| North Shore EVP NIFA Food Safety Outreach Program Food Safety Outreach in Hawai’i In September 2022, North Shore EVP was awarded a National Institute of Food and Agriculture Food Safety Outreach Program (NIFA FSOP) grant supporting a two year outreach effort across the State of Hawai’i. The project facilitates outreach efforts through four (4) events: Harmonized GAP Farm Days, GroupGAP Informational Webinars, Partner Outreach Events, and HeavyConnect digital recordkeeping demonstrations. Harmonized GAP (HGAP) Farm Days are designed to showcase farms in the state who have attained or are working towards attaining their food safety certification. Attendees will see practical food safety practices, learn about and try out the digital record keeping method through HeavyConnect (HC) demonstrations, and ask questions of farm staff and food safety professionals. We have hosted three (3) HGAP Farm Days across the islands since the start of our project, working with farms on Oʻahu, Kauaʻi, and Hawaiʻi island. Not only have these events allowed farmers to showcase their practices and individual farms, they have also served to connect community members with local farms and raise awareness of various service providers present to assist the ag sector. The most recent Harmonized GAP Farm Day was held on Hawaiʻi island at Hoʻonani Harvest farm in November. This event was a collaborative effort showcasing food safety practices, conservation program practices with NRCS, and bee-keeping! Nine (9) attendees turned out for the Saturday afternoon event, and while six attendees reported knowledge of food safety practices at the start, all nine attendees reported that they had learned something new by the end of the event. Additionally all nine attendees said that they would implement food safety practices discussed at the event, and that they would be interested in attending another similar event. To close out the event, we sampled honey from the farmʻs bees alongside local goat cheeses and māmaki tea. GroupGAP Informational Webinars are online outreach events designed to provide an overview of the Hawai’i GroupGAP program for potential applicants. We have now held four (4) GroupGAP informational webinars since the start of the project, with 55 attendees tuning in. The most recent webinar, held in November 2023, was our first held in both English and Mandarin. Our next webinar will be held in the late spring of 2024. Our team members have been participating in partner outreach events across the state sharing information about GroupGAP and food safety practices. Since the start of the project, we have attended eight (8) partner events, two (2) on each island (Oʻahu, Maui, Hawaiʻi, and Kauaʻi). Partners have included distributors (Fresh Point Hawaii, Kula Produce), farmer organizations (Kauai County Farm Bureau), University of Hawaiʻi Cooperative Extension, and veteran farmer groups (Hoʻola Farms). Demonstrations showcasing the digital record keeping app HeavyConnect are incorporated into all of the project’s outreach events. We are planning to host a buyer focused webinar in late spring 2024 focusing on how HeavyConnect can be utilized to streamline buyer-farmer communication on product availability, quality, estimated shelf life and final packaging information. We believe that improved communication (detailed and timely) between farmers and buyers will help to increase local purchasing and reduce fresh produce imports. Accessing larger commercial and institutional markets that generally require food safety certification is a challenge for small farms in Hawaiʻi. Over 90% of our state’s farms are under 10 acres and less than 1% are USDA GAP certified. Education, outreach, and technical assistance for farms wishing to attain USDA Harmonized GAP certification is our program’s goal. We are experiencing greater interest in our program in response to our outreach efforts as a result of this project, and have recently accepted 10 farms into the Hawaiʻi GroupGAP program to start training in our eighth cohort. This will be our first multilingual training cohort, offered in Mandarin and English. We have expanded our food safety team, hiring two (2) new food safety specialists in August, 2023, and look forward to helping more Hawaiʻi farmers achieve greater market access through this work. For questions or comments about the project or Hawaiʻi GroupGAP, please contact North Shore EVP. | 
