The Agricultural Health and Safety team at the University of Minnesota works with Minnesota’s produce farmers to help them develop and implement on-farm food safety plans and prepare for GAPs audits.
The program provides:
- Education, outreach and technical support to fruit and vegetable growers through GAP workshops and mock audits
- Research relating to GAPs, especially as they impact small growers and immigrant and minority growers
- Communication and collaboration with many agricultural partner organizations and government entities to help promote information-sharing regarding GAPs and farm safety
The goals of our programs are to help growers:
- Understand how GAPs (Good Agricultural Practices) impact produce safety
- Determine whether their farm needs to have a GAP audit (see Who Should Get a GAP audit?)
- Write a farm food safety plan that provides a Standard Operating Procedure regarding minimizing microbial contamination on their farm
- If needed, prepare for and a pass a GAP audit
Newly Updated! Food Safety Plan for You (FSP4U)
“FSP4U - A Food Safety Plan for You” by Michele Schermann, RN MS, UMN Agricultural Health and Safety Research Fellow, provides common sense guidance for farmers to establish food safety plans. It is packed full of useful record keeping templates, and will help fruit and vegetable producers set up food safety systems to pass Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) audits. Templates, logsheets, audit checklists and more can be found
here.
This template was funded by the Minnesota Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association with a grant from USDA-RMA.
On-farm food safety information for K-12 food service personnel
Farm to School is growing rapidly across Minnesota and many schools are interested in purchasing directly from nearby farmers. The goal of this document is to provide a list of questions about
on-farm food safety practices that K-12 food service personnel can use when talking with farmers from whom they are considering purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables. These questions do not pertain to food safety in your food service kitchen facility
. Rather
, they relate to
on-farm food safety. This means the steps that the farmer took to minimize the risk of contamination as the food was grown, harvested and transported to your kitchen door.
Click here to read the document.
New! Online food safety tool from FamilyFarmed.org
Recently launched by
FamilyFarmed.org a free online tool to help farmers effectively manage risk by creating a customized food safety plan and adopting best practices in food safety. The tool is available at
www.onfarmfoodsafety.org and gives farms of all sizes the capacity to answer a series of questions in 11 areas of food safety risk management, and create their plan.
