Record-Keeping Activities On The Farm

The different records are required to assist the operation in ensuring optimum food, safety and quality.

Management of health and safety can make a significant contribution to the performance of the crop and for enhancing food safety by reducing injuries and ill health and helping minimize losses and liabilities.

It is however very important to ensure that records of all actions are kept. The main reason for these records is “traceability”.

Traceability: Refers to the completeness of the information about every step in a process chain.

EU Food Law 178/2002:

The EU Regulation with regards to traceability applies to everyone involved in the production, processing, distribution or sale of any item intended for human consumption, including food service and catering companies.

The law lays down a number of principles that, by their nature, affect anyone exporting foodstuffs into Europe and it clearly states that all food businesses must have a traceability system in place.

• Responsibility for the safe production of food lies with the producer.
• Food that is in any way unfit or unsafe for consumption cannot be marketed.
• The entire food chain, from farm to fork, is included.
• The Traceability and Recall Articles require that a food traceability system must be in place that enables everyone within that chain to know who supplied the ingredients that make up the final product that goes to the market. This is known as the one up/one down principle.
• This information must be available to any competent authority on demand.

This means that every partner in a supply chain will have to know who supplied goods to them and, in turn, who they supplied the resultant goods to.

HACCP versus te EU Food Law

These two are totally separate issues. An effective food safety management system requires a proactive hazard management system (HACCP) as well as a traceability and recall system.

Safety records are the responsibility of dedicated team leaders, foremen, the health and safety committee, and specific individuals such as spray pump operators. It is important to keep the records in an organised and centralised point, under the control of one person who will be able to access the information at a moment’s notice.

Records can be kept manually (by filling in the forms and records by hand) or by utilising electronic systems where the information is fed via computer. Electronic systems have the benefit of also processing the data fed into the program and additional information can then be extracted from these programs. Electronic programs can, for example, deliver graphs and comparisons about the progress of the producer in terms of the quality of his produce or financial statements can be expressed by extracting data from different records. Electronic data can often be used when comparisons are drawn over a period of time. Although manual data can supply the same information, it is a lot more complicated to extract the required information without the assistance of electronic equipment and software.

The records subscribed by the various quality management systems and PPECB (Perishable Products Export Control Board) require that the documents be filled incorrectly. The nature of these documents will serve as evidence of compliance with traceability recommendations because specific information with dates and signatures of responsible parties will be found on these documents if they have been filled incorrectly.

It is thus important that all relevant staff and workers be trained in:

• How to complete the different forms and checklists correctly.
• How, where, when and for how long, to report on and/or file these forms and checklists.
• The consequences of accountability and responsibility in terms of traceability and the law related to the completion of (or failure to complete) these forms and checklists.

Evidence of records needs to be kept for a specific period in a central place and under the authority of a specific person.

The records should meet standard criteria of tracking and trace, in other words, they should be accessible in a systematic and chronological way, by date, batch number geographical reference point, delivery and dispatch reference.