Around the Farm

*Written by Katie Murray

In this version of Around the Farm, we literally took a trip around the farm – not just my typical run through a couple of the fields. Jill, Courtney, and I spent the last week doing food safety refresher trainings in the fields. Wait, let me reword that, Jill and Courtney spent last week doing food safety refresher trainings and I tagged along and asked pesky questions on a few of those training excursions.

So, let me break these refresher trainings down for you. Jill, who is our food safety girl, and Courtney, who handles a variety of administrative tasks in the office, trek out to the crews in the field one by one to conduct these refresher trainings. When workers are hired they go through food safety training as part of their orientation. We then do these refresher trainings each season as a reminder to the workers about our food safety rules, policies, and guidelines which make our food safer for the consumer. The training includes basic things such as washing hands and wearing clean clothes to help prevent cross contamination and goes on to less thought about things such as having nails no longer than 1/8 of an inch and not wearing jewelry – both of which are food safety hazards.

So, from crew to crew and field to field we went. We got to speak with each crew supervisor and then each crew, making sure all were up to date on food safety practices and any personal questions or concerns they may have since beginning work here. In the next blog, I’ll delve more into what was covered in these trainings and the questions we addressed, but for now I just wanted to share what we encountered as we made the rounds around the farm last week.

Allow me to introduce you to a few of our field crews. We are so thankful for their hard work!