University Place

Keeping Produce Safe and People Healthy

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center and the Division of Extension. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and UW-Madison’s Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year by Zoom. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Kristin Krokowski. She was born in Toledo, Ohio and went to high school there. And then she went to Sitka, Alaska to study at Sheldon Jackson College, Environmental Sciences. Then she went to the Peace Corps and served in Kenya. She came back to the United States to study at Purdue University to get her Masters in Horticulture.

And for the last 20 years, she’s been the commercial horticulture educator statewide for the Division of Extension. Tonight, she’s gonna talk with us about keeping produce safe and people healthy. Please join me in welcoming Kristin Krokowski to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

– Thank you, Tom. So I thought it would be best to start off with a little bit of introduction before I start talking about produce and keeping produce safe and what farmers do to make sure that their produce is safe for people, and that their customers are staying safe during this time of COVID. Just to give you a little context about myself, Tom did mention that I work for UW-Madison Extension. I work throughout the state, but I am housed in Waukesha County. I work a lot with fruit and vegetable growers throughout the state, but I also do some programming with landscape and green industry folks too. And then I work extensively with farmers markets around the state. I am the director of the Wisconsin Farmers Market Association.

I work with a volunteer board of market managers that are managers for Wisconsin markets. And we serve to support and educate farmers market managers throughout the state to help them provide a good place for farmers to go and sell their produce, and for communities to go and kind of get together and share with each other. And then last but not least, I am a farmer’s wife; my husband is a fresh market vegetable grower. So I have a lot of kind of basic hands-on experience with being at farmers markets and growing produce. So when we talk about these things, a lot of these things aren’t just based in science and theory, but they’re definitely based on kind of where the rubber hits the road and kind of taking the concepts that we get from scientists and from our specialists and researchers at the university and trying to figure out ways to apply them successfully on the farm in a way that makes sense for farmers, and it’s cost-effective and efficient. So we’re gonna start off talking about what is produce safety. I think a lot of people may have not heard of the concept produce safety, but I promise you that fruit and vegetable farmers and all sorts of other farmers are very aware of what this is. There are certain bacteria, and we’ve heard of a lot of them. Things like listeria and salmonella and E. coli, they’re bacteria and viruses and parasites.

And these are just those bacteria, parasites, and viruses that cause human illness. So there are lots of illnesses out there, we’re concerned on growing food for people. So we wanna make sure that the food grown for people is safe for people to eat, and they’re not going to get sick from eating produce. So produce has been grown for centuries. But in recent years, probably the last 20 or 30, just due to different ways that we grow it, distribute produce, we’ve had an increasing occurrence of foodborne illness associated with produce. And you may have heard of some of the produce, produce safety scares with things like tomatoes, the first really big one was spinach. But all of these things are produce that we want people to eat to stay healthy, so our goal is to make sure that they can safely eat those. For a long time, the federal government kind of put out guidance and asked people to follow certain rules and to try to make these foodborne illness problems less of a problem. But the guidance and the self-regulation didn’t quite work. And we saw the number of foodborne illnesses increase, continue to increase.

So the federal government ended up deciding that it needed to be regulated on a federal level. In response to that, the Food Safety Modernization Act was passed in 2011. And it covers the entire food system. So it’s not just produce; produce is actually the smallest part of it. It covers manufactured food, food processing, food for animals like dog food, and it also covers the produce that comes into our country from overseas. So that there’s kind of an even playing field and everything that’s coming to this country and being eaten here by people who live in the United States is subject to a certain standard to make sure that people can. . . don’t have to be concerned that they’re gonna eat something that’s gonna make them sick. So we try to make sure that we do reduce that risk whenever possible, and that Food Safety Modernization Act has to do with the entire food system.

But today, we’re gonna talk about the Produce Safety rule. And this is the one part of the rule that affects produce growers. Produce growers have been subject for a long time to expectations of buyers to have something called a food safety plan, which is very similar to what is done in the Produce Safety rule. And other places will ask you to have a third-party audit. These third-party audits are kind of very similar also. They’re a private audit, and there are a lot of different ones. And those are audits that also kind of lay out the practices that people are doing on the farm to try to reduce those risk of foodborne illness to customers. This slide is about outbreaks associated with produce. So it’s really important to understand that different produce kind of poses different risk. And a lot of that has to do with where it’s grown, kind of the the way the produce is, the texture, the size when it’s grown.

So if you look at this slide, you’ll notice that the two biggest causes of foodborne illness are leafy greens and sprouts. Sprouts, because of the way they’re grown. They’re grown kind of, start with a bean and you’re in this big cylinder and it’s using warm water. And warm, humid environments are just kind of the perfect environment for some of these foodborne illnesses to take hold and grow. And once they’re there, sometimes they’re really difficult to get out of the equipment. So sprouts actually has its own special category and its own special level of testing for water and testing for foodborne illness in those facilities that grow sprouts. And then, leafy greens is the other big one. And of course, we all heard of spinach, and that’s kind of where all of this started. But a lot of leafy greens are field packed. So they’re.

. . The tractors will go out with the harvesters and they’ll cut them and bagged them right there in the field, sometimes there’s a wash step. But that practice kind of led to some of these foodborne illnesses. So they’ve had to kind of rethink that process and easier ways to do it. Leafy greens, a lot of them, if you think of things like lettuce, also have the additional complication of being bumpy. And whenever you try to wash a bumpy surface, if you compare your lettuce, your green leaf lettuce to like an apple, those are two very different surfaces. And it’s much more difficult to wash away a pathogen if it’s gotten onto that bumpy leaf surface than it would to be able to wash that off of an apple. So that’s the reason sprouts and leafy greens tend to be the biggest carriers of foodborne illness. But there are other produce, there is other produce that does tend to have more problems.

And some of this just has to do with the sheer volume of it we eat. So for instance, tomatoes, Americans eat a lot of tomatoes. So there’s a lot of tomatoes being grown, there’s a lot of tomatoes being shipped and going to grocery stores and farmers markets. So some of these are kind of just associated with the fact that there’s more volume of tomatoes, so there’s a higher incidence of foodborne illness. Melon and cantaloupes, we can think about that rough outer surface of the cantaloupe, and how difficult that can be to wash and clean, and the idea that when we cut it, we take a knife through the outside. And if there’s anything on the outside, we carry it in with our knife to the inside. There are some other ways to do that, but that’s just to give you an understanding. And then there are other things that are also listed there, things that we frequently eat like cucumbers and green onions. But it’s just about understanding that, you know, some of the produce is a little more common to have foodborne illness with, and that there was enough of a problem with foodborne illness being associated with produce that the federal government felt the need to do some regulation. So the other thing that’s really important to understand about foodborne illness, and I think all of us are becoming more aware of this because of COVID-19.

But the idea that different types of pathogens can cause disease, and that they stand up or they hold up in the environment differently depending on what they are. So by far, the most common source of foodborne illness is bacteria. And that causes the highest number of deaths and hospitalization and illnesses. And some of those folks who do get sick and are hospitalized or even some of those who aren’t hospitalized, although they might not die, they may have lifelong kind of ramifications for that or disabilities associated with that foodborne illness. So bacteria are the most common, they hold up best in the environment, they’re transferred very easily. So they’re by far our most common source of foodborne illness. They’re followed up by parasites that can get on to produce, usually from passing animals or human beings. And then viral particles, although based on what we know about COVID-19, viruses just don’t hold up really well in the environment in a way that they can reinfect. You might have a virus on a surface for a period of time, but even though the virus is still there, a lot of times, it’s degraded to the point where it can’t infect a person. So our concern is when the virus is actually on what you’re eating, and you eat that virus.

So what exactly are these pathogens? And this is gonna help us kind of put together the name of bacteria with something we probably hear. So bacteria, the things that are included there are salmonella. At one point, we all thought that was associated with eggs and chicken, but now we find it in flour and peanut butter and all sorts of stuff. E. coli, which is by far one of the most common ones we hear about; E. coli is a really big group. But there’s a very small group of that bigger group that’s actually toxic to humans or can cause human illness. So it’s, not all E. coli will make you sick, but there are some forms of it that will, and we need to make sure that we. .

. we plan to keep that off of there. Shigella listeria is another one, mostly associated with things like cheese, but these can all be found on produce, in soil sometimes, and definitely all of those can be found when we’re testing the sprouts facilities. Viruses, we’ve probably all heard of norovirus. If you’ve heard about cruise ship illnesses and outbreaks on cruise ships, norovirus travels very fast. And then hepatitis A is the other common virus that causes foodborne illness. And then the last one is parasites. Giardia, which is a very common one for campers to get, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Toxoplasma, all of those are parasites that you can get, tiny, little living things that are very commonly found in water, or move by water, and those can be ingested by people. And then those parasites kind of live in your intestines and cause all sorts of problems there. Where do the pathogens come from? So we do grow our food outside.

And there are a lot of things happening outside that could potentially contaminate our food. And produce safety is really about just thinking through all the different places where that contamination can happen and trying to avoid it. So the most common source of pathogens are from people. There are all sorts of things that can happen. Handwashing was popular in produce safety before we started telling everyone else to wash their hands all the time. I have taught people many, many times how to wash their hands for 20 seconds with soap and water, and how to make sure you get the front and the back and underneath the nails. Handwashing is a really, really important component for helping make sure that people don’t contaminate the food. Another source of contamination can be animals. Our produce is outdoors, we have birds flying overhead, we have deer that walk through, raccoons, you know, all sorts of rodents and things like that, and they are in the fields. But the important thing is to kind of make sure that anything that the rodents deposit or the deer or anything isn’t on the produce, and to be watching for that, and to not harvest anything that’s been adulterated by that.

The next source is water. And water is an excellent way to move things around. So if people are using an open pond to irrigate their crops and they’re pumping water out of that pond and we have deer going to visit, and we have the birds, and we might have some ducks or some sandhill cranes, all of those animals are eating. And of course, as they’re eating, there’s pooping going on. And it sounds silly, but one of the most important things we talk about in produce safety is keeping the poop off the food. So if you have that in the water, and you’re pumping and irrigating, there are ways to irrigate that keeps that underground or on the ground and doesn’t get on the produce. So we think through all those things. We think about, where’s the water coming from? How are we applying it? When are we applying it to try to make sure that the produce stays safe? Another source is soil, more commonly something that’s called biological soil amendments of animal origin. So we’re talking about soil amendments like manure and compost that are from an animal. We know that a lot of these bacteria and pathogens are carried by those animals, and they’re kind of a normal part.

So we need to make sure we’re thinking about when we’re applying manure and compost in a way that reduces that risk and make sure that those pathogens aren’t there, or are there at such a low level that they’re not risky. We talk about when we apply them to the soil, you know, at what stage of development of the plants, or how we treat the compost to make sure it’s been through a process that really reduces those pathogens. And then the last one we think about is equipment. So farmers use equipment, and sometimes for picking, sometimes just for moving or transporting, sometimes for washing produce. And everything that touches that produce is a potential source of contamination. So we talk about things like if you’re using a pitchfork to pick potatoes to get them out of the ground, you don’t wanna use that same pitchfork that you just cleaned out the cow stalls with. So it’s all about thinking about the practices that you do and the process you go through, and eliminating the ones that are risky, and doing everything you can to reduce the risk and things you need to do. So what are the farmers actually doing to keep the produce safe? One of the things they’re doing is going to training. In the last couple of years, we’ve trained UW-Extension and in collaboration with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, has educated around 700 farmers in the state. Those folks are interested in doing better.

My husband went to the training. And even though most of the things that we do on our farm aren’t very risky, he said it was really helpful for him to think about things that he hadn’t thought about before. So there are things we talked about in that session that he’s like, “Oh, well, I never thought about it,” or “I never thought about it that way. ” And some of the training is just opening eyes and helping them have that frame of mind to think about produce safety when they’re going about their farming as usual. The goal of the Produce Safety rule isn’t to change people’s farming or to make farming more difficult, it’s just about tweaking and trying to change things in a way that makes it safer for people, but at the same time, the goal really isn’t to make it more difficult for farmers to farm. Some farmers are also subject to inspection for produce safety. So farms that do mostly wholesale or. . . they are large-scale farms, they are subject to inspection.

Our Department of Agriculture does those inspections, and they have started with the inspections. Although due to COVID, a lot of those inspections right now, the goal is education, because the goal of the rule isn’t to put people out of business, it’s to try to get people’s produce to have as low a risk as possible. So what we’re trying to do is teach people how to do it right, not stop them from doing it at all. So right now, most of the inspections are really about education and trying to get everybody into compliance and make sure that they’re doing things the way they’re supposed to. And one of the things that they’re offering to help with that is something called an on-farm food safety audit. So that’s a voluntary visit where somebody from the Department of Ag and somebody from the Division of Extension go out to farms. The Extension person is a local contact, and the two people go through and try to help the farmer understand things that are being done really well, and areas that could use improvement. So that when an inspection does come, or even if they’re not subject to inspection, they can improve their produce safety practices on the farm. And then I mentioned before another thing farmers are doing, and farm workers are doing more than ever is washing their hands. There’s a lot of handwashing going on.

They’re washing their hands before they start work, after they use the bathroom, after they eat, after they take a break, after they use their cell phone. There are all sorts of places where you can potentially get contamination, and our produce growers are trying to be a lot more conscious of all those different risks, and making sure that people’s hands are clean if they’re gonna touch your produce. Farmers are also scouting fields. So before they go and pick produce, they’ll go out and check and make sure that last night a flock of Canada geese didn’t come in there and poop all over the field. And then if there is poop there, they have different techniques for dealing with it, and flagging it off and making sure folks know not to pick, you know, or getting rid of it. And they all have their processes to try to manage that risk there. Another thing that firms are doing is testing their water. Different kinds of water has different levels of risk. Of course, something like a municipal source of water is the lowest risk, and then it’s followed by well water. A little of that has to do with where you live and the quality of your well.

And then the most risky form of water is surface water. So it’s really important for farmers who are washing their vegetables or cooling vegetables and using that water source to understand if there’s any risk there and to do things to kind of fix that or mitigate that risk if they’re going to use that water. And for water after produce is picked, there’s a zero tolerance for E. coli. So it’s really about making sure you have clean water if you’re gonna use it on produce. Another thing I mentioned is timing of manure applications or compost applications, just making sure that the way that’s timed, maybe you put it on in the fall and you let it set over the winter to reduce the chance of those pathogens being there. And then the other one is cleaning and sanitizing their equipment. They’re going through and they’re washing things. And then after it’s washed, they can, for some surfaces, they’ll use the sanitizers too just to make sure that those surfaces are safe before they start using them for your produce. Again, just another one of those measures that farmers are doing to reduce the risk of foodborne illness on their customers.

So one thing I do always wanna mention is that COVID-19 is not a foodborne illness. You know, COVID-19 is not getting on your produce, and you’re eating your produce and you’re getting COVID-19 because COVID is a respiratory illness. We’re focused just on illnesses that are caused because they get into your intestinal system. And then the other thing is that that spread of COVID-19 is mainly person-to-person. And this is gonna lead into what we’re gonna talk about in just a minute. But you know, really, we’re focused on making sure that the transmission of COVID doesn’t happen when we’re talking about our customers, and not so much when we’re talking about our produce. And then the farmers are doing all this work up front to make sure that your produce is safe. But now farmers have this added concern about their customers and farmers markets too. So they’ve been doing all these steps to try to make sure that the produce is safe for their customers, and now they’re taking steps at the farmers market or on farm to make sure that their customers, that they can reduce the risk for their customers contracting COVID-19 too. So farmers are very concerned about your health and safety.

And not only are they worried about making sure that produce is safe for you to eat, but they also wanna make sure when you come to get that produce, or when you come to purchase that produce, that that’s a safe environment for you too. So the first thing we’re gonna talk about when it comes to steps that farmers and farmers are taking to reduce that spread of COVID, so we’re gonna talk about farmers markets. Farmers markets are wonderful places, they’re great places for the community. We sell at farmer’s markets, people run into their third grade teacher or the parents they haven’t seen since their kids went to college ’cause they used to play sports together. They’re just. . . they’re wonderful places for people to enjoy their community and to talk to people and to converse with their farmers. So we wanna keep those places kind of safe and open for people, even during this pandemic. In Wisconsin, there aren’t any statewide requirements for farmers markets.

Many of the other states that I work with through the Farmers Market Coalition, which is our national association for farmers markets, they have very specific guidelines about how farmers markets are supposed to be run to minimize the spread of COVID. But in Wisconsin, we don’t have those. So we’ve worked really hard to try to create some guidance so that the farmers market managers can take that information and mix it with their local situation, and come up with good rules for their market, for their individual market. Things are different all over the state. So when we think about the difference between a rural county up north where the population might be a lot lower, and a densely-populated county like Milwaukee County or Dane County, and you think about farmers markets in those two different areas, they’re gonna have different pressures and different needs. And each market needs to be able to kind of have that local knowledge of what’s going on locally, and knowledge of what their farmers market consists of, and try to mesh the two to try to figure out what actions can I take to keep our customers safe and to keep the farmer safe in my specific farmers market and my specific community? So we do encourage the farmers market managers to contact local health officials, the local health department, whoever their local person is. And the goal of that is so that they have a really good understanding of what’s going on locally, to be able to kind of mesh that information with what they see on the ground at their farmers market. And then this guidance was developed, the Division of Extension worked with the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health Services because we thought it was really important that all those perspectives kind of be at the table, and that we all have the same guidance. We didn’t want people being confused, we didn’t want the local health department having different guidelines than we’re telling farmers through the Department of Ag or through Extension. So we wanted to make sure they were all consistent.

And that guidance was shared with farmers markets. And what we did was encourage them to go through that guidance and go through the bullets on that page of things that they could do, and treat it kind of like a menu to pick and choose the things from that guidance that made sense for their market that they could kind of initiate at their market and that people would follow so that they could figure out what was best for their market. So one market might choose five things, and then a market where you have higher COVID pressure and more people and greater density, you might have to use 10 or 12 of those recommendations. So those are out there for farmers markets, and most of the markets that I have talked to are doing a really good job of assessing the local situation and putting together rules for both their vendors and their customers to keep folks safe. So this is a graphic that was shared with me from the Alaska Farmers Market Association. And we’re gonna talk about these a little bit. But these are some of the things that we talked about with farmers markets and created guidance around. One of them is stay home if you’re sick. I know that can be challenging. As a mother of two and kind of the main shopper and runner around in the family, it’s really hard to kind of not do all that stuff that people depend on you for.

So it’s important to try to minimize your contact with people. So we ask that people not go with if they’re sick, or they believe they might be ill. There’s always a risk there. And one of our goals with doing that is not only so you don’t infect the customers, but we’re also really concerned about our farmers. The farmers, often you have one main farmer that runs the farm with some hired help or some family help. But that one main farmer or the husband and wife that are the main people on that farm, they tend to know everything and be able to do everything. And then they also supervise and kind of instruct other people on activities. And if those two people get sick, or if that one person gets sick, it’s really quite catastrophic for the farmer. So part of the reason we ask customers, or even the farmers themselves if they’re not feeling well, or if they’ve been diagnosed with COVID that we ask them to stay home is because we understand the potential like financial impact of that farmer getting sick on that farm and that farm family, and the people who work there too. Many of the farmers markets at this point do ask you to wear a mask.

We’ll talk a little bit about signage. Another thing that is being encouraged is one shopper per household, just kind of to minimize the number of people at the market. Handwashing again, we’ll talk about handwashing more than once. Social distancing or physical distancing, depending on how you wanna say that, but just that idea of being six feet away from people whenever you can. And then keeping pets at home is another one that’s on here. And that really is, you know, I love dogs and pets as much as everybody else. And we always have a good time kind of looking at pets at the market and petting people’s dogs and talking about how cute they are. But it really slows down that transaction at the farmers market. The goal is to be a little more transactional than we usually are at the farmers market and not to slow things down. So by not bringing pets, people don’t kind of linger and spend more time socializing and seeing pets.

And by reducing your time at the market, you’re also reducing your risk. We’re gonna talk about a few of these a little bit more in a little more detail. The next slide is about wearing a mask. This is a sign that was put together by the Menominee Farmers Market up in the northwest part of the state. They do have a mask requirement; not all markets had one. But they also provide the masks. And are very kind of kind and instructive for people who come without a mask, and kind of just explain the policy and why it’s important to keep other customers and their farmers safe. And they provide them with a mask. And for those folks who don’t care to wear a mask, they politely ask them to shop somewhere else, just because they really do wanna protect their customers and their vendors and to keep the market alive and going. So the educational piece of trying to help people understand that is a really big role for the farmers market.

Another thing that markets are doing is spacing out vendors. So in a normal farmers market, we have tables next to tables and tents next to tents. And you know, at the farmers market we go to, there’s a thin line separating you and the next farmer. So to try to increase the amount of space between the farmers themselves and also lines for farmers, and the crisscross traffic around dense areas, some of the markets have chosen to spread everything out. And that gives you a lot more space and a lot more ability to stay that six feet away from people. And the farmers also have the ability to stay away from those people in the next booth on either side of them a little bit better. So another strategy that farmers markets are using for social distancing between the farmer and the customer are barriers. The slide here, you can see that there is a table where the farmer has their product, and then they have another table in front to kind of increase that distance, and they have some hand sanitizer out there for their customers too. So the goal there is just because we forget, because we get comfortable and our brains revert to the way things were a year ago. And we wanna talk to people and we wanna be close to people.

This barrier system works well because there’s an actual physical barrier that stops you from getting closer to that farmer. So it’s just, it’s a physical reminder to help you maintain that social distance and keep folks safe. Another thing that farmers markets are doing a really good job at is trying to make sure there’s space in lines. And I really like this picture, maintain a social distance of one cow distance apart. So instead of using the traditional six feet, they’ve got a picture of two people separated by a cow, which I think is really great for a farmers market. This is another one from the Menominee Farmers Market. The manager there has done a really awesome job at trying to make it fun, trying to make social distancing and COVID not seem like such a burden for everybody, but to try to kind of liven it up and make it seem like something that’s not really that big of a deal and not that much trouble. The other picture that you see here is the cones are actually places where the customers stand. So they have a really big, a really big bin of sweet corn, and everybody wants to pick their own sweet corn and pull it out there and look at it and check for worms and make sure it looks sweet and the kernels are all filled out. But having eight or nine people around a bin trying to grab their corn isn’t a really good situation to minimize the spread.

So what this farmer has done is done cones, and you kind of wait at your cone. And when you get to the front of the line and you stand by that cone, you get your corn, and when that person leaves, the next person can move in. But the cones are just a way to help people remember their social distancing, because I think I think all of our perception of six feet can be different. So for some people, what they think is six feet is very different from what another person might think is six feet. So things like cones or sidewalk chalk lines or little flags in the ground, those are things that help people remember and kind of make it so you don’t have to think about what six feet is and remind yourself. It’s really just a lot easier just to stand by the cone until the person in front of you is gone from that cone and then you can move there. Eliminating sampling. Eliminating sampling has been challenging. I know there are a lot of farmers that take a lot of pride in the quality of the produce that they grow. I’m 100% sure that sampling sweet cherries like this nice young woman here is doing, I can guarantee you she sells a lot more sweet cherries when people can try ’em.

When sweet cherries are in season, these folks drive down to the southeast part of the state with their cherries. They sell like hotcakes, and I’m sure that being able to taste ’em really helps. But the thing about sampling we’re really worried about is the idea of your fingers and your mouth. Saliva is a really good vector for COVID. And once you get that saliva on your fingers and you touch things, that’s when we become concerned. And some people say, “Well, I’m just eating popcorn, or I just pop it in my mouth. ” That’s great, that’s just not the way it works for everybody. So it’s best to kind of keep things safe and just eliminate sampling for the time being. It won’t be long before we can eat our cheese curds and our sweet cherries at the farmers market again. So another way that some of the markets are kind of adapting to COVID is by directing foot traffic.

Not all of our markets have a ton of space to space out and allow for that room. So one of the things some of the markets are doing is having one-way directional traffic. And what that does is everybody’s moving in the same direction so that you’re not face-to-face, coming in contact with people going the other direction. It helps move things through more quickly. There’s less of that kind of running into people and slowing down. So one of the goals of the markets are to try to keep you moving and moving through the market so that you can get what you need and get home, and directing foot traffic in a specific direction can really help. So other strategies that farmers markets are using. Markets like the Dane County farmers market is doing an awesome job with a preordering system. Their normal market on the square is chock-full of people, if you’ve ever been there. Every time I’ve been there, it’s been shoulder-to-shoulder.

They have awesome stuff and lots of people, and everybody is packed onto that square. And they just didn’t feel that there was a safe way for that market to continue. So they’ve adapted to a preorder system, where you can order produce and then just do a drive thru pickup, which has been really awesome because they’ve been able to maintain their support for their farmers and keep the farmers in business, and supporting their families. And they’ve also been able to make sure that the folks in the farmers market can still get their fresh produce that they’re looking for. So that’s really worked well. I know that there are other markets that are thinking to moving to that system for winter because the winter farmers market generally happens inside and there’s less available space. And so there are a lot more things to think about with spacing and how many customers can be there and moving people through. So some of the winter markets are thinking of doing more of a pickup strategy. Another thing that some of the markets have been doing is limiting the number of attendees. The idea is that there’s a footprint for the market and a certain number of square feet.

And they can have a pretty good idea of how many people can be in that area and maintain social distancing. So some of the markets have had kind of limits to the number of people at one time, and as people leave, more people go in. Another one is prohibiting pets, which I mentioned a little bit earlier. The idea that having pets there just kind of slows down your trip and leads you to linger a little bit longer, and the goal is to really move you through the market quickly. Another is washing hands and hand sanitizer. All of the markets I’ve been to this year have some kind of hand sanitizer station or handwashing station to try to encourage both the vendors and the visitors to the farmers market to keep their hands clean and minimize that spread. One of the other things that was adopted early on was this idea of prepackaging food. Not only do we not want people to be sampling at the market, but we also don’t want people eating at the market. ‘Cause again, we’re taking down our mask, we might be getting saliva on our hands, we might be sharing food with other people. I think of popcorn, a bag of popcorn.

And if you’re eating popcorn, and you’re going back for some more and somebody else is eating out of there too, there’s some risk associated with that. So we really need to think about prepackaged foods, pick ’em up at the market and take ’em home. One of the six foot lines, the cow space in between was something that was thought up for, specifically for their egg roll vendor. The egg roll vendor at that market was really popular and people wanted to go and get their egg rolls. But the market still wanted to encourage them to go to that vendor, but at the same time, take the egg rolls home and eat it. So they’ve closed the picnic tables and the seating, and just kind of encourage people to come and get their produce or their meat and cheese and bakery, and ready-to-eat food, but then take those home and eat ’em. So that people can still enjoy everything from the market and support the businesses, but at the same time, reduce their risk of infection. The last kind of group we’re gonna talk about are pick-your-own operations. So right now, it is fall while I’m doing this presentation. And one of the things people love to do in the fall is go pumpkin picking and apple picking.

Earlier in the spring, kind of when things were still a little bit newer, we had a lot of folks who wanted to go out berry picking, and then there are all sorts of things to pick in between. But the goal is, just like when we have workers picking in our fields, if we have customer picking in our fields, we wanna make sure that you know, the produce is safe and that they’re not risking infection. Going to a pick-your-own operation is awesome during this time of the year, it’s outdoors. There is less risk because of that. But there are still a lot of people there, a lot of people moving through there on a regular basis. So it’s still really important for these farms to think about what they’re doing to keep their customers safe. So there is guidance through the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, that for pick-your-own operation specifically. But again, it’s just like the farmers markets, where the farmers need to assess their own situation, the risk that they have. Pick-your-own operations might have people coming from a greater distance. So they need to kind of think about how many people do we have? You know, what kind of volume are we seeing? What are the things that we can put in place to keep our staff and the farmer safe, but also our customer safe? So one of the things that farmers need to think through for pick-your-own operations is protecting their employees.

Part of protecting employees involves creating working crews, so that you have this group of five people that work together, and this group of five people that work together, and you don’t keep mixing those groups. So we’re minimizing the number of people each of those crews is exposed to. And then we know if one person in this crew of five gets sick and we have to quarantine, then this other group of five can keep working and keep picking. Part of that is just to keep people well, and part of it is to protect their ability to make a living. You know, farm work is not the highest-paid, and you need to be healthy for a lot of that. You know, to be in good health to work well, it’s a lot of physical labor. So the goal with that is you know, if somebody is gonna get sick, you wanna minimize how many people are out and how thoroughly it kind of impacts your operation. Another thing that some farms are doing are health assessments, you know, having people self-identify symptoms or taking temperatures to try to keep in front of it. It can be really, really difficult to self-volunteer, “Hey, I have a sore throat,” when you know that having a sore throat may or may not be a problem because you haven’t been tested, and it’s also gonna keep you from working. So that’s a really hard thing for workers to do.

So some farms have decided that they’ll do health assessments, and that will involve taking the temperature of a worker. Most farms are encouraging or requiring mask of employees. The masks are something we know reduces spread. So to try to protect the health of those employees and the farmers, they’re requiring or encouraging masks to try to reduce that spread. Social or physical distancing is another thing. If you’ve got those two crews of five people, you wanna keep them separated, you don’t want them kind of interacting or intermingling. So even if you have two crews of five people, if you have them all eat lunch together, you’ve kind of negated the benefit of that. So the goal is to make sure that if they’re in the field, you’re keeping those crews apart, if they’re working, you’re keeping the people apart, if they’re doing breaks, you’re keeping those people apart. Handwashing, of course, always handwashing. And then another thing that pick-your-own operations are doing to keep their workers safe is kind of cashier safety.

Plexiglas, we looked at those physical barriers for farmers markets. But those cashiers tend to interact with a lot of people, especially people are checking through and paying, and you’ve got a large volume. So it’s important to keep those people safe too. Another thing people are doing is just being aware of customer numbers. So if the pick-your-own operation knows that there’s gonna be a ton of people on Saturday, you’re looking at the forecast and it’s Wednesday and it’s gonna be 65 and sunny and perfect, crisp fall weather, you know, people are gonna wanna go out and pick some apples. So trying to figure out, planning ahead to make sure you have enough staff and kind of a plan ready for that volume of people. Some of the pick-your-owns are limiting customers. So they might only let so many people through. I know early on in berry picking season, one of the talks that I went to, they had a gate and they had to like close people off when they hit a certain number of people in their fields. Another thing they’re doing is just assigning picking areas.

So if you’re berry picking, you’ve got row three, four, and five, and then maybe you skip a row, and then the next group of people has rows seven, eight and nine, just to maintain that physical distance. Of course, family groups or cohabitating people who interact with each other normally can stay in a group. But they try to make sure that groups that aren’t related have some space in between them. Another thing that people are doing is reservations, kind of like you would for the dentist. Like, I’m gonna pick Saturday at 9 o’clock for my family to go apple picking. And then when those slots are filled, those slots are filled. And that kind of helps them keep track of how many people are going to the farm, and kind of space out their traffic. So instead of everybody being there between 9:00 and noon, maybe they can get more customers through because they’re kind of encouraging people to go from like 9:00 to 5:00. So you might have wanted to go around 10 o’clock, but you’re okay going at 3:00 because that slot is open, and you know that there’re gonna be fewer people there. And then encouraging customer safety.

So when folks come on to the farm, they wanna encourage the customers to act in a way that’s not gonna spread the virus for their own sake and for the sake of their other customers. You know, the pick-your-own folks don’t want people having a bad experience on their farm. Pick-your-own is all about fun and enjoyment and quality time. And they don’t want to be associated with, “Oh, yeah, I remember when I got there, “and the whole family got COVID. ” So they are encouraging customers to take precautions. Some farms might require it, but each farm gets to have their own rules and their own expectations. So most pick-your-owns already have handwashing because that’s something that’s produce safety-related. Some are requiring masks. They encourage the social distancing. There may be limiting of the number of people allowed in like the farm store, and then another thing is the elimination of sampling.

So additional attractions are also things that pick-your-owns have to consider. There are a lot of things that cause people to linger that kind of increase kind of the risk. And so they have to figure out is there a way we can offer this without increasing risk? Do we just let people know what the risk is? Or do we eliminate it altogether? And some of those things include things like petting zoos, playgrounds for the kids, on-site food. So picnic tables, and food that is ready to eat that you can eat right there at the farm. Hay rides, so a lot of the places have hay rides that you get on the hay ride and you go out to the pumpkin field, or you go out to the apple field or just a hay ride for fun. And then haunted houses are another one. So pick your own operations are thinking through the risk that is associated with those activities and trying to decide how much risk are we willing to accept? How much risk will the customers be willing to accept? And can we do this in a way that kind of minimizes that risk and doesn’t put our customers at risk of getting COVID? So eating on-site is one of the ones that’s kind of especially dicey. Again, we’re talking about the taking off the mask or not wearing a mask, saliva, sharing of food. So one of the things we do encourage pick-your-owns to limit or eliminate is on-site eating. Some of the farms have decided that they can do a really good job of sanitation, and they clean the tables in between and they have attendance and things like that.

But again, the farmers are doing their best to assess risk and make decisions that they think are right for the farm, and then customers need to do the same. So in conclusion, produce safety is people safety. So the farmers, produce farmers are using things, using all these strategies, all of these practices on the farm, and they’re broadly called Good Agricultural Practices. And they use those to prevent foodborne illness to make sure their customers that are buying produce have little to no risk of getting a foodborne illness from their produce. And another thing that farmers are doing is trying to make sure that at the farmers market or at their pick-your-own operation, they’re not only reducing that risk of foodborne illness, but they’re also taking consideration the new risks of COVID so that you’re not getting a respiratory illness or a foodborne illness at the market. And then probably another thing to mention is that customers are a really important part of keeping the farmer safe and keeping markets safe and keeping our farm businesses and other businesses associated with farmers markets alive and well. If farmers markets aren’t perceived as a safe place to go, then they can really hurt the number of people who feel safe going there and go and buy agricultural products. So even the customers have a role in supporting the farm businesses above and beyond just buying their produce, but kind of helping the overall culture of the market seem like it’s a safe place for people to be. Everybody has kind of a different perception about how much risk they are at. And the more people we can get to feel safe coming to the market, the better it is for farmers.

Because of course, farmers are not only selling you produce, they have families to support, and they have local economies that they’re an important part of. So it’s really important for us to think about all the different aspects of keeping produce safe and keeping people safe so that we can keep our local food system really kind of vibrant and strong. I have one last slide here that kind of gives you some links. So if you want to learn more about UW-Madison Extension, we have an office in almost every county in the state, and we have all sorts of programs. We’re associated with the 4-H program, we do community development, agriculture, we’re there to support our communities and help our communities grow and be strong. So feel free to go to the Extension website to learn more about what we do, and if there’s something that we can help you with. And then the next link is to help you find your local county office so that you can find your local contact. There’s also a link for yard and garden questions. Part of what I do is help people with their sick tomatoes and their trees that didn’t leaf out. So if you have a yard and garden question, you can go to the link there and it will forward your email to the nearest office that can help you with that.

And then if you’re interested in produce safety, for the state of Wisconsin, we have– that’s the link to our specific website, and there are lots of links there to more information. But if you are someone who grows produce or if you are interested in growing produce and you’d like to learn more about produce safety, then that is a really good place to start. I would like to thank everybody for joining me today. I appreciate you spending this time with me today, and I hope to see you all again soon. Thank you.