Collaboration needed to solve challenges, build opportunity in agriculture
The world has no shortage of challenges, from climate change to social justice issues and inequities, and conflicts across the globe. It can be easy to feel depressed or overwhelmed when watching the evening news.
These challenges and others can feel daunting and endless, but solutions exist, and they lie not with any one single entity or organization, but rather through collaboration, innovative thinking and a collective willingness to push beyond the status quo. Likewise, through collaboration, opportunity abounds to create a new and better future.
In agriculture, the list of challenges also runs deep, from rising costs and labor shortfalls to regulatory pressures and new demands from consumers and the marketplace. My first column as CEO of California Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, or LGMA, in March 2021 highlighted the opportunity — and necessity — for collaboration as we evolved the LGMA to address new challenges.
Recently, we formalized this perspective with the development of a new values statement that firmly states: We work collaboratively with leafy green handlers, growers, industry buyers and partners. Each of these stakeholders plays an important role in living the purpose of LGMA: to build confidence and trust in leafy greens by making them even safer. Simply stated, we, as the entity of LGMA, can’t do it alone.
Two recent events also highlighted areas where additional industry collaboration will yield benefits for the leafy green community while also enhancing food safety.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture, along with Monterey County Farm Bureau, assembled a multi-stakeholder think tank to address the animal-agriculture interface, a project called California Agricultural Neighbors, or CAN. This group consists of farmers, ranchers, vineyard owners, scientists, industry experts, associations and leadership from CDFA and MCFB. Building on work begun several years ago, this year-long effort resulted in a report on how animal agriculture and vegetable growers can work together to reduce cross-contamination of fresh produce. The report highlights four key areas for collaborative action:
- Foster neighbor-to-neighbor dialogue and a common understanding of the challenges.
- Build a research roadmap to understand the amplification, survival, persistence and movement of pathogenic E. coli.
- Create a quantitative microbial risk assessment framework to organize data and prioritize research needs.
- Build and maintain the capacity to transfer knowledge from research into applied practice.
This report is a call to action for the production sector of the industry to work together with leadership from CDFA and MCFB. It is through the spirit of collaboration that progress against these objectives will begin.
Collaboration was also the call to action from Randy Babbitt, former administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, which was reinforced last month at the Center for Produce Safety Symposium in San Diego. Babbitt spoke about the tremendous progress in aviation safety because of industry and regulators working together. Indeed, the work was “wickedly difficult,” he said, but yielded unimaginable results: Since 2010, there have been no commercial airline crashes, with over 8 billion passengers carried.
The effort was voluntary, but together with FAA, airline industry leadership, mechanics, pilots, air traffic control, engine manufacturers, maintenance personnel and others, sharing of learnings, near-misses, ideas, insights, and data, aviation safety improved immensely.
Babbitt advocates for collaboration across several fronts, including information-sharing and data aggregation and analysis. At the core of his recommendations is the development of a formal mechanism to share information and data among farmers, harvesters, packers, shippers, processors and their providers. As Babbitt put it, you can either “sift through the data or sift through the wreckage.”
The work of CAN and the recommendations presented by Babbitt represent important opportunities for collaboration, but they are not the only ones. Collaboration on solution creation should be a goal for which we constantly strive. Have ideas on how we can work together to improve food safety? Reach out. Let’s talk. The best collaborations, perhaps, are still to be determined.
Tim York is CEO of the California Leafy Green Marketing Agreement.
