Lots of farms scrambled to set up home delivery and online sales at the beginning of the pandemic last spring. Even if they didnât have all the details sorted out, farmers focused on getting the new offerings up and running so they could keep serving customers.
Now that farms and consumers have had a growing season to settle into a new normal, itâs a good time for farmers to review how their new marketing channels are working and to make sure they can be permanent drivers of sales.
âIf people arenât coming on farm in the current environment, can you afford not to deliver?â said John Wodehouse, a Penn State Extension business management educator.
The proposal, published in September, aims to reduce the time it takes to trace contamination issues from consumer to source.
Public comments on the rule are due by Feb. 22. But in order to make a comment, the public needs to understand what is being proposed.
Emily Griep, the food safety manager at the United Fresh Produce Association, discussed the proposed rule Feb. 8 during the virtual Mid-Atlantic Fruit and Vegetable Convention.
Currently, investigations of contaminated foods take a lot of time. The FDA has to find convergence points from multiple retail locations before the grower can be identified.
âIf you have multiple legs leading back to multiple distributors, multiple growers, multiple fields, it does take up valuable time that could be used to determine the source of the contamination,â Griep said. âUltimately, FDAâs goal is to reduce the time that it takes in an outbreak investigation to go from the consumer â the people who became ill â
For 14 years, the Historic Lewes Farmers Market (HLFM) has awarded scholarships to small-scale Delmarva farmers to attend sustainable-farming conferences, including the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) Annual Farming
You know itâs been a rough one when people start talking about turning to a new year while itâs still September.
Those souls, tempest-tossed and woebegone, are a few days from getting their wish and being rid of 2020. But changing the calendar wonât magically wave away the changes of the past year.
2021 will begin with high unemployment, muted demand from restaurants, a nationwide vaccination program that is just getting started, and a handsome U.S. sovereign debt.
Here are some of the big questions for the ag industry as it enters the new year.
1. How will the Biden administration shape farm policy?