2020 has been an eventful year for us all, and here at Chesapeake Harvest, we have been expanding our program and switching gears to be more available and responsive to our base of farmers. Although we could not meet in person, we still served our farmers virtually and reached even more people through webinars.

COVID-19 has increased farmers’ interest in food safety as they keep a keen eye on keeping their customers, employees, and families safe. To address this, we held webinars this year in partnership with Future Harvest CASA that can be found along with a food safety toolkit at futureharvestcasa.org. The webinars focused on frequently asked questions regarding COVID and food safety and post-harvest handling and standard operating procedures.

This Fall, we have been busy capturing video on urban and rural farms, which can be viewed as part of our upcoming webinars. We will be featuring our Food Safety Educator trainees, Kimberly Raikes, Dana Barnes, and Crystal Forman from Whitelock Community Farm and Miss Rodette Jones from Filbert St Garden in Baltimore, as well as farmers Erik Guzman and Meghan of Dicot Farm in Waldorf MD.

We also successfully applied for a new grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture to extend our programs for two more years! Those programs include training cohorts of community-based food safety educators, farm risk assessments, one on one food safety plan coaching, and a series of workshops and webinars to teach food safety basics and best practices in post-harvest handling.

Ways to stay connected and informed:

• Look out for our upcoming webinars on Tuesday, Jan 26th, 3-5 pm, Tuesday, Feb 9th from 3-5, and Tuesday, Feb 23rd, from 3-5 pm.
• If you or a farmer you know is interested in a farm risk assessment or food safety plan coaching, please reach out to Lindsay Gilmour at .
• If you are interested in becoming a food safety educator, please reach out to Aleya Fraser at .