10/06/08 Inspecting the Crops

Inspecting the crops. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. It's harvest time for potatoes and onions- two of Oregon's top agricultural commodities. That means some long hours of inspection by the Oregon Department of Agriculture and others. ODA inspectors provide an impartial third party certification to make sure a half million tons of potatoes and onions make the grade for processors and consumers this fall. PRENTISS: A lot of it determines price. We go through and grade product and determine price. The other portion of our service is we go through and make sure the consumer gets a good quality product that they are paying for. Casey Prentiss is district manager of ODA's Shipping Point Inspection Program, and is based in Ontario. That's where a lot of the potato and onion activity is taking place right now. PRENTISS: Volumes have increased greatly, especially the potato processing. On the fresh side, volumes have really increased. We went up in the volume of sheds and now we have kind of graduated back down a few sheds, but our daily volume is the highest it has ever been. With more potatoes and onions needing inspection and resources tighter, ODA has looked to the state's prison system for some help in Eastern Oregon. Trained and supervised inmates are being used in at least one Ontario facility to do many of the tasks formerly done by ODA employees- and are doing a good job. PRENTISS: We go through and select inmates that want to be there and want to do the job. They come ten of them with an officer or five of them with an officer- depending on our needs. We pay Department of Corrections for that work and we actually give them classroom and on-the-job training for their release, and they do basically every job in the plant. Prentiss says the inspection process has changed in the last decade and has become much more automated. That has streamlined the process. PRENTISS: In a lot of our third party, we use a computer now. We don't have a paper trail. We've kind of gone green, for a lack of a better term. We don't use as much paper, we do a lot electronically, and it has really cut into our time consumption. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.