More on Specialty Crop Block Grants

More on Specialty Crop Block Grants. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Wednesdays announcement by Deputy Ag Secretary Kathleen Merrigan regarding new specialty crop block grants has been well received by fruit growers across the northwest. Bruce Grim, Executive Director of the Washington State Horticultural Association was a part of that announcement.

GRIM: What we’ve been doing in Washington for the last couple of years now is we have created a food safety program and put forth a guidance manual that allows growers to have their orchards audit ready by participation in this program. These funds have helped create the guidance document.

Grim is talking about the GRAS2P audit readiness program.

GRIM: It’s uniform that helps tremendously with the final audit process because auditors know right where everything is in the manual so we have this last year 450 growers signed up in the program. We anticipate at least that many more as the full impact of the Food Safety Modernization Act and retailer requirements, their dictates for food safety come fully to bear. We’re ramped up and ready to go when we’ll have large numbers of growers in our state that will be GAP certified under this program.

USDA will be investing in 55 specialty crop block grants that will fund 740 initiatives across the United States and its territories including the GRAS2P program Grim is talking about.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.