By Daniel Weller, Patrick Baur, and Aaron Adalja
Recent studies suggest that on-farm food safety practices can have unexpected economic and ecological impacts. Despite the potential for negative consequences, limited data are available on the costs and benefits of implementing specific practices. Co-managing farms for food safety and sustainability is further complicated, because farms are linked to adjacent environments; this means management decisions can have unexpected ecological, economic, and food safety consequences.
A comprehensive understanding of the links between agricultural and adjacent environments is key to ensuring environmental health, sustainability, and food safety. A new survey, funded by the Atkinson Center at Cornell University, promises to give a clearer picture of these linkages and what this means for growers.
To meet this need, a new collaborative research project between researchers at Cornell University, the University of California, and the University of Rochester is reaching out to growers in the Eastern United States to fill out a survey on food safety. The survey asks questions about:
Monetary and labor costs associated with on-farm food safety
Agricultural water use and treatment
Pest management
Conservation practices
Obstacles or difficulties growers have encountered.
Filling out the survey takes about 20 minutes, and all responses are confidential. The project will not only identify grower costs associated with various farm practices, but the information generated will also be integrated, using big-data analytics, into models to quantify trade-offs between different grower aims, including food safety, conservation and profit. This model will then be used to develop guidelines for how to best co-manage produce farms for these aims.
The first 300 people to complete the survey will be eligible for a $15 e-gift cards. The survey will be open through May 31st, 2020.
For additional information on the survey, contact the project directors, Dr. Daniel Weller (Daniel_Weller@urmc.rochester.edu), Aaron Adalja (aaron.adalja@cornell.edu), or Patrick Baur (pbaur@berkeley.edu).