Relationship Driven Food Safety Technical Assistance to California Small Farmers

Goals & Objectives #1 Strengthen relationships with BIPOC Farmers: 1)Attend four annual regional gatherings for two consecutive years and build relationships with BIPOC growers that are part of CAFF's farmer aggregation program in various parts of the state 2) Write related report.#2 Provide food safety office hours: 1)CAFF's marketing team will be conducting marketing field days and meetings with different growers around the state from 2022-2024, focused in the California Central Coast area2)Provide 1-on-1 food safety technical assistance to growers. It is likely that a large percentage of the growers that attend these field days will be BIPOC. #3 Offer Food Safety Partner Farm Program: CAFF has offered our Food Safety Partner Farm Program since 2018. This program provides growers with an in-depth collaboration over a few month period. This program originated from a 2018 FSOP proposal and out of the feedback we had received from BIPOC and beginning growers at the time, that one or two stand alone workshops was not very helpful for them. They wanted 1-on-1, in-depth, food safety guidance over a period of time. For the Food Safety Partner Farm program, growers determine their food safety goals at the start of the partnership and then we guide them through small steps that get them to the end goal (e.g. creating/updating a food safety plan and following it, being prepared for FSMA Inspections, etc). At the end of the partnership we host a field day with the grower to share with other local growers changes they've made and tips.#4 Create hands-on activities for the national alternative food safety curriculum: CAFF is a part of the national project team developing an alternative food safety training program that will be approved by FDA as an eligible training for farmers to take to meet the FSMA training requirement, referenced in 112.22(c) of the regulation. We have been involved in this project for years because we have seen first-hand that small-scale, socially disadvantaged, and beginning farmers need more hands-on training and material presented in short segments. We have completed many rounds of curriculum review by FDA and are anticipating getting approval to do a curriculum walk through in 2022. CAFF created the animal and sanitation modules for that curriculum. Through this FSOP project we would like to create optional hands-on add-on activities for those modules. The hands-on activities would include 1) farm sanitizing kit in a box (demonstrate with the supplies in the box how farmers can clean and sanitize postharvest areas), 2) farm tough first aid kit assembling and contents explanation, and 3) using flags to mark buffer zones around animal contamination in the field. These activities could be used outside of the official course and by other trainers around the country