MSU Extension Agrifood Safety

Harvest Wagons and Pick Buckets

Allissa Conley | Produce Safety Technician

Wagons and pick buckets are very common on the farm and can be used to your advantage when it comes to on-farm produce safety.

Subpart L 112.123 in the Produce Safety Rule states that you must inspect, maintain, and clean and, when necessary and appropriate, sanitize all food contact surfaces of equipment and tools used in covered activities as frequently as reasonably necessary to protect against contamination of covered produce. Food contact surfaces are anything on the farm that come into direct contact with produce and covered activities include the growing, harvesting, packing, and holding of the produce.

It is common in many operations for farm workers to bring a stack of pick buckets out into the field so they can pick more at once, especially if they are picking for piece-rate pay. Although it is great that workers are wanting to pick more, when pick buckets are stacked into one another and/or placed directly on the ground it becomes a food safety issue because when buckets are placed on the ground and stacked together, poop and other bacteria on the ground can be transferred to the bucket, and then to the fruit or vegetable being harvested. These practices can help facilitate cross contamination, or the process of bacteria being transferred from one source to another.

One blueberry farm is combating this issue by providing workers with wagons that fit the same number of buckets but have lower side walls. By providing a wagon that has low side walls, the workers can still bring many buckets into the field, but it helps them to not keep them on the ground and prevents them from being able to stack buckets, thus helping to prevent cross contamination to the freshly harvested fruit.