Welcome to this Production and Post harvest Water Testing and Sampling training module for farm owners, small and mid-sized producers, and processors.
This module was developed by RTI International, North Carolina State University, and Virginia Tech and supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Food Safety Outreach Program, Accession No: 1023628.
This interactive training should take you roughly 30 minutes to complete. This course provides informative content related to production and postharvest water testing and sampling and short challenges to test your knowledge of the material. Your responses will be anonymous and none of your information (e.g.: name, company, email address) will be collected. Your answers will be aggregated to produce a summary report that will help us improve the course.
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
- Understand why it is important to test the water you use to grow and process produce at your operation
- Describe the differences between agricultural water, production water, and postharvest water
- Identify the different sources of water and their risks
- Describe how, where, and when to sample surface and ground water
- Describe how to store a sample and maximum holding time
- Learn how to obtain a list of labs to which you can send samples and what test to order Interpret the lab results of water testing
You can stop the training at any time; however, you will not be able to save your work, and will need to restart from the beginning.
Keywords: water, food safety, fresh produce, sampling, testing, microbial water quality, pre harvest water, post-harvest water