Expanding the Capacity of Community-Based Produce Safety Educators to Serve Hard-to-Reach Farmers in the Mid-Atlantic

The project, Expanding the Capacity of Community-Based Produce Safety Educators to ServeHard-to-Reach Farmers in the Mid-Atlantic Region, will sustain and enhance the practice of our cohort of6 African American and community-based PSEs and provide technical assistance to economicallydisadvantaged, urban and hard-to-reach farmers. We will collaborate with trusted colleagues andcommunity-based partners to achieve the following 4 objectives.1. Provide advanced, train the trainer education and in-the-field experience for our cohort of 6community-based produce safety educators (PSEs) and the wider educator community. Includingbest practices in on-farm risk assessments, worker training, post-harvest handling, food safetyplan writing, and meeting wholesale buyer requirements.? Advanced training in risk assessment, post-harvest handling for wholesale readiness, andprofessional instruction in how to interpret GAP standards and develop food safetyprograms are skills and training that are not easily accessible to community-basededucators and small scale farmers. Even well-connected educators have difficultyacquiring such training unless they have experience working for large farms andaggregators, work for an institution, or a food safety certification body. Through a varietyof virtual and in-the-field trainings with produce safety educators from Maryland, NewMexico and South Carolina, our PSEs will benefit from a deeper dive into these areas,learn from diverse teachers, and connect with a wider network of community-basededucators.2. Provide opportunities for the PSEs to teach these topics in virtual and in-the-field educationalworkshops to 80 economically disadvantaged, urban and hard-to-reach specialty crop farmers.? It can be difficult for independent, community-based, food safety educators to gainprofessional experience as teachers when they are not part of an institution or agency thatprovides this education to farmers. We will collaborate with community partners to createopportunities for the PSEs to teach many aspects of produce safety, with continuedmentorship from LI Lindsay Gilmour and peer mentorship from other community-basededucators.?? Participants will include: the farmer apprentices and members of the Farm Alliance ofBaltimore, the farmer fellows and students of Acres4change and Green St Academy inBaltimore, rural farmers on the Eastern Shore hosted by Mighty Thundercloud EdibleForest, urban farmers in the Philadelphia area hosted by One Art Community Center andUrban Farm, rural farmers in Pennsylvania hosted by the PA Farmers Union.3. Identify in the mid-atlantic region 18 farmers to receive one-on-one coaching in produce safetyrisk assessment and worker training; and 6 farmers to receive one-on-one coaching to auditreadiness and compliance with food safety laws and certifications to enable them to enterwholesale markets.? Our PSEs will provide two levels of technical assistance to meet the specific needs of thegrower: For farmers who do not anticipate needing GAP certification but want tounderstand more about implementing food safety protocols on their farm, we will conducton-farm risk assessments and advise them on preventive or corrective action to mitigaterisk and what training, procedures or records they should put in place. To support farmersthat have a goal of scaling up and reaching new wholesale markets, we will provide a fullprogram of on-farm risk assessment and one-on-one coaching to develop a food safetyprogram customized for their operation, and help them achieve GAP audit readiness. Weprovide all the templates and a toolkit of resources.4. Maintain and enhance the Chesapeake Harvest website, video library, and social media presenceto provide replicable examples of a culture of food safety on farms, and useful information andresources for both educators and farmers.? We have already developed a library of longer (10-15 minute) on-farm videos on workertraining, risk assessment, ag water and other topics, our own and in partnership with thePA Farmers Union. We will continue to showcase farms in our region and addressfarmer's burning produce safety questions by capturing 20 very short videos ofreal-world farm solutions and mini interviews with farmers and other subject matterexperts. These short (1-2 minute) videos will be very practical for use in workshops andsharing via social media.? The website and especially the produce safety toolkits must be maintained, added to andup-dated to continue to be relevant. We will add our own and regularly scout for newtools and resources from other food safety service providers such as those in the regionalcenters' networks.