Food Safety: Bringing your produce to the market after harvest

Food Safety plays an important role throughout the entire food growing process. Microbial contamination can happen at any point during pre-planting, production, harvesting and post-harvest. Five key identified routes for contamination of produce are: agricultural water, farm worker hygiene, manure or other amendments, animals in production areas, and cleaning and sanitizing.

Today we are going to take a closer look at post-harvest food safety and do it yourself cleaning stations. Katie Plohocky, Executive Director for RG Foods hosted the GreenCore Farmer Incubator on June 11, 2022 as part of their Market Farming Production Course, an immersion program for beginning farmers located in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Food Safety post-harvest starts with cleaning to prevent contamination of equipment, tools, packing materials and worker hygiene. Managing wash water is next. Cleaning your harvest should be done in three steps: 1) Rinse off dirt and other particles and insects, 2) sanitize with one tsp chlorine to 1 gallon of water - If opposed to using chlorine, you can also use organic acid, vinegar/lactic acid, 3) rinse again. Prevent contamination of packing materials whether bundling, bagging, putting in individual containers, or storing bulk. Always make sure to clean and sanitize produce crates or use clean boxes. Finally, store at its proper temperature to keep produce fresh and long lasting.

The fun part is doing a little DIY in setting up your equipment. James Spicer, Founder of Green Country Permaculture loves showing his students great, innovative ways to clean your post-harvest. Notice in this video of his demonstration that he uses all plastic materials which won’t harbor microbial concerns and is easy to clean. Greens are the hardest to clean but with this easy greens bubbler, a sanitizing bin and rinse pail, greens are a breeze and come out looking beautiful. Don’t forget to spin the excess water out to keep them crisp and fresh instead of limp and soggy. To build your own greens bubbler follow this link for instructions.

Building a Better Greens Bubbler – UVM Extension Ag Engineering