Good agricultural practice

Summer of '23 will go down forever as the year we, um, did our GAP, our Canada GAP certification.

GAP, or Good Agricultural Practices, is an on-farm food safety certification.

And in recent years, it has become just about essential for farmers who want to sell into wholesale markets.

It also has a reputation for being inflexible to the realities and needs of small-scale farms like Helmer's, so it was a big deal for Anna to go through the process.

We are finally getting to the point where we can put the sheep, we think we can put the sheep into the fields when they're mature.

And then you've got other restrictions like GAP and USDA restrictions on when you can put sheep into any sort of food You know, um, sort of thing.

Whether you're picking off the ground or not, you can't put sheep in prior to harvest for I think it's 90 days.

That's a s- that's our main growing time.

And obviously meeting those standards that we require here in the UK, which I think are stricter basically than most places in the world, in fact.

And the regulations here changing, which has happened recently on the GMP, GAP front, which we only explained in great detail, which we talked about on the last episode.

But I'd love to understand from you guys whether that's sort of impacted you, the change to the UK regulations, whether that's been as much of a headache for you as it has for us.

Yeah.

I need to fill this many trays, and go.

And then with the wash/pack team, we're GAP certified, so there's also a lot of logs that I think keep people organized and on track.

So clipboards with, like, what all got cleaned, what all got sanitized, what needs to get checked, stuff like that.

So there, there is, like, a, a morning routine and flow.