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Calming Food Safety Fears a Challenge for All Producers
By Canadian Farm Business Management Council and Canadian Federation of Agriculture
You're a typical North American. You admire farmers and you trust the food they produce...so much so that you think the corn or tomatoes you buy at a producer's roadside stand is even more wholesome and safe than the same food sold through a large grocery store. You are also concerned about food safety. You're not as diligent about food safety as you think you are. There is a 20 per cent chance that if you get sick from food poisoning it will be because you didn't wash your hands properly before preparing food, or didn't clean the counter properly after stuffing the turkey, or made some similar mistake. But your confidence in yourself will remain high. Yet the trust you place in farmers can shatter in an instant. Anything might trigger it.
Your child or grandchild falls ill in an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 at a daycare and is hospitalized with severe diarrhea for several days while you live with the terror that she may suffer kidney failure. Your neighbor contracts shigellosis at a banquet and authorities can't pinpoint whether the kitchen which prepared the salad or the salad ingredients are the source of the shigella bacteria. A co-worker finds the tip of a needle in a roast, and exaggerated stories about the livestock industry are the talk around the water cooler for days.
Yes, North Americans trust farmers but, increasingly, they expect farmers to be able to prove - when problems arise - that their trust is not misplaced. Which is why commodity associations have spent the past several years developing programs for Canadian On-Farm Food Safety (acronym COFFS). "Consumers want to know as much as possible," says Dietwald Klaus, an official with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, which has spearheaded the development of national COFFS programs.
Documentation key to on-farm food safety program
The changing nature of consumer attitudes to food safety was humorously summed up by a British speaker at a recent food safety conference in Toronto, says Klaus. "He said that in 1945, after the war, people just wanted food, thank you very much. In 2002, they want to know the name of the chicken where the chicken breast came from."
"I think it's a question of insecurity," adds Betty Vladicka, a food safety specialist with Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. "People don't know that much about the food system and so when there is a problem, they question whether the system is secure." The focus of COFFS is not so much on promoting good food safety practices, but getting farmers to document them.
"The whole issue is about trace-ability, and it is coming," says Vladicka. "It's about being able to trace back to a specific animal or to a specific field where the food was grown. It is coming and it will be here in a couple of years.
"I think most producers already have good agricultural practices and are adhering to them. They're just not documenting what they're doing." Farmer organizations were also worried about how food retailers would react if there was a major food-safety scare in Canada or North America as a whole.
"The nightmare scenario for farmers was that major food companies would all come out with individual programs that farmers would have to live up to. In order to avoid the fragmentation and the redundancies of such an approach - farmers having to follow different protocols for different customers - the COFFS program was envisioned and put into place," says Klaus.
"It allows farmers to have a farmer-driven and farmer-organized approach to on-farm food safety and so far, marketers and distributors (of food) have backed off individual programs." But what does it all mean for producers?
The general rule of thumb is "write what you do and do what you write," says Anna Griffin, a member of the COFFS working group of the Alberta chicken, turkey and hatching egg producers. That doesn't mean producers will have to end each day by spending a couple of hours in the office logging everything that happened in the past 24 hours, she says. The whole idea is have a workable system. "This is a producer-based program. It isn't the government coming in and saying you must do this. It was designed by farmers for farmers."
The focus for Griffin's group is on medication - whether prescribed by a vet or present in feed - and pest control. So if there's a problem with a load of feed, the producer should record the date, what the problem was, who they talked to about it and what action, if any, was taken. They might also collect feed samples - but instead of paying to have them tested, they would merely keep them so that the samples could be tested if a problem arose when the birds were sent for slaughter.
The system is based on Standard Operating Procedures (or SOPs). For example, in broiler barns, that means do a thorough cleanout of manure every six weeks and SOP details exactly how that procedure is to be done. If there is any deviation from the SOP, a note should be made in a logbook describing it. Most of the time, documentation would only take a minute or two.
Commodity associations across North America are doing similar work, and producers should contact the association in their province for more information.
The programs are voluntary, but there's a growing consensus in the agri-food industry that food processors and retailers will eventually require their suppliers to purchase only from producers enrolled in certified food safety programs.
This article is based on "An Introduction to on-farm food safety" published by the Canadian Farm Business Management Council and Canadian Federation of Agriculture. A free copy of the entire booklet can be downloaded from: http://www.farmcentre.com/english/downloads/foodsafety.htm
For more information on farm management, consult the web site of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council at www.farmcentre.com. Email: info@galbraithcommunications.com to provide article feedback.
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