Growing a Network of GAPs Educators in the Upper Midwest

Growing a Network of GAPs Educators in the Upper Midwest

Summary

The overall goal of this project is to train people to be Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) educators and to increase the capacity of educators across their states to meet the needs of farmers in their own communities.

We aim to accomplish this by developing curricula and providing in-depth training and information about Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) and on-farm food safety practices to educators and other agricultural professionals who work with fruit and vegetable growers in Minnesota and the upper Midwest.

In 2015 this project hosted two, two-day training sessions to key agricultural educators and professionals in the region. Each training session included one day of classroom interactive learning about GAPs fundamentals.

At least one of the two workshop days took place nearby farm to provide a participatory experience and a chance to see fundamental applications of food safety practices.

Objectives/Performance Targets

The major objectives and performance targets of this project for 2015 include the following:

Learning Objectives

1. Extension educators and other ag educators are able to answer questions to community members and do 1 or 1.5 hour workshop on basic GAPs concepts.
2. Extension educators and other ag educators know where/who GAPs resources are and how to connect farmers to them.
3. Extension educators and other ag educators help overcome constraints to farmers implementing GAPs on their farms and writing food safety plans and help them prioritize.

Advisory Group was formed and includes farmers, agriculture professionals, Extension Educators, and Latino and Hmong agriculture professionals and farmers. The AG helped to develop goals, evaluation tools, outcomes and training activities and provided feedback and guidance to the project and reviewed our workshop training materials

Two 2-day hands-on GAPs train-the-trainer workshops were developed and implemented for agricultural professionals and Extension educators in the Upper Midwest. Educators participated in an intensive learning workshop on day 1 and were provided with tailored educational materials that they can then use with farmer constituents in their regions. Day 2 included hands-on learning at a nearby farm to see how farmers implement food safety and what sort of questions arise.

In 2015 the workshops were offered in the following regions of the state: Central Minnesota (June 2015) (n=12) and Northeastern Minnesota (October 2015) (n=4). 

Materials and food safety content:Project team continued building new and adapting existing farmer specific materials and materials from other states and state and federal agencies, tailoring them to Upper Midwest-specific educator audiences to reflect the typical cultural growing practices, vegetables and fruits grown, and environmental situations. Suggestions from educators were incorporated into a final product, the GAPs Toolkit.

Workshop content included:

Good Agricultural Practices. Background, epidemiology, governance and legislation updates, and in-depth coverage of the practices. In-depth coverage of the Produce Safety Rule was included in Year 2 after the FDA published the Proposed Rule for Standards for the Growing, Harvesting, Packing, and Holding of Produce for Human Consumption.

Most frequently asked questions from growers are included here and throughout to provide context for following material and to demonstrate how those questions could be answered.

Risk assessment and decision making. Discussion covered the ecology of pathogens, food safety risk factors on a farm, how to develop a framework for risk control, and decision-making tools to determine the most economically feasible risk reduction practices.

Identification of common hazards and risks for the region. While the hazards are the same throughout the US, local and regional variation exists and need to be considered when discussing manure and compost, irrigation water, washing and processing water, and wildlife and pest intrusions. Handwashing and worker health and hygiene, packinghouse and equipment cleanliness were covered. The available science behind the risk management guidance was provided.

Writing a food safety plan. Participants learned the purpose and benefits and practical aspects of creating individualized farm food safety plan. Examples and templates were provided.

Supplemental training materials. For participants who may be doing group teaching we provided instruction on adult learning styles and cultural teaching considerations when teaching immigrant and minority growers, how to facilitate a food safety workshop, and provide sample workshop agendas, PowerPoint slide sets, and resource lists.

Accomplishments/Milestones

An advisory board of key farmers and partners was created in Feb 2014 to help guide the project; five of the six same advisory board continued during Year 2 of this project. Members include:

• Atina Diffley, Organic farmer and consultant at Organic Farming Works, LLC
• Sandy and Lonny Dietz, Whitewater Gardens
• John Mesko, Sustainable Farming Association
• Janaki Fisher Merritt, Food Farm
• Hli Xyooj, Farmers’ Legal Action Group

During Year 2 the team continued to communicate with the project team members via in-person, email and phone to ask questions and for feedback on session design and ideas, as well as on materials development and review.

In addition to the advisory board, key partners in MN and ND Extension were consulted to help with participant recruitment and to plan the workshop. These connections were critical to ensure Extension employees understood the importance of GAPs and to tie it into their own training and educational goals.

Each 2-day workshop also had a Moodle online learning component. The online platform was used before, during and after the workshop to complement the in-person learning. One week prior to the workshop, each participant was set up with a Moodle account. Each participant was asked to introduce themselves electronically to the group and then take a 10-question quiz to determine their pre-workshop level of knowledge about GAPs. This homework allowed the team to tailor the information to the needs and level of understanding of the participants, and got the participants thinking about the topic area prior to the workshop.

The platform was also used for information sharing: the team posted all supporting food safety materials including videos on the Moodle site 1 week prior to the workshop. Participants had access before, during and after the workshop to the Moodle site, which served as one place where background food safety information, factsheets, published studies, videos, and USDA audit information could be found. Each participant continues to have access to these materials, as well as the jump drive and binder of materials that were handed out at the workshops.

Participants also completed “homework” after the workshop. They created a written lesson plan for a food safety topic that we assigned and posted it onto the Moodle so that other participants could view it. See summaries below for more details. 

Workshop Moodle Summaries YR 2

The following materials were handed out to all participants at each workshop. Material was put into a binder for each participant.

• Farm Risk Assessment Matrix
• Cornell University Decision Tree summary
• How to Write an SOP
• USDA list of SOPs
• USDA audit checklist
• Summary of Food Safety Modernization Act
• Food Safety Fact Sheets (5, full color)
• 1 Food safety jump drive with food safety plan template, videos and supporting documentation
• 1 Employee training DVD. Fruits, Vegetables, and Food Safety: Health and Hygiene on the Farm, Cornell University (English/Hmong or English/Spanish)

Workshops. Two workshops were held in 2015. 

Workshop 1. June 2015, in Avon Minnesota at Baker’s Acres a woman-owned and run organic vegetable farm (n=12). The workshop was held on the farm for both days. Teaching and demonstration were mixed in with both days instead of classroom first day and farm second day. Participants included Extension employees, agricultural non profit attorneys, immigrant farmer cooperative founders/leaders, food hub employees, and other non- profit and agricultural educators. 

• Participants learned GAPs fundamentals via a PPT that was tailored to provide the information they needed to have a firm grasp of food safety concepts, current regulatory framework and best on-farm practices
• Participants broke into small groups throughout the day to encourage active and participatory learning. They developed a short program that they could use to teach farmers about a food safety concept (which the groups presented to the larger group), and then brainstorming questions that a farmer would ask and what potential answers would be.
• Activities included writing a risk assessment for the farm and writing an SOP on a particular process at the farm. General discussion at the end included sharing information on how the educators will share the information with their farmer clients, what sort and what length of workshops will be most useful, and common questions that may arise from farmers
• Local area Extension educators brought new teaching ideas and tools to the workshop on day 2, including leading a demonstration teaching activity using the product GloGerm that showed “germs” on hands pre- and post- handwashing to show that germs can easily be missed on hands.

Workshop 2. October, 2015 Cloquet, Minnesota (n=4). Participants included Extension Educators from the area, Minnesota Farmers Market Association outreach and education staff, and tribal college faculty. [Note: there were 3 other people registered for this workshop prior to the date. However, at the last minute for various reasons they had to cancel and didn’t attend]. The project team worked hard to recruit for the workshop, including connecting with the Regional Sustainable Development Partnership, SARE and UMN Extension, who put the workshop in their local newsletter and called farmers individually. NC-SARE communications staff assisted with workshop promotions. There are not as many fruit and vegetable farmers in the area as in other parts of the state, and there are not as many Extension educators, which may explain the limited turnout.

Day 1 of the workshop was held at University of Minnesota Cloquet Forestry Station.

• Day 1 of the workshop mirrored the content delivered during Day 1 of the first workshop.

Day 2 was held at Janaki Fischer-Merritt’s Food Farm in Wrenshall, MN, an organic vegetable farm (Janaki is also part of our Advisory Team and a 2002 NC-SARE grant recipient for a Colorado potato beetle/crop rotation project).

• Participants toured the farm, storage and washing facility and learned about the food safety challenges, issues and practices he uses on his farm. 

Curriculum – Throughout the workshops the project team gathered information to develop into a Minnesota GAPs manual. The manual was reviewed by the advisory committee and farmers and changes were incorporated. This manual will be presented in the final report. 

Impacts and Contributions/Outcomes

General evaluation questions about course content, site, and classroom and farm activity components were asked and all respondents stated all activities were “very useful” or “useful.” Other options were “somewhat useful” and “not useful” and there were no responses in those categories.

Pre- and post-test questions were asked of participants confidence in their ability to help a farmer write a food safety plan, conduct an on-farm food safety self-audit, teach a short GAPs course, answer basic GAPs questions from a farmer, or help a farmer prepare for an audit.

The questions were Likert scale 1 to 5, with 1 being not confident to 5 being very confident. Participant confidence increased in all areas and was the greatest in their ability to teach a short GAPs workshop or lead a course from a mean of 1.90 to a mean of 3.80 (See Table 1).

SARE PDP 2015 Report Table 1

Two months after workshops we followed up with participants to see if and how they had applied the GAPs training in their work. A few people stated no formal interaction, “just informal conversations” or providing fact sheets or forms to farmers. Examples of what other educators had done two months after the workshop were: helping a grower complete a food safety plan and prepare for a GAPs audit; gave short GAPs presentations to at grower meetings; added the newly learned information to farmers market materials; held in-depth conversations with a grower about packshed designs; provided short hands-on assistance on writing food safety plans; and farm walk-throughs with growers.

Of course there are always areas where we can improve and we included evaluation questions for future or missed topics and suggestions for improvement. We made changes from the first workshop to the fourth and continue to tweak our content delivery, group activities, and mix of farm and classroom time. 

Other outcomes from the past year’s activities are closer ties and potential project with Extension staff around the state. By attending the workshops, Extension staff understand basic GAPs principles and who may need to know more about them, and have reached out to us to collaborate on projects to provide more education to farmers in their region.  

One other outcome is that at the Central MN workshop at Baker’s Acres a group of four Hmong-American farmers attended the training. These farmers are leaders of a Hmong-American farmer co-op in Dakota County, and now have led trainings and education with other farmers in their group on food safety. The group has started selling to Minneapolis Public Schools and using the training to write their food safety plans. Two attendees presented on food safety for farmers at the annual Immigrant and Minority Farmer’s Conference in St. Paul in Feb 2016 and stated that they hope to become trainers for their community on food safety and GAPs.

The Moodle Online Component was burdensome to use for non-University based workshop attendees. While we knew accounts would have to be set up and allowed time for that, we did not anticipate the amount of phone calls and step-by-step tutoring we needed to provide to help people first get signed into Moodle and then on the basics of how to use and navigate the Moodle environment.

One workshop was attended by a number of people who were educators in their communities but were not frequent computer users. This would be an issue when working with Amish or immigrant and minority grower groups as well. We decided to administer the Moodle quizzes on paper instead of using the Moodle online platform for those users. We did not use the Moodle online platform for Cohort 4 because of the small number of attendees and the large amount of time it would take to set up Moodle for a few people (we used paper at the workshop instead). 

We are pleased with the success of this project. Many participants have told us how much they appreciated learning this valuable information. We look forward to continuing to work with educators we met through this project.