Produce Safety Training for Fruit and Vegetable Growers Focuses on Prevention, Best Practices

Mar 24, 2026

By Rebekah Hall

Arkansas fruit and vegetable growers are invited to learn food safety best practices and regulatory requirements at the first produce safety grower training of 2026 on April 9.

The training will take place at the C.A. Vines Arkansas 4-H Center at 1 Four H Way in Little Rock from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Registration is free and includes lunch, snacks and training materials. Attendance is limited to 25 spots, and participants must register online by April 6. Walk-ins will not be accepted.

“We are looking forward to working with growers to provide them with important information about best practices, risk management and regulatory requirements,” said Amanda Philyaw Perez, extension associate professor of food systems and food safety specialist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

The training will cover soil amendments, postharvest handling, worker health and hygiene, wildlife management and more.

Perez said that the 2026 series of extension produce safety grower trainings were made possible through the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Grant program, or RFSI. Two more trainings will be offered this summer and fall.

The Arkansas Department of Agriculture administers the RFSI program through funding provided by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service.

Source : uada.edu

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.