Ep. 36. Good Ag Practices (GAP) and GroupGAP for Hawaii farmers

In this episode we speak with Lisa Rhoden, Food Safety Director with NSEVP on the island of Oahu about The Food Safety Modernization Act (or FSMA), water testing, and NSEVPʻs Group GAP program. GAP stands for Good Agricultural Practices and Lisa facilitates a group certification process for Hawaiʻi ag producers on all the islands.

Brought to you by University of Hawaii College of Tropical Ag. and Human Resources, and the Seeds of Well-being (SOW) Project. This podcast is supported by the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hawaii Department of Agriculture.

Resources:
- North Shore EVP
- NSEVP GroupGAP Intro video
- HeavyConnect App
Water Testing by Island
- Hawaii: Aileen Yeh (ayeh@hawaii.rr.com)
- Oahu: Ming Yi Wang at Hawaii Agriculture Research Center (mwang@harc-hspa.com)
- Maui: Aimee Greenwood (agreenwd888@gmail.com)
- Kauai: Lisa Rhoden (lisa@nsevp.org) or Carl Berg (cberg@pixi.com)
Lisaʻs contact information: lisa@nsevp.org
UH AgConnect Program

Find out more about us:

• Seeds Of Wellbeing website
• Seeds of Wellbeing Resource Hub
• All the SOW links

Transcript

Jim: 0:00

The views information or opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of individuals involved, and do not necessarily represent those of the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, our funders, or any of the organizations affiliated with this project. Welcome to a Seeds of Wellbeing"Experts in the Field" podcast featuring people working in their fields of expertise to provide support for agriculture producers in Hawaii, in the United States, and in some cases around the world. These podcasts were made possible by a grant from the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, also known as CTAHR. And the Seeds of Wellbeing or SOW project and is supported by a grant from the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the Hawaii Department of Agriculture. What's North Shore EVP?

Lisa Rhoden: 0:57

We are, well, it stands for North Shore Economic Vitality Partnership, and we are a nonprofit, originated on the North Shore of Oahu, really to look at economic opportunities for the region. And primarily the work that we're doing right now is food safety work statewide, but we remain committed, of course to the North Shore as well and the economic partnerships and projects that we can come up with for that area.

Jim: 1:25

That's North Shore of Oahu. Yes, yes. Okay. In this episode, we speak with Lisa Rhoden, Food Safety Director with the North Shore EVP on the island of Oahu, about the Food Safety Modernization Act or FISMA, water testing, and NSEVP's group GAP program. GAP stands for good agricultural practices and Lisa facilitates a group certification process for Hawaii ag producers on all the islands. Please note that when Lisa refers to working with Kevin at NSEVP, she's referring to Kevin Kelly, who is the president. Now let's hear more about the group GAP program. Keeping the country country is what I heard you say. Can you talk a little bit about that phrase?

Lisa Rhoden: 2:08

Yeah. Kevin was actually involved pretty heavily in that organization. And what they were really concerned with at the time was the fact that there was a lot of development pressure on the North Shore and they were looking at how do we sort of tamp that down a little bit? And it seemed, I think, like there was a lot of defensive maneuvering, and they really felt like we really need to go on the offense. And how do we convince people to preserve green space on the North Shore and really look at what are the jobs that we can create and enhance on the north shore for folks who live there. And that's where the study came, the clusters of opportunity study came from, it's on our website as well, but basically it boiled down to looking at what were the biggest economic drivers in the region. And it turned out that there was, of course, tourism, but also agriculture. And then a category of jobs that were more like remote type jobs, things that you could do anywhere and just happen to be folks were living on the North Shore and doing those jobs. So really, as a nonprofit, we're looking for ways to increase economic opportunities in Hawaii, particularly on the North Shore of Oahu. And food safety is just the tool that we're using at the moment to really move some of that forward.

Jim: 3:25

So I first noticed the work of North Nhore EVP a few years back and the phrase group GAP was was what caught my attention. I know, GAP stands for good agricultural practices. And I remember a couple years ago, maybe you did a presentation about group GAP, which I think at that time was a new concept, certainly new to me. And so is that when you came on board with North Shore EVP, is that your role? And are you folks kind of spearheading group GAP throughout the islands? And just talk a little bit about that if you would.

Lisa Rhoden: 3:59

Yeah, that is I came on board in, I want to say 2016 or so, and Kevin had approached me earlier in 2016, I had been introduced to him by a mutual friend who said, "Hey, there's somebody here who I think thinks very similarly to you." And I had expressed, I had been managing an ag park at the time and Kunia and I had expressed to this mutual acquaintance of ours that, "You know, gosh, I've got all these small farmers, but they've got nowhere to put all their products and they're not food safety certified." And that conversation came about because one of them one of the farmers had said "Oh, thinking about calling Whole Foods and see if they'll come out and look at my farm and want to buy my product" and I was looking at their farm and I was like, "Oh my god, please do not call Whole Foods. They do not want to see this" because it was just sort of a typical small farm operating on a shoestring, very disorganized looking, but they had not the best practices in place, and I knew that we could do better. And so I had mentioned this to our mutual acquaintance, who then put me in touch with Kevin and Kevin came out and we actually walked around the farms and toured that area. And I said, you know, I really feel like one, these guys need to get food safety certified to help them get into these markets, like Whole Foods. And two, we really need a hub, a big hub to take product. And that's where Kevin was, at the same time, unbeknownst to me, but involved on the North Shore. So a few months later, he called me up again, and he said, I'm, I'm going to submit a grant and I'm going to try to get funding and I want to do this, you know, I want to do this hub, and I want to help farmers get food safety certified and group GAP is the way to do it. And I had also found out about group GAP at a similar time and I thought the same thing. It's a perfect fit for small farmers. And so we started talking more regularly. He finally got word he had gotten the grant, he created a job description I interviewed for the job, and here I am working with Kevin, and for us it's been a I guess a couple of years now, what is it 2023, so almost seven years we've been working together. And we just we just think very similarly, and we see a lot of the same potential for these for this program and for our farmers here in the state.

Jim: 6:17

I think Kevin, and remind me Kevin, he's president of North Shore EVP, is he one of the founders?

Lisa Rhoden: 6:23

Yes, he is yes.

Jim: 6:24

Great. Have you been focusing a lot on food hubs and food coops? Has that been what what have you been targeting as part of the group GAP and your work that you've seen as most successful or has the potential to help the most?

Lisa Rhoden: 6:39

Yeah, initially, we were focused on food hubs and, and food safety for small farmers. And it, we spent some time trying to find a great site for a mid scale size food hub. We spent some time trying to find great partners for it. And we just, we just really weren't finding the right, all the right things coming together at the right time. Space, location partners, etc. At the same time, we were working on this food safety certification and group GAP establishing the group which took some time. And over the last couple of years, a lot of food hubs have popped up or grown particularly on Oahu, but across the state. And that happened, you know, really, it was exponential during COVID. The food hubs suddenly became really the place where all of this food was being aggregated. And so for us now I think we're we're interested now in helping food hubs if they want and need to get food safety certified at whatever point that's going to need to happen for them. We want to help them with that. We really put a lot more energy though lately into getting better at food safety certification for farmers. We have grown in terms of the number of farmers that we've serviced. Our first two cohorts we had a lot of farmers in there, but we did not see see succession, or success in certification on those guys. And we reevaluated and we looked at"Well, what's what's the problem? Where are we failing?" and it turned out to be record keeping, and so that was the big one anyway. And so we looked at how do we make this easier? And that's when we were looking for a digital record keeping app. We found Heavy Connect, got in touch with those guys, did a pilot program with three farmers using Heavy Connect, and we've saw tremendous success. And we thought this is it, this is this is going to fix this record keeping issue. Since then, we've had a lot more success on the record keeping side which has contributed to more farmers getting certified. We also have done a little bit more diligence in looking at the farms that we're inviting to join our program and looking for farms that want to grow, want to have a market that's opened up and have the infrastructure to be successful in this program. And not just you know, do they have a bathroom and things like that, but are they regular communicators? Can I reach out to them and they're gonna get back to me within a few days, if not sooner? Are they, do they know their processes? Do they have set processes or are they still growing and they haven't quite figured out what they're doing yet? So that's been a big piece. I think we've seen more success because we've just really focused down on that food safety certification part of the program. Also we are part of a monthly community of practice call with food safety, quality and folks around the country. And that's been really helpful too, because we've been able to learn a little bit about what goes on in other places. And I think we have this sense in Hawaii that we're so different. And things that work in other places aren't ever going to work here but I have found that at least in this sphere, we're wrong. There are so many similarities with the small farmers in Mississippi and Georgia and all these places, I can reach out to any of those folks in the group GAP community of practice and say, "Oh my gosh, here's what I'm dealing with. Do you have any experience with this?" And almost always somebody says "Yes" or "Oh, I'm in that same place right now." So we really have benefited from that. And our farmers have benefited from that.

Jim: 10:20

A couple of things that I was thought it asked you about is water testing. It sounds like as a regular need and it sounds like you have access to resources that can do water testing on all the islands. That's true

Lisa Rhoden: 10:32

Yes. A few years ago, Stevie Whelan at the Hawaii Ag Research Center, she received a grant, I think, from the Farm Bureau. And she was able to purchase some water quality testing supplies, and she got enough that they ended up on every island. So Maui, maybe not Molokai, but Maui, the Big Island here on Kauai and Oahu. And the idea behind it at the time was that the FISMA water quality standards, we thought, were going to be finalized and farmers were going to have to do all this testing. I think at the time, it was something like 20 tests in a year to establish a baseline. And we just thought,"Oh my gosh, what are we going to do to help these guys? We have nowhere to send this other than a few labs, which are going to be inundated, and it's expensive, and they're all on Oahu. What are the neighbor islands going to do?" So Stevie got a hold of this equipment, got some folks trained to do it, and we've provided free water quality sample testing to farmers all across the state for some time under this project. It's a really quick method, it's the same, it's called the Colilert method. It's it's approved for FISMA. And it's essentially take a sample of the water, it goes, you add media to it goes into the incubator for about 24 hours, and then you're going to take a look at the cells in in the tray. And you're going to look at how many of them turn color. One color for total Coliform, one color for generic E. Coli. And it's just a really great way to give farmers an idea of what their water quality looks like at a given point in time. I think if you establish sort of a regular testing schedule, you'll know, you know, during the rainy season, this is what my water looks like during the dry season this is what my water looks like. It's just a great way a great piece of information for folks to know what it looks like to know what to watch out for. If you've got limited water and you're having to bring water for cleaning. If you've got kids on the farm, you don't drink the irrigation water, you know, it's not for that kind of thing. But you know, just to understand really what it is. And we've had some success here on Kauai in talking with some land managers about ways that they could help improve the water quality. You know, keeping animals away from the ditches if possible, where possible, because that's a big contributor to poor water quality. And we just want to be aware of it. You know, so many of our farmers, that's it, surface water is what they have. And we got it.

Jim: 13:08

And it can be certainly in short supply or in some parts of the island way too much certain times of year, so yeah. Understood. So you mentioned I think you mentioned a harmonized GAP is the standard use in Hawaii. And and that I think I heard you say that it was similar to the Food Safety matter... Let me try again... it's similar to the Food Safety Modernization Act or FISMA requirements. Is that true for Hawaii? So are they pretty close?

Lisa Rhoden: 13:38

They are. So back when GAP was established by USDA in 2002. There was just GAP, which was essentially a checklist. It was a very simple audit. And over time, they have added different audit standards. So there's a specific one for tomato production. There's one from mushrooms. When FISMA was introduced, USDA kind of took a look at the old GAP and thought it's not very robust, and now we've got FISMA, which is very robust, so we need something to sort of bridge that space. And so they came up with what's called a harmonized gap. And it's essentially something that covers everything that FISMA covers, in some places, it's a little bit more covers a little bit more or is a little bit more robust in its requirements. And the idea behind it was, particularly for farms who maybe have a qualified exemption from FISMA, but their buyers still want to see some verification. And harmonized GAP or any any GAP certification would suffice, right? Your buyer wants to see that you have a third party audit. So harmonized GAP is more closely related to FISMA, closer to FISMA requirements. And so a farmer then can say "Well, I don't have to comply with everything in FISMA but I've got this harmonized GAAP certification." As as they grow, if they do have to comply with everything in FISMA, they're already in good shape, they're already complying because harmonized GAP is so synchronous with FISMA. And there has been some talk about folks who are harmonized, GAAP certified, as FDA does begin doing inspections, if they see that you're already harmonized GAP certified, you're probably not going to be on the short list of FDA inspections because they don't have to worry about you. They know you've had a third party audit, they know you're following these compliance criteria. It's the farms who maybe don't have anything to show that they may be like, we're gonna go take a look at this one.

Jim: 15:40

It's a really interesting program. As you know, again, as I understand it, FISMA once you hit certain limits of of how much revenue you generate, or to whom you're selling products, and to get into certain markets, you have to have that certification, follow those requirements, I think GAAP is optional for now but potentially valuable to hold up there as as something that you can set you apart as a producer, and get you ready for markets like we talked about. But I think the Seeds of Wellbeing project, right, which is why we're here, it's we interviewed over 400 ag producers and affiliates on the Hawaiian Islands and they have a lot of stressors, right? I think one of them is keeping up with paperwork and certifications. So I guess what would you share as kind of a, a short sentence or description to say when ag producers that are listening to this might want to pay attention to group GAP, GAP, FISMA? When would I as a producer need to start to really pay attention to that and and make sure I'm in compliance?

Lisa Rhoden: 16:49

Sure. Well, I think if you're selling to any entity that's beyond a direct to consumer, if you're looking to get into institutional purchasing, which is becoming a big buzz, so you want to sell to schools or your local hospital or something like that, you really need to start to keep records and be able to show those buyers that you have food safety practices in place and documentation of them. And as far as group GAP goes, you know, when you start to when you start to get to that point where you're growing, and you really want to have a little bit more market access you or you need certification, one of your buyers has said, "Hey, we're going to start requiring this in the next year or two." then I would say reach out to us. Because really, what we're here to do is help alleviate that administrative burden. We want farmers to farm and to farm well, and all the documentation and stuff, we want to help you with that so that you can pay attention to what you do well, and we will pay attention to what we do well. I am not a farmer but I can do a pretty good job of helping you with documentation of your practices. And that's really what we want to provide. We want to make it equitable for small farms, they don't have food safety managers? We want to help with that.

Jim: 17:58

Sounds great. Thanks for that summary. That's, that's helpful. So I will take pieces from the longer course that you were kind enough to provide to the UH AgConnect course and their cohort. I think there may be a YouTube recording somewhere that you've done in the past as well, that you're okay with me sharing that as well as the link in the notes of the podcast. I think I could offer that. So people get the full version of the overview of the program. Or we could even use the one from UH AgConnect is that if that's okay with you. So let's, let's try to come up with some resources that we could share in the notes and people, your website, of course, and ways to get a hold of you if they're interested.

Lisa Rhoden: 18:42

That sounds perfect. Yeah, we do have a YouTube channel. We have some group GAP webinars on there, as well as some publicly available, what we call, employee trainings. So that's an area where sometimes farms aren't really gonna have the time, or they don't know how to train their employees on some of these practices. So we have a whole series up there. There's probably about nine or 10 videos that they can watch to.

Jim: 19:07

When Lisa recently met the University of Hawaii's AgConnect program about group GAP. We decided to record it and will now share some excerpts from the meeting to highlight some of the key points. We hope you find this helpful.

Lisa Rhoden: 19:19

I'm going to talk a bit about a couple of things, one little bit about our program. So what are we doing? Who are we? GAPs, history FISMA history, those are sort of confusing terms for folks. They don't exactly mean the same thing, but they're in the same space. So cover a little bit about that. Basics of FISMA. People always want to know a little bit about it and whether or not they're exempt. Differences between GAP and FISMA. What is GAP about? Why is it useful? Why do we care about it? I'll talk a little bit about general best practices on the farm. Sort of overall things that you should know about if you're growing food for consumption. And then specifically, I'll talk about group GAP and how it works. How is it a little bit different from what we call traditional GAP or GAP that was around prior to group GAP. To talk a little bit about the history of GAP, it's an acronym people use it all the time. It stands for good agricultural practices. USDA GAP is the most popular food safety certification available. There are other things out there you can get. You may hear people talk about Primus, that is a food safety audit that is typically required by Costco for example. GFSI is another one, which is global food safety standard. Global gap is another one. But USDA GAP is the most commonly required one. It was established in the early 2000s. and it was again put in place by USDA to allow a producer a way to show verification of their practices that they were preventing or trying to prevent trying to minimize the potential for foodborne illness coming from their product. It is voluntary. So GAP is what's called a buyer driven audit, which means that you don't have to do it but your buyer may say,"I'm not going to buy from you unless you are food safety certified in USDA GAP." So it is the buyers choice. Whatever audit scheme they wish to work in or have a farmer or supplier do, that is their choice. So for the farmer, it's not voluntary, but if you're in a position where you really want to sell to a particular buyer who's requiring it, then it kind of goes into that gray area. It's not, it's not required, but it is required because you can't sell to this buyer unless you have it. So GAP is pretty common. On the mainland, particularly, it's very well known. FISMA, on the other hand, newer a little bit more confusing. FISMA is an acronym for the Food Safety Modernization Act. And it was written because in the early 2000s, right around the time kind of GAP got introduced, there were a number of food illness outbreaks that really caught the attention of the nation because they were spread out across the country, and they were pretty bad. One of them had to do with spinach, it was the E. coli infection. It killed a number of people. And other one was cantaloupes. People have probably or you may remember if you haven't heard of it recently, but there was a big one that was related to beef that was Jack in the Box, I think. That really set the stage for people just start worrying about this because a small, a young child died in that one. So food safety became all of a sudden something that everyone was really paying attention to to the point that nationwide, it became something that leaders were looking at. And so FISMA was starting to be written. And the idea was really to strengthen the supply chain from farm to fork to prevent foodborne illness as much as possible. There are seven pieces to FISMA legislation, there is the Produce Safety Rule, which covers farm operations, that's what most farms or farmers are aware of. And that is what establishes the standards for growing, harvesting, packing, holding any of the fruits and vegetables that people eat, particularly the ones that are eaten raw. If it's something that is never eaten raw, it's likely not covered under FISMA. So we'll talk little bit about that in a minute. Farms, generally speaking, if you're of a certain size, you're gonna have to comply with some portion of FISMA. You may be eligible for an exemption. There are exemptions, qualified exemptions and a full exemption as well, depending on the size of your farm. And by size, what we mean is income and where you're selling your product and how much of it you're selling direct to consumer. So basically, if you grow a product for human consumption, if you wash it, pack it hold it any of those things, any combination of those things, you are probably covered under FISMA, especially if that produce is on the, not on the rarely consumed raw list. So if it's something that you might eat raw like lettuce, tomatoes, etc. that's going to be covered by FISMA. There are exemptions and as I mentioned, one of them has to do with income. So if you on your farm made less than, and this is a little bit off,$25,000 a year in produce sales, that would be adjusted for inflation, so it's probably a little closer maybe to $28 or$29,000 now, but essentially, that would mean that you're not you don't have to comply. You are exempt, fully exempt. A qualified exemption is that you are selling your product, more then half of it 51%, directly to a qualified end user, which is a consumer, so directly to a consumer to a restaurant or retail within 275 miles or in the same state. So for Hawaii, most of our farms would fall under this qualified exemption. Most of our farms are selling more than half of their product directly to a consumer or a restaurant or within the state. So you really as a person, if you're worried about having to comply with FISMA, in most cases, you're probably going to have a qualified exemption. What is GAP then? So we talk about FISMA. We talk about GAP, they're not exactly the same thing. And GAP again, good agricultural practices, it is voluntary, whereas FISMA is the law. So FISMA is not voluntary. That's why it provides that exemption for certain size farms. For GAP it's really about how do you show that you are doing all of these practices, best recommended practices? And how do you show that you've thought through the potential contamination that might happen on your farm or around your farm? How are you keeping your product safe? It covers a lot of different things. It's not just about cleaning and sanitizing. It's also about how did you train your workers? are you monitoring regularly? And how are these things verified? So keeping documentation is a really big key piece of GAP. Because really, your practices are going to be verified through an audit process. And when an auditor comes to your farm, they're just there for that one day. They're going to watch what you're doing, they're going to see your processes. But in order to really assess whether or not you've been doing all of these things all this time, they really need to see documentation and that's where those records come in, that documentation that shows "Yes, I regularly do cleaning and sanitizing of my harvest tools. I always log my harvest, I know exactly what I got and where it's going." So this is how we verify that these practices are being done by reviewing these records and reviewing the procedures. For GAP typically, an audit will be done once a year by USDA. They'll also be follow up audits done intermittently. So that's kind of an opportunity for them. Typically a shorter audit, they'll come out to the farm and just check up on everything and make sure that yes, you have records for the last few months since they've been there. Yes, you're still doing basically the same procedures as you were before. So why do we care about GAP? Why is it helpful? I like to think of it as kind of like car insurance. It protects you in the event that something happens. Now, of course, we hope nothing happens, and for the most part, we don't see a lot of evidence of that, particularly in Hawaii. But that may just be because we're not very good at tracking it. So having that GAP certification or following good agricultural practices and having records even if you're not certified, it goes a long way to showing someone, if you need to, that you do have all of these practices in place. It's also important for buyers. Buyers like to have some assurance, some verification that you are following these best recommended practices. And even better that you've had an audit by a third party who has come into your farm, seen what you're doing, and verify that that's exactly what they are expecting to see. For a buyer it reduces their risk, right? It reduces their concern and their potential liability. And it gives you a market advantage, particularly in Hawaii. Not that many farms are GAP certified or have any food safety certification. So it's a branding opportunity to put that out there to say "I have gone through this process, the USDA has come to my farm, they agree that I am doing all the things I'm supposed to be doing." In fact, if you go through the GAP process, and you get audited, your farm would be listed on the USDA website. So anyone can look it up and see, yes, you meet the compliance criteria for GAP. So why do we care about it, though? Why is it such a big deal? I get that question a lot, particularly from folks who say,"Well, you know, we don't see food safety, illnesses coming from small farms in Hawaii. We don't see that small farms cause these big problems." And I would say for that one, I think that's not necessarily the case. We probably do have that happen. We just don't have a good way to track it. People don't remember that they got sick. Maybe they had bought, you know, something from a roadside stand. They didn't wash it. They don't put those two things together necessarily. And most of the time, we're not keeping good enough documentation to know anyway. It's also important to remember that contamination comes from many places and it's all often not something that's visible or very easily seen. So when we have things like curly kale, we've got tomatoes with scarring or bruising, those are potential for contamination to get in there of some kind. If we don't wash our kale, well we've got little bit of stuff stuck in there, maybe we've got a snail in there we don't know about. So those are things that we just need to keep in mind. As far as where can contamination come from, sometimes it's just part of our environment. And we don't know what the person who buys our product is going to do with it, when they go home. We hope that they're going to wash it themselves but that's not always the case. Sometimes people buy stuff, they put it straight in the blender, they don't wash it, they don't rinse it, they don't do anything with it, other than eat it right away. So on the farm side, we want to be sure we're doing everything we can to prevent any potential illness from happening. This is everyone's favorite topic. No one really likes to keep records and I get it. But if you don't keep them, you really don't have one any evidence that you've been doing all of these best practices. And two, you don't really have a way to show your progress. So I always recommend to folks try to keep records as best you can. Even if you're not trying to get food safety certified. There are a lot of reasons why you want to keep them aside from food safety. One is that it's your commitment to what you're doing, right. It's a history of the work that you've done. It shows your inputs, it shows your outcomes. So you have a really good set of documents to show your progress, I have had an operation tell me that because of their record keeping, they were able to show donors that they produce this much more from one year to the next and they were able to hire this many extra people. So understanding that having that data can be useful. It might be a grant that you're applying for, it might be a donor that's looking into investing in your operation, but having a clear set of data to show this is what I've been doing and this is where I've come is really, really key. So however you want to do your records, doesn't really matter if it's on paper, you want to do it digitally or Google Sheets is a great way to do it. Whatever it is, just keep records, set yourself up with some kind of system that works for you that you feel comfortable with, and then try to do your best to complete them every single day. Lately, over the last couple of years in our program, we have been using a product called Heavy Connect and it is a digital record keeping system. We love it. I like to call it the glitter and unicorns of record keeping. It's a digital system. It's not the only one out there but it's one that is specific to food safety so we really like it for that reason. And it's just wonderful because basically it goes on your mobile device, so on your phone or on an iPad. We put all of the records in here for our group, it has templates as well. So if there's a record that you don't feel like producing yourself, you can use the template, but essentially, it's a very simple way to go through and identify what you did in a day. So why all this care about food safety? Why do we care about getting certified? Well, the big reason to us and I mentioned this earlier is, you know, we were looking at how do we boost ag how do we have a more thriving ag production in our state. And we know that we import a ton of our food 85 to 90% by most accounts, and yet the state had a goal to double local food production by 2020. That was back in 2016. We're now two years, three years past that. In the last couple of years, the state has actually mandated that institutional purchasing boost up and start buying a lot more local product. So how are we going to make this happen? Because we haven't had this opportunity to do it yet. We've got a lot of small farms, but they're not selling into these markets. And again, that is because in many cases they don't have food safety documentation. They're not food safety certified. These larger markets just won't or can't take their product. So if we look at how do we make ag a thriving industry here in Hawaii, one of the ways to do it is help these small farms get certified so that they can start to fill in these markets, these gaps that we have. Institutional markets, bigger buyers like HFA and Y, Hata, and ChefZone. We have the production capacity to do this. We have a ton of small farms in this state. We're just not really helping them get to where they need to be. So for Northshore EVP this is our big goal. This is what we realize this is how we help small farms by enabling them to compete more successfully in the marketplace. One thing that we want to do is level the playing field. Big farms, they have farm food safety managers, they have the capacity to hire someone to just do that farm food safety work. So that's what we want to do, we want to be that for small farmers. That allows them then to get that food safety certification, compete more equitably with the bigger guys. We also want still to work on helping folks achieve an aggregation or food hub facility. Midsize food hubs, midsize aggregation facilities, that's a place where a lot of small farmers can hurry up their product. And then a retailer can be assured that they're going to get what they need, in the consistency that they need, the quality that they need. So by putting all these small farms together and their product together in one place, we start to address those concerns that these bigger buyers have with small farms. And that is, namely that they're inconsistent, the quality isn't there, or they just don't have enough, right. So by huiing, together, by setting up these mid scale aggregation facilities, we address that issue. We address that concern that the big guys have. And then we're also working on that food safety certification or documentation that the buyer requires. So again, we're addressing all of these issues. And that's going to help these small guys be able to compete more successfully with the big guys that are out there. So this is where group GAP comes in group GAP is a little bit different. It was a response by USDA from smaller growers who said, "I want to get GAP certified but it's out of my reach. I don't have a person to manage it. It's too expensive. It's too hard." All of these things that that small growers said. And so USDA was like,"Okay, how do we make this happen for smaller farms?" So they came up with the idea of group GAP. It is a USDA program. There are specific requirements that a group has to follow to become an authorized group GAP group and to stay a group GAP group. Our group here in Hawaii, we work under the harmonized GAP standard. So that is the standard that is synchronous, essentially with FISMA. So basically, that means that FISMA requirements and harmonized GAP requirements are very, very similar. In many cases, they're similar or the same. In a few cases, harmonized GAP requirements are a little bit more robust than FISMA. But group GAP allows a group of farms, even food hubs, marketing organizations, it allows them all to work together under one system to get that certification. So essentially, all of the farms are working together. They're all kind of following the same practices or similar practices, following the same procedures, and then the group will be audited together. So if one farm doesn't do well, that's okay. They basically have their corrective actions that they need to take care of. Everybody else is going to get certified. We started looking at this as a way to help small farmers in Hawaii. We saw that it was a really good fit and we started working on our group procedures, got authorized by USDA in January of 2020. In March of last year, about a year ago, we actually merged with another big group GAP group on the mainland and it's administered by Fresh Systems. This is a really big group, that's about seven different states that are involved. And they have a number of group GAP groups within those states. But it comes up to about 60 farms. This is a good opportunity for us, for a couple of reasons. We wanted to merge with them because USDA didn't see any reason why we couldn't do that. There was no specific requirement that it had to be regional. And so we thought, well, if we do this, we've got all of this technical expertise from folks on the mainland who have group GAP groups. We've also got a much larger pool of farms so when it comes to looking at how many farms in the group will be audited, we've got a much bigger pool that reduces the number of farms in our group that would be audited every year. And it's just a really great way to share, right? There are a lot of similarities with rural farms on the mainland and rural farms in Hawaii, more than I would have expected. But we started working with this group and we started to see that they had a lot of the same challenges that we have. So there's really a lot of power in that to brainstorm, to work together, to ask for advice, and we found it to be really helpful. So the way that group GAP and regular GAP work or are different? Regular GAP, the way that it had been prior to group GAP coming along, a farm would prepare for that audit, do all of their record key thing, right, their farm food safety plan, all of the documentation that they need, they're gathering on their own, and then they have an audit on their own. They pay for that audit. So the audit cost goes to the farmer. And typically, as I mentioned, you're going to have a follow up audit in that year as well. Under group GAP, it's a little bit different structure. The farms, all the farms in the group work under what's called a QMS, a quality management system that's managed by an entity or group manager. So in our case, that is Fresh Systems. Fresh Systems manages our quality management system, they have set the procedures and they make sure that we're all following them. We prepare our farms for their audit together. So all of the Hawaii farms work together with us, with Northshore EVP. We work individually with each farm. We also do classes, we help them write their farm food safety plan, we go through the risk assessments and we help them start their record keeping. Once in the year, each farm in our group is going to have an internal audit and what's called an unannounced audit. So two audits a year done by us. That gives us a really good sense of where are you? Are you ready for the USDA audit? Are there some things that we're not quite feeling compliant on we're going to work on? And when it comes time for the actual USDA audits, we're going to submit all of our farms to USDA together along with all the other farms in that big huge Fresh Systems group. USDA will say okay, you've got, let's say about 50 Farms, we're going to audit the square root number of that, which would be about seven. So all across those seven states, seven farms out of those are going to be audited, give or take. The USDA will look at all of our internal audit records so they know which farms are in our group, they know who's doing well, they know if there's somebody who's got some corrective actions, and they're going to choose which farms they want to come see. Once they do that they do those audits, again, if everybody passes, the whole group gets certified. If there are some farms that didn't pass, that's okay, they do their corrective actions, the whole rest of the group gets certified. Once those farms who have their corrective actions take care of those and they receive a follow up audit, they will get their certification as well. One of the biggest benefits to this is that every single farm in our group pays a flat fee, they pay that into basically the kitty, and we pay the audit costs out of that. So every year if you're in group GAP, you know what your costs are going to be. versus regular GAP, you do that on your own, you don't exactly know how much it's going to cost because you don't know how many hours the audit is going to take. And then that is the bill that's going to come to you. And then to provide I guess, a little extra robustness, the entity that manages the procedures, Fresh Systems, they get an audit every year by USDA too. So USDA is really checking on overall the procedures of this group, how does this work? Is that working? Are they meeting the requirements? And then they're also going to look at all of the farms as well in the group in one way or another. So for our program here in Hawaii, again, we are we are working with Fresh Systems, they they manage the administrative side of it. On the ground here in Hawaii, the way that we do this is that we hold a recruitment period. So once a year, anyone can apply. We will take those applications and we will go and meet with the farm and kind of take a look at what does it look like? How are things set up? Is it organized? Is there anything missing? Infrastructure? Do you have a bathroom? Do you have a place to wash hands? What are you producing? Where are you selling? That will help us determine if the farm is ready to enter into this program. If we have a farm, for example, that doesn't have a working bathroom, that's going to be a point of concern where we're going to say, "Well, you need to get that before we can start working with you because not having a bathroom is not acceptable, we're not going to be able to get you certified without that." Once we get our group going, we do group training and one on one training. Our group training is in the form of classes that we start off with going through the entire harmonized GAP audit, so we understand what's in there and what's required. And then once that is done, we begin to work with every individual farm, preparing their risk assessment, their documentation. And overall this really is just a big network of farmers who are kind of all thinking the same thing."We want to open up our markets. We want to get food safety certified." And we do those internal audits twice a year as well. So you will get visits from us to come out and we will do those audits with you and give you a sense of you know, how good are you doing in terms of being compliant with the USDA standard? We kind of break our work down into what we call tiers. So in the first tier, that's kind of the basics. We're looking at your record keeping, we're gonna go over food safety, basics and culture and we're going to talk about traceability, because that's a really key piece of understanding, being able to trace documentation wise where your product went, and what did it what happened to it when it was still on the farm. Then we move into what we call tier two, that's risk assessments. So we kind of look at where are all the possible places on your farm that contamination could come from and what do you have set up to do about it? In most cases, this is a pretty rigorous meeting. But it's also a meeting where we find that most farmers already have a lot of procedures in place, they're just not written down. So we take that on, we write that down, and we use that information to write a farm food safety plan. At the same time, we're going to be gathering the other documentation that we would need. So water quality results, if you have any pesticides being used on the farm, you're going to need WPS trainings, we make sure that you get that. Any of the documentation that's required outside of your farm food safety plan. And then the last tier essentially is, if you want to get an audit, you're going to be preparing for that audit. So if you are chosen, we will attend the audit with you. Otherwise, we're going to be doing your internal audits and submitting those reports to USDA, if they don't see any problem with it, and you pass those, you're going to get your certification. So what we're doing is we're auditing the procedures at a farm with respect to those particular products. So as an example, if you are growing cucumbers, leafy greens, herbs, swiss chard, that kind of stuff and let's say tomatoes, and you want to get certified all of those products, we would come out, we would look at your procedures, and we're going to look at the harvest procedure for all of those things. Now, for leafy greens, if your procedure for lettuce, swiss chard, kale is all the same, we don't need to see every single one of those things harvested, we would just look at one of them, because you're using the same procedure for everything. But your tomato procedure is different, that's going to be looked at. If your cucumber procedure is different, we're gonna look at that too. Then, if you go somewhere else, so let's say you you open up a second farm, then you could get that farm certified as well. And same thing, we're going to come out and look at the procedures on that farm. Every every farm site, every crop is going to be reviewed. And that's every year. So you're gonna have that review, you're gonna have to maintain your records, all of that, you know, every single year is the same process. When you introduce a new crop that's going to be audited as well. So if you say, oh, now I'm gonna grow pumpkins, I'm gonna add that, same same thing. We're gonna come out and we're gonna be like, "Alright, I want to see your pumpkin harvest. Let me see your whole procedure here. What do you do?" If you move and you like you give up your farm and you go somewhere else, then you're not, there's no more certification until you establish something at a new place.

Jim: 48:09

We thank Lisa for sharing details of the group GAP program and to the AgConnect cohort for their willingness to share excerpts from their review session in our podcasts. As described. GAP certification, while not mandatory, can open up opportunities for selling into certain markets like schools. And since the process to get GAP certified may seem like a burden, or even overwhelming to a small scale farmer, this Northshore EVP group GAP program can make it much easier and can also help ensure that our locally produced food is following these food safety standards.

Lisa Rhoden: 48:41

I just wanted to talk a minute about what what do we see as a successful program because really, we can do this kind of stuff all day but we need to have a measure, right? What's our measure of success? What we really want to see is that this program is serving farmers. That we're getting folks certified and helping them open up their new markets. So we want to see farmers who want to work with us, farmers who are dedicated really to to growing their markets, farmers who are looking for food safety certification, or at least food safety documentation, folks who really want to maybe increase their production or at least be producing and have consistent markets to sell it into. Ideally, we'd also like to see that this helps a farmer reduce their post harvest work. Because if your food safety certified, you can move your product over to someone, some distributor, there's a lot less work for you to do in terms of getting it out to a farmers market or some other place where that's a lot more work on your end. And of course, we want folks who want to be a part of a network, because that's really how this works. It's a community and we're really trying to sort of elevate that for farmers in Hawaii that you have a place to go to, to ask questions, to get help, to help you grow bigger and be more successful and access new markets. So ideally, that's what success looks like to us and, you know, at the at the apex of this we have local food everywhere because it's widely available and we have a lot of farmers who are certified and able to get it out there.

Jim: 50:16

The intention of this podcast series is to create a safe space for respectful and inclusive dialogue. With people from across a broad and diverse spectrum involved in growing and making accessible the food we share together. The diversity of voices, perspectives and experiences can serve to deepen mutual understanding, to spark creative problem solving, and provide insight into the complexities of our agricultural system. If you, our listeners, have experiences with Hawaii agricultural ecosystems, from small holder farms to large even including multinational agricultural industrial companies, or anywhere in between, and you would like to share your story, please contact us. We welcome your voices and perspectives