Instead of emphasizing universal prevention practice standards,
further on-farm research should evaluate the structural barriers to
on farm adoption of produce safety measures and develop recommendations
that are accompanied by scale and marketing based
metrics. In addition, analyses of fresh produce aggregation and
distribution systems for risks and understanding the optimal scales
to reduce those risk is warranted. Consumer health and safety must
be the foremost goal in developing standards while ensuring that
these solutions make a real difference in protecting consumers and
not creating additional barriers to farmers for the sake of shortterm
market assurances. This process of standard development
can begin by questioning our assumptions about on-farm food
safety, where the best food safety controls can be implemented in a
commodity chain, the messages that are used, and the practices
that are promoted before concluding that the audience of growers
is knowledge deficient.