The cost of implementation is often cited as a primary barrier to implementing food safety practices in the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) on the farm. Costs include infrastructure and equipment upgrades and time and labor to implement new practices and maintain recordkeeping systems. The benefits of compliance with FSMA include maintaining and expanding existing market channel sales, accessing new markets and buyers, and strengthening of their farm brand to prospective buyers due to their food safety improvements.
Studies using grower surveys or case studies have consistently found that smaller farms have higher average costs per acre in food safety investments relative to larger farms. Models incorporating foodborne illness outbreaks that simulate long-term market effects have also demonstrated large growers will benefit more from FSMA relative to small growers. The results of these studies have caused concern regarding the continued financial feasibility of smaller farms given the relatively larger cost burden they face in meeting increasing food safety regulatory requirements. However, potential sales benefits from improving food safety practices on farms have been ignored, as has the ratio of benefits received from food safety to their costs.
This Cornell Dyson School study used a unique data set from GAPs training participants in New York State (NYS) that counted the additional food safety investments made by producers because of the GAPs training received as well as the costs and benefits to producers from those investments. Using this data, the authors explicitly accounted for changes in food safety costs relative to changes in food safety benefits.
They found that food safety improvement costs averaged $312 per acre across the entire sample of farms. The average costs per acre across farm sizes supported the hypothesis that costs for food safety improvements increase with farm size, but less than proportionally. Average costs per acre drop drastically from the smallest farm category (less than or equal to 15 acres at $908 per acre) to the largest (> 500 acres at $43 per acre) farm category.
Across all farms, food safety improvements resulted in average sales per acre benefits of $1,441, ranging from a low of $905 for the largest farm size category to a high of $1,860 for farms ranging in size from 15 to 99 acres. But there was no statistical difference in benefit based on farm size. Third party audits of the farm’s food safety plan and practices seemed to increase the positive sales effect. Of the farms reporting a positive sales effect, 70% had a third-party audit. Only 6% of the farms with no sales effect after food safety improvements had a third-party audit.
Most importantly the food safety benefit cost ratio for all farm size categories was above 1, indicating that, on average, the benefits of food safety improvements exceeded the costs, regardless of farm size. The average across all farms was 4.61 implying that the benefits received were 4.61 times that of their annual cost. There was a big difference between the benefit cost ratio for farms with a third-party audit (13.33) and without a third-party audit (1.57).
The results presented here should be welcomed by growers, demonstrating that food safety efforts are worth the investment and by educators as they encourage participation by all scales of producers in GAPs training.
Source
Schmit TM, Wall GL, Newbold EJ, Bihn EA (2020) Assessing the costs and returns of on-farm food safety improvements: A survey of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) training participants. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0235507. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235507