Food Protection Trends - January/February 2023 - 9

Adopting produce safety practices to meet market access or
regulatory requirements is a complex process for growers
due to a mix of factors, including requirements of various
state, federal, and grower association audits that differ from
regulatory inspections; the lack of FSMA PSR guidance;
unfinished relevant scientific research; sections of the FSMA
PSR that are under review or reserved; and the wide diversity
of size, scale, crops, market channels, and other operational
characteristics of the grower community (4). Therefore,
the educational needs of growers also are complex, and a
continued and evolving need for educational programming is
evident to increase growers' produce safety knowledge, assess
and reduce on-farm produce safety risks, and meet market
access and/or regulatory requirements by passing an audit
and/or inspection.
A needs assessment tool is designed to collect feedback to
identify needs and understand how to respond to those needs
(11). The use of needs assessments is common and increasing
agricultural extension and other educational personnel
(11). With growing requirements for market access and new
regulation, the administration of needs assessments to clarify
produce safety needs among growers has increased over the
last 20 years. Although needs assessments are important tools
for identifying areas of need and promoting effective program
planning, they are also very time-consuming to create and
administer, can be limited in scope or audience, and may not
yield easy solutions because the needs identified are complex
(11). In one example, a needs assessment alone was insufficient
to understand the complex needs related to local food
systems (11). To develop sufficient educational programming,
the additional elements of community participation
and collaboration were essential to the needs assessment
process (11). For produce safety programs, educational personnel
have relied on individual needs assessments to inform
programming because no systematic literature review has
been conducted covering all needs assessments. As a result,
the published literature lacks a full accounting of available
research on the produce safety needs of growers. The attendees
of the 2017 Northeast Center to Advance Food Safety
(NECAFS) Annual Conference (Boston, MA) articulated
the need to conduct a semisystematic literature review. The
goal of this holistic review was to generate findings that covered
the complexity of the issues and identified gaps in the
literature to inform produce safety educational programming
and future needs assessments and research.
Our semisystematic literature review synthesized the data
from 34 published produce safety needs assessments and
answered a clearly defined primary research question to
identify known produce safety needs among small- and medium-sized
producers in the United States. The review focused
on small- and medium-sized producers because NECAFS
work is funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA) Food Safety Outreach Program, whose objective in
part is to develop and implement food safety training, education,
extension, outreach, and technical assistance projects
that address the needs of owners and operators of small- to
medium-sized farms. This semisystematic review provides
evidence-based results and recommendations to inform
educational programming development specifically for smalland
medium-sized produce growers.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
We followed a semisystematic review process described
by Snyder (33) to provide a comprehensive overview and
analysis of current published needs assessments on the topic
of produce safety and the needs of small- and medium-sized
produce growers.
Define the research question
To build the research question, a group of three agricultural
extension personnel (the review team) first determined the
target population (small- and medium-sized produce growers
and small and very small processors), study area (the northeast
United States), type of literature to be reviewed (unpublished
and published needs assessments), and outcomes to
be measured (understanding needs associated with produce
safety and preventive controls for human food). Based on
these criteria, keyword search terms were determined (see
Appendix 1 or full list of keywords).
The review team conducted an initial search based on
these criteria to assess the research landscape. This early work
allowed the review team to develop a clearly defined research
question that was not too broad or too narrow. Studies found
during this initial search filtered generally into four broad categories:
(i) needs identified through assessment when looking
at produce safety among producers in the United States,
(ii) gaps in knowledge or practice and remaining needs of
the target population, (iii) successes and challenges relative
to educational and direct technical assistance delivery, and
(iv) food safety practice improvement on U.S. farms due to
educational programming.
Based on the categories of research available, the review
team developed the project research question: " What are
the known produce safety needs of small- and mediumsized
produce growers in the United States? " This process
revealed that limiting the geographic area of review to the
Northeast region would be too narrow because few studies
were specific to this region. Terms related to small and very
small processors and preventive controls for human food
were removed from the review because the search resulted
in only one needs assessment of this target population.
This initial search and research question development
process was presented for discussion to an eight-person
group of produce safety educators via a conference call. The
group confirmed the approach and research question and
provided feedback.
January/February Food Protection Trends
9
Food Protection Trends - January/February 2023

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