want to do it today. And so we try to change those guidelines a little bit. And then of course the last area there along those lines reducing your liability is to have proper tools and have those tools clean and have them sharp or have them so that they operate the way they're supposed to be operated. Just some other general topics just to talk about. And I think that maybe if there's some questions we can go through those. But visitors, if you have visitors out to the field, they need to follow a lot of the same rules that you follow that your employees follow. In other words, if they're going to come off the field and you're going to allow them to do some picking, then you need to make sure that they know they need to wash their hands. When they use a restroom, when they come back, they need to wash their hands. That took a thing. So make sure your visitors follow the same rules. Make sure you're head washing and toilet facilities are clean and always properly supplied. First aid kits are always important. We talked a little bit about that a while back and that we should try to have a bandaid with band aids and other supplies available. And then in addition to that, people around you need, whether they're your employees or visitors, need to know what to do if somebody gets hurt. And of course we talked about the safety of that individual, first of all, but they also need to know about contamination issues. So always make sure you go over that with everybody. We don't talk always on farms about MSDS sheets, material safety data sheets. But we do use different chemicals. We do use different formulas of things and we really should have material safety data sheets available so that if we have an individual that gets it in their eyes or on their face or whatever, we have a quick reference for taking care of that issue or to getting them to the clinic. So, you know, the last thing is consider logs whenever you think it's feasible. But don't just put logs out there. They have logs out there. And by logs, I mean a sheet of paper where you write down what you did when you did it. But the other part of that is if you're going to log your temperatures for your cooler, maybe you've got a couple plans, for cleaning and for temperatures, that log should be on the clipboard right there at the cooler door. Because if it's up at the house or if it's in the office someplace, somebody may come in and they may clean the cooler and may check the temperature, but if that log is in there, the temperature is not going to get written down. Inspectors will say, if I don't see it in writing, then it never happens. So make sure that if you're going to have a log in a place where everybody can use it and it's convenient. I'm going to quickly go over this traceability and recall is just a simple system of being able to know where your proteins came from and know where it's going. So I'm going to give you an example. The first one I use, log coding system 0506161HT1. Sounds like a lot. So here's what it is. 050616, number one is me. I'm the individual. I picked the fruit in high tunnel number one. So that gives me all the information I need. It's a very simple system. You use a simple system that works for you. But if you're going to be selling produce to a restaurant or a grocery store or a wholesaler, I would reinstall your own recommended some kind of log coding system in place. And if you're going to sell to one of those types of businesses, make sure on the invoice, you put that log code right on the invoice. So that way, you know where that produce is going. So, important to remember, know when to step back, know where the produce came from, and let's step forward. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that, but traceability and recall is often one of those things that we kind of step over and then when it happens to us, when inspector comes to us and says, you know, I think tomatoes are suspect. Gosh, we better know something about when we picked them and what those tomatoes would have gone through. So, and it's not, it's a way of reducing our liability is what it is, because we want to protect what we have. And if we've got something like this in place, that's going to help us give us some protection. It's also going to help the inspector work through that process and know where that produce came from or where the contamination came from. It doesn't always come from your farm. Most of the times it doesn't come from a producer. It comes someplace along the way. We talked about checklists and logs quite a bit. Make sure it's someplace where it's convenient. And then the last part, I've mentioned it several times about the food safety plan. When you write a, when you write about your food safety plan, you kind of write it the way you do things. And so that becomes your procedure. And if you have logs in place, you carry those logs and you keep those logs up, it's important that you do that. The last part is reviewing. You can actually, there's checklists out on the internet. There's USDA audit verification checklists. It's a good way to see how well you're doing them on your farm plan. You can go through a checklist and see how you've covered that in your farm plan. So review buildings. Always remember if you're going to write a farm plan on food safety, think about the history of the land and think about those farmers that are farming around you and if there's contamination, that may be getting into a bunch of your land or not into your crops. That is basically what I have. Here's a couple of good sites. The FDA has the Food Safety Modernization Act and there's a lot of good guidance there. And then also the second one down is the Food Safety News and it's a daily report I get, and it tells me about producers all over the country that are having these issues and not only producers but processors and so it kind of helps me keep up to date on food safety issues. Julie, I think with that, I'll turn it back over to you and I guess there was one question if I recall and I believe it had to do with tobacco. It's an employee that smoke or chew or use the electronic devices nowadays. It's a source of contamination. So if they smoke, give them a time during the day in which they can smoke, give them an area in which they can smoke in, but make sure that when they come back to working with your food that you're producing that their hands are washed. Well, thank you very much, Keith. Does anyone else have any questions? Just go ahead and type those in the chat pod. I'm going to copy a link to the survey I mentioned where you can give us some feedback and also you should be able to, if it all works, click on this and it'll take you to a survey. But I welcome any other questions. And again, you can win a prize and you can print a certificate. I'd certainly like to thank you, Keith, for being willing to come on. It was a lot easier to do this in our office than having to drive all the way up to see you. So technology is pretty neat. Yes, and it really is neat how we can do this from wherever now, David. Yes. Like I said at the beginning, I really enjoy visiting with everyone on food safety and as producers, if some of you are producers out there thinking about ways you can reduce your risk, you never can eliminate it, but think about ways you can reduce risk. Well, with that, I will welcome you again to come back same spot next week, same time, and you can hear Todd Weinman talk about high tunnel. So thanks everybody. Please, please do the survey. I think you'll also get a follow-up from the system, but that would really help us. Thanks again, Keith.