Needs Assessment of Food Safety Education for Small-Scale Farmers

<p>Small-scale farms, as an important component of the food system in the United States, share the responsibility to ensure food safety and maintain public health. Thus, farmers play critical roles in managing and minimizing food safety risks. With increasing food safety regulatory requirements, small-scale farmers are struggling to balance between making more profits and complying with the regulation. In order to increase profits, value-added processing is getting attention among farmers. However, further processing activities trigger additional regulatory requirements, which could limit farmers’ ability to implement. </p><p>Farmer food safety education is an essential approach to raise farmers’ food safety awareness and address their barriers to complying with the regulatory requirements. This thesis started from a literature review and needs assessment; then identified their barriers and needs to food safety education; lastly, dived into intervention evaluation to understand farmers’ food safety knowledge, attitudes, and practice change.</p><p>In the literature review (chapter 1) and needs assessment (chapter 2) stage, small-scale produce farmers were targeted. Forty-two published articles were reviewed to understand growers’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices toward on-farm food safety principles and evaluate the effectiveness of food safety education programs for growers. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was used to assess growers’ food safety education needs and identify their motivators and barriers to starting and expanding a value-added business. In the intervention evaluation (chapter 3) stage, the military veteran farmer group was targeted. The effectiveness of three educational interventions, including learning circles, in-person workshops, and electronic newsletters, was evaluated by using pre- and post-surveys.</p><p>The findings from the research showed that farmers were aware of the importance of food safety, but their knowledge and risk perceptions were insufficient. They commonly lacked time to do additional activities other than farming such as learning and adopting new practices or involving in value-added processing. Most food safety education programs were reported to improve farmers’ knowledge. However, farmers still perceived standardized food safety education programs to be burdensome and were expecting to receive culturally tailored education programs targeted at small-scale farmers. These findings provide the foundation for the development of future education programs for small-scale farmers. </p>