Community Care & Food Safety: A Practical On-Farm Field Day (New Orleans)

In this training, food safety is introduced as a practice that is adaptable and unique to every farm operation. We center our current day-to-day operations and view them through the lens of food safety and risk mitigation. This training is not about regulation or what we can’t do on the farm, but rather how we can adapt our current systems to ensure safe food for the communities we are feeding and care for the farmers growing the food.

Farmers are the experts of their own operations and this training grounds farmers in the practice of risk assessment as it relates to food safety so that they can adapt concepts and practices to the uniqueness of their own farm. This training empowers farmers to take food safety into their own hands and merge it with all other aspects of their operation.

The training is hosted at Imbue Farms in New Orleans and led by Anita Adalja, who has spent 15 years working on farms including non-profit, for-profit, urban and rural farms in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, California, Washington, D.C., and New Mexico. In 2019 she founded Not Our Farm, a non-profit farmworker storytelling and power building project. Based in Albuquerque, she is also an okra farmer at Ashokra Farm and a proud food safety nerd. Anita is a USDA HGAP+ auditor, Produce Safety Alliance lead trainer and a food safety lead reviewer and trainer with the New Mexico Grown Farm to Institution state-sponsored program. Anita works to amplify the intersections of farm food safety with dignified labor conditions.

This workshop is co-sponsored by Louisiana CRAFT (Collaborative Regional Alliance of Farmer Training)which aims to bring established and aspiring Louisiana and Gulf South agricultural producers and harvesters together for farmer-to-farmer training in sustainable agriculture.