Prevalence and cost of on-farm produce safety measures in the Mid-Atlantic

Abstract

We use data from a survey of leafy green and tomato growers in the Mid-Atlantic region to investigate the prevalence and cost of produce safety practices required under the Produce Rule of the Food Safety Modernization Act. Majorities of our respondents currently employ most of the food safety practices that will be required under the Produce Rule. But the Produce Rule will nevertheless require changes on the part of some growers. We find that farm size has a statistically and quantitatively negligible relationship with the use of most produce safety practices except for the sampling and testing of water, soil amendments, and product samples. Contrary to the theoretical literature suggesting that traceability increases incentives to take precautionary measures, we find little evidence that the use of produce safety practices is correlated with any marketing channel. We do find that all of these practices exhibit substantial increasing returns to scale, implying that the burden of complying with the provisions of the Produce Rule is much lower for large operations than small ones.

Assessing the costs and returns of on-farm food safety improvements: A survey of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) training participants

“…In other words, larger farms spend less on food safety improvements per acre than smaller ones. That result is consistent with the literature [9,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18] and to which we estimate directly in the regressions that follow. We are also interested in how the benefits of implementing additional food safety practices change with farm size.…”

“…result is consistent with the literature [9,[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. After accounting for farm size effects, the impact on food safety improvement costs by farms primarily marketing through DTC channels and whether the farm has had a 3PA are not statistically significant; i.e., they do not affect costs on their own.…”

“…Distributional implications across farms of different sizes regarding the costs of implementing improved food safety practices have received considerable attention. Studies using grower surveys or case studies have consistently found that expenditures on food safety practices increase with farm size but less than proportionally [9,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. In other words, smaller farms have higher average costs per acre in food safety investments relative to larger farms.…”

“…Second, we rely on a unique data set from GAPs training participants in New York State (NYS) that enumerates additional food safety investments made by producers as a result of the GAPs training received and the costs and benefits to producers from those investments. In so doing, we are able to explicitly account for changes in food safety costs relative to changes in food safety benefits, as opposed to most of the literature that examine the costs of existing food safety practices already in place [ 9 , 14 , 16 – 18 ]. GAPs programming evaluations have been conducted in other regions [ 20 , 21 ], but none formally considered the costs and returns to growers of food safety improvements as a result of the training programs.…”

Assessment of Biological Soil Amendments of Animal Origin Use, Research Needs, and Extension Opportunities in Organic Production

“…Several studies have described and characterized GAPs by highlighting food safety risks related to vegetables and fresh produce production (Hultberg et al, 2012;Tobin et al, 2013;Marine et al, 2016;Adalja and Lichtenberg, 2018a;Sinkel et al, 2018), but a few have focused on current food safety practices under the FSMA-PSR (Lichtenberg and Tselepidakis, 2016;Adalja and Lichtenberg, 2018a;Pires et al, 2018) or organic systems (NSAC, 2016). The present study differs by using several needs assessment tools (survey, in-person focus groups, and workshop) targeting mainly organic producers, stakeholders, researchers, and policy-makers across the U.S.…”