This is part two of a two-part series on food safety and sustainability. You can read the first part of this series in the September/October edition of the Western Grower & Shipper.

Climate change is rapidly changing ecosystems worldwide, and there are increasing concerns about the long-term impacts that these changes may have on the stability, sustenance and growth of communities.

Agriculture is accelerating efforts to understand and optimize practices to address changing conditions and ensure the security of a safe and nutritious food source. With rising temperatures, destabilized weather patterns and diminishing nonrenewable resources, the food supply chain must consider all factors when developing a food system aimed at long-term resilience.

Overarching environmental pressures are nonselective and impact the entire ecosystem, including bacterial and viral pathogens contributing to human health risks. To be efficient and effective in building a resilient food supply chain, the complexities require a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach that designs for and balances the needs of sustainability and food safety together.

Efforts for food safety are currently aimed at developing a risk-based management system with the goal of continuous improvement leading to ongoing risk reduction to consumers. Sustainable Food Safety (SFS) prioritizes the interconnectedness of sustainability and food safety efforts to ensure optimal outcomes, leading to the goal of environmental and agricultural resiliency. To ensure both efforts are addressed efficiently, monitoring systems must be developed to characterize the risk from all agronomic, food safety and sustainability practices.

With a measurement process and monitoring system to understand outcomes, growers can align the management of the agronomic system while assembling a multi-step process to mitigate risks for both sustainability and food safety. While the concept is straightforward, it is challenging to build a system for comprehensive farm characterization and monitoring due to the size and scope of all the variables. The direction may be clear, but the question quickly becomes, how would we begin?

When we start to consider whole ecosystems, we must think broadly about measurement systems and targets since we have numerous factors that may have a positive relationship/correlation, a negative relationship/correlation or a neutral relationship (i.e., independent). One of the reasons that food safety and sustainability efforts have sometimes felt at odds with one another is that it is much simpler to consider, in terms of food safety, a practice as either good or bad for food safety. This binary simplification is amenable to simple communication and alignment of actions.

However, the reduction of complex questions to binary outcomes can lead to actions that are misaligned or even opposite of the intended results. For example, following the 2006 spinach outbreak, a common and recommended reaction was to remove non-crop vegetation to reduce interactions between wildlife and crops. Over time, removal of habitat has been shown to have no impact, or even increase the amount of wildlife in a production field due to the need for wildlife to find food, water and shelter. We must be careful of reducing complex questions to binary answers (good/bad) since those decisions can lead to poor unintended outcomes despite even the best of intentions.

Risk-based decision-making and risk management require characterization of risk (e.g., pathogenic E.coli, Salmonella, heavy metals) in an environment, and then identifying the factors that can lead to changes in that risk. To achieve risk-based food safety management, a baseline understanding of the risk(s) is needed to be able to identify when food safety concerns may be increasing or decreasing.

To achieve this, an ongoing measurement system must be in place to compare the expected/historical baseline level with current observations so that appropriate behaviors can be exercised, if needed. An example system that most are aware of is that of weather monitoring. With weather systems, we have established an expected range of temperatures, precipitation and prediction algorithms so that when we compare current data on today’s conditions, we know whether the current conditions are expected or unexpected and the systems provide some predictions on what to expect in the coming hours/days so that we can plan appropriately.

Food safety systems can be designed in the same fashion; using historical data, practices and trends to predict when and how food safety risks may fluctuate, and what practices we may need to adopt to ensure the risks to consumers remain acceptable. With a well-designed monitoring system and means to measure and characterize practices in terms of risk, it is possible to establish a system to use data to achieve any goals whether they be designed for food safety or sustainability purposes.

SFS addresses the fact that all practices in the production of food must account for food safety. A non-safe food is simply not a food. Building a SFS system for fresh produce requires an interdisciplinary approach incorporating all sciences (e.g., microbiology, soil science, agronomy, toxicology, hydrology, geology, engineering, data science, genetics, animal husbandry, ecology, etc.) and the construction of a dynamic system capable of creating a baseline understanding of risk in an environment or system.

Once we broaden the view of the interrelatedness of all factors contributing to our agricultural ecosystem, we recognize the need to approach food safety and agriculture holistically; a way that accommodates a spectrum of needs, considerations for science and the overall economics for a grower.

There is no right or wrong way to produce food, but instead many pathways can be balanced to achieve the outcomes needed to support a resilient food ecosystem. Systems like Western Growers’ GreenLink® data-sharing platform are currently being developed for agricultural food safety to lean into complex data collection, analysis and prediction. With dynamic systems to help define baseline risk and quantification of impacts (positive or negative), we can drive toward a future where there is no good or bad practice, but instead, optimized control of risk and reward of safe products. With a comprehensive view on the relationships in our world, we offer an optimistic ability to help contribute to a resilient food production system, quality nutrition for our communities and a business model sustainable for the growing community.

There is no food without food safety. There is no food without environmental sustainability. There is no food without a grower who can afford to produce the crops. There is no future without a comprehensive approach to food production. SFS is the solution for sustainable, risk-based food production.