The Produce Safety Rule is a federal law and is part of the federal Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) that was passed in 2015 that applies to some farms in Minnesota. Since the law has been finalized, updates and changes have been made that relate to water you use on your farm. If you have attended a training previously and wonder what has been updated since then, here is a summary of the updates to date.
First, this rule only applies to some farms. To determine your status under the PSR, see this website. Second, the rules about agricultural water only apply to water that is being used on covered commodities and that is likely or intended to touch the harvestable portion of the crop.
As a reminder, water is broken into both pre and post-harvest water for the purposes of the FSMA Rule.
Pre-Harvest, or Irrigation water standards have had significant updates since 2015 Definition: Pre-harvest water is water used prior to harvest, generally for irrigation purposes If you recall from the initial curriculum, the 2015 (original) rule for pre-harvest water required growers to test their agricultural water for generic E. coli and to create a Microbial Water Quality Profile, or MWQP with those results. The MWQP is built from five surface water samples per year, or 1 ground water sample per year over 4 years. The 4-year data set would be summarized by two statistics, the geometric mean and the statistical threshold value. Those statistics, compared with FDA standards, would determine how the water could be used. In December 2021, the FDA released proposed revisions to the agricultural water requirements substantially to move away from the quantitative criteria and towards a more qualitative assessment of the water. The revised rule will ask growers to conduct a Agricultural Water Assessment instead of relying on testing the water. Testing will be a part of the AgWA, but the AgWA will be a more holistic assessment of risks to water used on the farm including risks from nearby septics, animal operations, faulty wells and other infrastructure, and will not necessarily include testing as a part of that assessment. When will the changes to this part of the rule be effective? Since the final text has not yet been published, we have no further information about the effective date for the production agricultural water requirements in the revised pre-harvest water requirements. The compliance dates for this section will begin 9 months after the revised rule is finalized. We will let you know as soon as FDA releases the final requirements for this section.
Where does this leave growers now? Inspections for the FSMA Produce Safety Rule will not include preharvest water until this part of the rule is finalized. For now, if you have not started to test the water that you use on your farm, we recommend that you do that.
Source: umn.edu
Photo Credit: GettyImages-Songbird839
Categories: Minnesota, Crops