Jen Dougherty
Specialty Crops Inspection
In March 2017, the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce reached out to AMS’s Specialty Crops Program on behalf of JD Farms, of Poplarville, Miss., the parent company of Pearl River Tea. MDAC staff wanted to know if the agency could perform a USDA Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) audit on fresh tea leaves, a first for AMS.
SCP supports producers of agricultural products from almonds to Christmas trees and lumber to zucchini with a variety of services that help ensure the quality of crops and help farmers get their crops to market. GAP is a voluntary program offered to the fruit and vegetable industry that verifies the participant has taken proactive measures to reduce the risk of contamination by adhering to generally recognized industry best practices.
The program’s Specialty Crops Inspection Division and its Federal-State partners perform more than 4,000 USDA GAP audits each year, which include hundreds of different specialty crops and their products, so it’s not often that a new one comes our way.
Although tea fits the specialty crops definition of “fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops (including floriculture),” before SCI could agree to take on the audit project, it had to evaluate the entire tea production process. Don Van de Werken, an owner of the company, showed the prospective auditors what they needed to know about tea farming, from planting, pruning, and trimming the tea bushes, to cutting the tea in the field using a special harvester, to drying the cut tea leaves in the sun.
With this knowledge of the production process, they determined that the growing and harvesting of tea leaves was within the scope of USDA GAP audits. In May 2017, Kevin Riggin, of MDAC’s Federal-State Inspection Services staff, audited the production of the farm’s three acres of green and black tea, making JD Farms the first in the United States to undergo a USDA GAP audit for tea leaves.
JD Farms is confident that USDA GAP certification will open new markets for their tea. “We are putting it in our marketing campaign now,” Van de Werken said. “Consumer safety is on everybody’s minds, so we are excited about it. We have comfort knowing someone in the state is keeping an eye on us to do the right thing for our consumers.”
Let Us Walk You Through The Process
If you are the producer of a specialty crop and are interested in becoming GAP certified, contact the local Specialty Crops Inspection Division audit office closest to the facility that needs to be audited and let us walk you through six basic steps that will put you on the path to certification. For non-domestic audits, contact the national office at (202) 720-5021 or email SCAudits@ams.usda.gov.