The HACCP application for primary producers

The HACCP application for primary producers
These are the farmers either raising livestock for the meat industry or the growers of the crops and vegetables that will be used by the processors in their conversion into finished products.

The individual steps within the process can be assessed systematically for the potential for hazards to occur here, just as with any other area of the food processing industry.

Control measures can then be identified, and the control points that critical to food safety identified.

Critical limit may be harder to identify, but here the framer is often helped by legislative limits, for example in the case of herbicide and pesticide application.

Monitoring the CCPs are sometimes require some ingenuity. Staying with our example of herbicide and pesticide application, this may be done though the signing off of application record sheets or, when using aerial application, through use of regularly placed pieces of test paper across the land being sprayed, in order to record the spread of the application.

For primary producers there may be added difficulty in understanding the impact of their actions further down the supply chain.

Yet for the processors it is almost impossible to anticipate what potentials new hazards may arise at their stage in the supply chain, if they do not know what has occurred earlier on during primary production, or what may arise in the future.

Also, an issue that may not appear to be hazard on the farm may well have an impact further down the chain and require control measures to be implemented at the stage of the earlier primary process.

For example, presenting animals for slaughter in an unfit state may increase the likehood of E. coli contamination of the meat. Application of HACCP at the primary producer states probably best done by use of a team approach.
The HACCP application for primary producers