Innovative Farm Traceability Program
By EduTransfer Design Associates and Haywire Creative
Photo by www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/premier_award/2008/mwin.htm
Hillside Gardens Ltd., a family run farm in Bradford, Ontario, has supplied quality produce to consumers across North America for more than four decades. “The farm was started in 1964 by Jim Verkaik, my father-in-law, who has always been an innovator and idea guy,” says Ron Gleason, President. “He established a culture of innovation from the beginning, and was the first grower to bring automatic carrot packaging into Canada, and more recently the first veggie polishers that we use for carrots.”
Hillside Garden’s latest innovation is helping to build trust in food safety and traceability by strengthening the ‘gate to plate’ connection. “We started investing in a food safety program several years ago and developed a traceability protocol as part of our food safety plan,” explains Gleason. “We were selected as one of several projects to participate in the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) Traceability Pilot Project.” The project helped Hillside Gardens convert its system to an electronic traceability program.
Electronic Traceability Program
Gleason selected a commercially available software program called ProducePak™, designed by an Australian developer, to collect packing and field production information. “We worked extensively with the software developer to customize the software to make it more applicable for the North American market and to our particular application,” explains Gleason. “It ended up being more work that we thought, but the developer has been very willing to work with us to make the product right to bring to other North American customers.”
The program is capable of tracking all field activities at every stage of the operation. Crop harvest and inventory management modules in the software track the produce from picking to storage. The system uses a wireless computerized network that collects real-time data in the packing and shipping facility. All packing and processing information is recorded using handheld computers, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) with bar-code readers, which improves inventory control, shipping and traceability.
“The business management tools available with the software allow you to collect all the data from your farm, making that information available at your fingertips for many different reasons, even calculating costs per acre or labour costs,” adds Gleason. “We wanted to get this first piece working really well before we started adding components, but eventually we plan to expand and add other food safety data and forms such as daily audits, maintenance records and other details.”
Implementation Considerations
Before selecting and implementing a system, there are various factors to consider including the time of year, available resources and staff knowledge and skills. Gleason encourages producers to ask a lot of questions such as: do you need to go to an electronic system or is a paper trail sufficient for now? Do you have computer skills and staff that understand computer systems and software?
Are your customers asking for traceability? Is your industry going to allow you to recover your costs? “It is ‘nice’ to have all of this information for food safety, but understanding whether or not you will be able to cover your investment costs is important,” explains Gleason. “Up until this year, I don’t think we could recover our costs, but there is starting to be a gap between companies that have made the investment. Any business has to eventually be able to pass the costs along in order to stay profitable and healthy.”
Hillside Gardens Limited received the 2009 OMAFRA Minister’s Award for Agri-Food Innovation Excellence. “The award really represents 25 years of innovation in our business, not just this particular traceability project,” says Gleason. “Having a culture of innovation in our company is the reason Hillside Gardens continues to be one of the leaders in the industry.”
