handle your vegetables after harvest and after harvest so that the quality will really be high quality of your produce is very important to the end buyer as local farmers selling in the local market one of the number one things that i hear from customers is when they buy in a farmer's market or food from a local farmer they are afraid the food won't hold up as long  in their refrigerator and so the way you handle your food after you harvest it is very very important for the long lasting quality the shelf life the nutritional levels and the taste all affected by how you handle it that's what we'll be talking a lot about for this next hour and a half and the quality of your produce will also have a bigger impact upon your reputation and your relationship with your customers so you will find that it will help you be much more successful if you pay attention to some of these simple basic practices and how you handle your food we're also going to talk a little bit about food safety in the in the in the practices that we do in the food handling and the things that we need to take into consideration to make sure that the way we're handling the food after we pick it is going to be safe every farm has to think about this safety issue because you're feeling people your handlers of of the food and you're responsible for the wellness of their product so when we start to talk about  alexander food and fresh problems the very first place we want to start is to really understand that the fresh produce is a life and it breeds it really says he and wife journey can get sick and it can even die so we're going to talk about their process if you think about a plant where it is growing in the ground how the roots go down into the soil and they take up water and that leaves they have a in the ground and living the fresh food that you are growing can replenish that water and it can replenish those nutrients but as soon as we pick the food and we take it away from the plant that process is reversed the food can no longer take in water from the ground it can no longer make a difference in cells from the air in the sun and so it begins to deteriorate i want you to do something the back of your hand and notice the temperature notice how warm or cold and notice if it's more a stir dry and then breathe on it a few times and i'm feel again tell me tell me what you feel that is different but what do you know just different warmer maybe one story fills them waster that is your process of breathing because you are alive and your fresh produce is is similar it's also alive and it's breathing lets out air and it lets sell more if jerk and it lets out heat and so or vegetables are different than people of course they do not have lungs they're more like a reptile and if you think about a snake in the woods when it's cold it doesn't move it just sits still and what it wire it runs through the grass and so on you want to put your vegetables to sleep you want to bring the temperature of the vegetables down very quickly so that they go to sleep that will slow all that respiration breathing process and you won't lose the my fear and the heat as fast which is what causes the deterioration i put this slide appear not because these numbers are important but i just want to really emphasize how important temperature is when you are working with fresh vegetables if you look at the line across the car you see different temperatures thirty two degrees in the freezing temperature and then  as the temperature gets higher so you can see those numbers in very large as the temperature goes up so for air so it's very important that you bring your vegetables very quickly down to the correct temperature if you want to put them to sleep just when you want to put your children to sleep it will really help them stay fresh longer so in the manual that you received today you will find a child that looks like this and it classifies all different vegetables according to how quickly they deteriorate at different temperatures so is there a category of very low or low or moderate the best among you can grow them and sell them in the fresh market without having expensive coolers and and doing a lot of cooling and they will stay fresh potatoes will be able to sell them and have a good reputation crops are high very high extremely high in breeding and respiration those crafts they must be cooled and they must be kept c fast if they are not got called quickly and getting them called have to happen very fast if they sit warm for one day they start to spoil i'm sure many of you have had this experience you pick a head of lettuce and it's  mother hog day and within a few hours is getting lamb and now you are looking fresh any longer whereas you know if you pick a beet and you set it on the counter it will still look nice in a day it is not a sensitive front what if you leave the leaves on the beat then it must be got cold because those leaves are green and they will spoil very quickly so the first step in this process we have to pick the vegetable we are writing at harvest i took these two pictures in september and the picture in the middle is a thermometer and it says that it is fifty eight degrees want to get even a little cooler but that's cool enough and it will stay very fresh if you pick it really in the morning like this when it is cool you won't have to do a lot of work cooling it further but then there's a picture on the right i took that in the afternoon at four o'clock and then the air temperature was eighty eight degrees and the broccoli was eighty two degrees well now that broccoli is very warm it is going to spoil very quickly that's not cool so it's going to take time and money to get that feel he out of there privately it has to happen fairest so if you can pick your vegetables when it's cool out early in the morning before the sun has heated them up that is the really important first thing you can do to get the quality down and if you do make it in the afternoon when it's hot you must have a way  crops that are so sensitive quickly and even if you can cool them quickly the quality will never be as good as if you had picked them when they're cool so number one step is to know which of the crops that you're growing you must  cool very quickly and try to pick them when it is higher before it's about really in the morning all those fresh greens and broccoli your lettuce your spillage is this is an nking it when it's cool and keeping it cool will help a lot once it's picked it's very important that you get it out of the style as soon as the boxes film take it to the shade put it in a tr boxes sit in the field many boxes full as soon as the box is full get it out of the side and then quickly take it to where you want to pack it if you have refrigeration on your farm or cool place where you keep it that should happen very quickly another thing that's important to think about and harvest is whether you can pick the vegetables dry or wet because early in the morning it is often where from do or if it is rain crops like tomatoes or peppers those crops usually pick them when they are dried if you pick them when they're wife it really increases the amount of disease that the crops have when they are wet the pores in the leaves open and your hands can have the pathogens form the disease on them because they're in the soil and in the air and then if you touch the plants it's very easy for the disease to enter the plant squash on the crops that are in the current their way they are very sensitive to fungal diseases i think a pound green beans if you pick them when they are when it causes them to the disease rust and the green beans you have like little red brown spots on them so you would want to pick those when they are not wet other things such as fresh  or right after rain for like an onion or a really crap those you can pick if they're where or if they're dry if you're going to sell them fresh it's fine to pick them either if you want to keep them for a very long time and it's best if you pick them when they're not muddy think about not damaging the produce every time the produce is handled it's very easy to puncture it or scratch it or to give it a bruise sometimes it's hard to see those parts right away it's like if you bruise your arm you know how you don't notice it right away and then later you see a bruise and you think oh where did that come from i don't remember getting myself because it doesn't show up right away and it's the same with many vegetables if you aren't really gentle when you pick them you might bruise them and then you might sell them and you don't even know it's got a bruise and then your customer finds a bruise we want to make our customers very happy so they come again and again and again and make sure we have a damage so think about trimming your fingernails so you won't scratch the food take off your jewelry leave in a safe place instead of wearing it while you pick it can be very good to wear gloves soft cotton gloves will help to pad your hands so you won't damage the food when you pick the produce i always like to say fresh produce should be seen but not heard and that's because when you pick it and set it in the container set it down gently don't drop it we take it all the way to the bottom before you let it go and make sure you don't bruise it think about when you bring it in and if you're driving a truck or pushing a cart don't go really fast you know go nice and slow so you don't count the vegetables up and down think about how for you make your container if you make it very fall in the food is gentle fragile like a tomato it can cause compression damage so don't make your containers to fall for  when she worked for us to trim these stems of the squash straight not an ngo because then you make a nice little knife and to set them in the box with the stem side out and she knew that and did that really well and you work for us then she started her own farm and she was not used to training her helpers yet so she just told them to pick the squash but she didn't instruct them to put the stems out and so they just picked them and they didn't understand that their arms would scratch the other squash and about three weeks later she took this picture because almost half of her squash had rotted where it got scratched from another squash so even when you understand these things really well about protecting the food in the box be sure you have educated and told the people who are working for you so that they understand that one important thing to remember is what you should bring in from the field or what you should leave out i put this picture of a premium here because you can see it has a small crowd right it's pretty swell scars all over it that crack was whose in a fluid to just not even pick it in unless you're going to put it in a separate container to eat for yourself but if you bring that in with that you will because it's the other food to spoil another very important thing to be aware of for food safety when you're harvesting is to watch for animal tracks or animal pool in this picture you can see some deer on the ground and a deer footprint you want to watch for  bird droppings and if you see any sign of that you should not pick the food in sell it the animal feces the animal can have bacteria and different disease organisms that cause human beings to get sick you should train your wrist people helping you to watch for and in they see it don't walk through it but walk around it and then tell you so that you can mark down there that was there and that you didn't pick it if anyone ever does get sick from food if you eat and you have kept good records showing that you watch for this sort of problem it would really help you have to answer questions you might also want to have a way of scaring birds away from your fields so that they don't come in and poop on your crops when you are ready to harvest on the top picture you can see there that's called the bird scared cycle round if you can hang in a field of something like strawberries which birds like so much and that will help to scare them away you know the best trick i ever found was the radio term into a talk show and some soap and the other one was some sanitizer i'll show you some types of sanitizers you can use in a little while if you have them stand up in the morning when you start a war then it doesn't take very much time to simply  and put it in the soap and in the sanitizer and then go to the field but you know if these things aren't set up ahead then it takes so much time and it will likely happen have them set up ahead  difference in the world make it easy to do or where you need to also washing boxes if there was only one tool you could afford to buy i would suggest you buy a pressure washer they cost about one hundred  fifty dollars and they will make the water come out very hard without a pressure washer to wash your boxes you have to scrub them with a scrub brush it is very slow so it's important that your boxes are clean really every day and have someone assigned who is responsible to do that they could start early in the morning or do it at the end of the day but they should be cleaned out before they go to the field the other aspects of sanitation for food safety is there must be some sort of toyland where there is a running water toilet or porta potty but a safe place to go to the bathroom and a place to wash hands with pardonable water water that is safe to drink if you don't have running water on the farm you can make a portable hand washing station you could purchase a water jar of the has a spout and lives on that side you can purchase them for about eight or ten dollars you should have soap in a trash can with a lid for paper towels it's important that you have paper towels so you're not using the same cloth for food safety between different people that's an important thing to have on the farm so that the workers can wash their hands after they go to the bathroom and not get their own pathogens on the food that people will eat as you're picking and not just possible keep the produce clean all that the ball should be clean when they are sold that's a very important thing that doesn't mean they have to be watched it's possible to get many vegetables clean without washing them so as much as possible you want to keep them clean and harvest and sometimes that just involves a little bit of training of people who are helping you if you think about something like broccoli it's already clean it's not on the ground and it's clean so you don't want to give it dirty when you're picking in but if you are not careful you'll get a little dirt on your knife and then when you cut the broccoli then the dirt gets on the broccoli stem well that actually could be a food safety problem because the pathogens that we want to be sure don't get in our food that may come from all sorts of different wild animals are often in the soil so we don't want to take the soil and accidentally shear it across the cut space where it's easy for those pathogens to go inside the vegetables so we want to be sure the knife is clean and not guarding dirt on the bottom there we're cutting and think about your hands if you get some dirt on your hands and then put it on the top of the head of broccoli while you cut it then you will get dirt on the broccoli so by just taking a little bit of care and harvesting it's very possible to pick the broccoli and keep it clean and then it will not have to be washed other crops like cabbage for example those crops will get soil down in the bottom areas there and you will be able to cut it and not get dirt across the cut and that will keep it clean it's important for some crops like cabbage because cabbage should actually not be washed many people do watch cabbage but when you get why should you get water inside those leaves and then they say for oil much faster it won't keep as well some crops like tomatoes they also should not be washed many people wash them but they're very sensitive to taking pathogens in with the stillness and if you watch them in water that can cause disease problems for people usually with a crop like tomatoes if you wear s gloves and if you pick them when they are dry you can simply polish the soil off harvest something like a watermelon it's fine it's ok to wash a watermelon that will not hurt the watermelon but it's extra work and there's always enough work to do on a farm there's no reason to look for any more so if you were gloves and you pick them when they are not really wet sometimes you can just polish them and you will not have to wash them anymore for crafts that you will have to wash like leaks you can often leave much of the soil and the leaves that you're not going to sell right in the field and then make more actual work you can see the pretty clean and it was very quick and then we'll bring that in and just printed out and it will be ready to go for market i like that one we really didn't give each other given it soil off it was pretty dirty other crops there are crops that you should never ever wash such as strawberries or raspberries you wouldn't wash those crops until right before you eat them so it's important that you when you grow them keeps them clean or something like strawberries you would put mulch or plastic underneath them so they don't get dirty that harvest something like raspberries are often grown on a troll us so that they won't touch the ground wash and which ones you should not wash so you can look to that as a reference for your particular crops now crops and i'm very very dirty such as road crabs those crabs should be spray should they should not be poured into a tank of water intil they have taken most of the soil off and that is important because many people pick these when they're dirty and they put them right into a tan wire but that could cause a food safety problem because the soil is where the pathogens that people are concerned about causing food borne illnesses are and if you place some very dirty produce that should bowls in a tank of water then those have legions are able to go inside the vegetable to be taken into the vegetable so it's important to wash the very dirty vegetables with the sprayer before you put them in water you can see that very dense and you can do this very inexpensively in this picture you think they just have a hole with the own and they're spraying it's very simple and you can make yourself a screen table without spending very much money this one is from our car we just took a metal frame and cut the legs  and then we put galvanized steel over that i like it this way with no legs because we can get it out of the way when we are not using it it doesn't take up a lot of space and then when we want to use it we just take feel towards and we stack them up and make links with the field poles or we might set it on the end of our washed our hands and then use it to drive things so you can make one very inexpensively now i put this picture ian because i want you to help me find some problems in this picture there are more things happening here there are causing the problem to blasters law and there are some food safety problems very quickly ok i'm going to tell you a couple icy to see the wooden wall behind the washer it has peeling paint and then he could fall on the food and then people would believe that it might even be lead paint it's very old it might have lennon and because they're spraying there they might not the water against the wall very easily and that would knock the panes into the food to see that this table is made out of words well they have the screen on the bottom if the screen was on the top would could have splinters in the food my hunch that because they just moved that screen to the top that would be a little bit safer but there's one more that's a very big problem and i just this picture of the internet i don't know who this is but it's a good example because we find when we visit our all farms there are things that we haven't noticed and it's very important that you look at your own places that you are handling the vegetables and make sure you're doing it safe so that one is last year is that right think about the birds fly over the world and then they poop on the road and then when it rains the rain will wash the diseases that is are in the birds pools and to this washed table so in the important think about where the birds fly and not sending things where the water will be from the roads coming down and watching those to they're another way to wash bread products can be right in the field told that you harvest two if they're about half full if you spray the vegetables on the top and then just sort of tip the box from side to side and continue to spray and that can be a good way to wash them if you don't have too many so when we talk the bowl or other we've been talking about washing vegetables it's very important that you wash your vegetables with water that is safe to drink if the water is not safe for you to drink because it has half the jinns and then it is also not safe to wash your vegetables with because you could get the pathogens on the best of both if you're using water that is from a city system then that water has been tested and it's safe to use if you're using it from a well you should have it twice to two times a year but once in spring and then again in august and you can go to the department of health where you live in your county offices and they will give you a small bottle to try to bring them a water sample and it will have instructions about how to take the sample it is important that you take the sample the correct way or you might get pathogens in it that aren't actually in the water they might be outside of the faucet the instructions will be in the container so if you cannot read it and someone to read it for you if you don't know the language i don't know if they come in other languages those instructions it doesn't cost very much to that is considered safe and you want to be sure they test for how much it is very important that you do not wash with water from a river or piled orosz dream water that is above the ground it's another way to clean vegetables is to wash them in a tank of water with a brush and that can crowd such as congress have you might watch that way a winter squash could be washed that way i'm going to show you only chemical rush washer because this i told you already that if i could only buy you one tool i would buy a pressure washer well if i could buy you a second tool i would buy a mechanical brush washer many farms could use this launch sooner than they realize if you are packing if you are selling five hundred dollars worth of shabelle when you wash your vegetables i think it will pay for this machine it is so much passion there if you wash my hands it's about four or five boxes an hour maybe this machine they sell they say a hundred bucks an hour but that would take five people when i use it with two people it's thirty to forty boxes in an hour and gets them so much cleaner than if i wash them by here and it saves so much time this picture shows four different sections you don't need all of the sections you can buy them as individuals the most important section is this one called a washer sprayer and it has brushes inside i'm going to show some videos to you so that you can see how it works the first section here that's the feed belt that just turn rolls you put food on it and it feeds it into the washer that's not a very important or necessary part of the machine if you wanted to save money you could not buy that part and you wouldn't really miss said you could just stand there and put the proof right into the sprayer area afterwards washed it will come out on these drying sponges and they take off the excess moisture so the food won't rot as quickly and this last section is the rotating pack table there also is a section that you could avoid purchasing if you want to save money but when i show you the picture i think you are one if you buy the entire machine they cost around three thousand dollars new sometimes you can find them used i have purchased just the washing sections sometimes for three or four hundred dollars and you can use that section just alone if you want put the vegetables in and then have a come out and have them go into a box then you would have thought there is two good sources to buy them from one is market farm implement and the other is routers farm implement they both carry the new and used and you can also just watching craigslist replace an amp or at the farmers market in the newsletter many people will sell them you and you can sometimes to pick them up i packed vegetables for over twenty five years and this to me a lot of damage to my arms in my wrists because if you don't have that table you pick the vegetable up and you have to turn it to look for the bad spots and make your decision about where you should sell it and that's very hard on your wrists in your arms for many years i have a lot of pain and then i got this round table that turned so nice it saved so much damage to my own body because i could just sort of flick the vegetable and roll it and then i could see all the sides without having to handle them manually so i'm very happy i got there because it saved me so much labor also going to look at washing vegetables and of water and this is the type of washing where you must be the most careful first food safety reasons because when you put that shrivels the water and they are immersed inside of the water it's like a flower you know if you buy a flower you cut a flower you put it in a vase of water so that the water will go into the flower and keep it fresh and the vegetables will do the same thing they will take the water inside of them to stay fresh and that's good if you want the water there to keep them crisp and french but you must be very careful because if there are any diseases inside of the water then that disease can go inside of the vegetable once the disease has gone inside the vegetable the danger is that many people eat vegetables without cooking them and then those diseases can cause serious people born illnesses that can kill people so when you point us to bones in the water it's very important that you have good clean practices you should never ever pick vegetables that have bird feces if you then put them in water those feces those germs can spread and get on the other vegetables and they can go inside of the vegetables it's important that the people who are putting their hands in the water to take the vegetables in now and have gotten good many of the diseases that we're concerned about can be in the soil so when you pick them that soil if it is on the vegetable and you put it in the tank of could you could have put these diseases into the tank of water i showed you earlier that you could spray wash that the bottles and it's it's safer if you spray wash them then if you put them in the tank of water there also could be diseases on the people's hands that put them in the water and many of these types of diseases have legends we cannot see th and so it's important that we follow good sanitation practices so we are putting them in with our hands or with the tools that we use the boxes of the nights usually the germs will come either from soil whether in a wild animal has passed through and cooked on the soil or from a worker who's gone to the bathroom and hasn't fully washed their hands and you will not see those germs you need to have sea practices in place and be very aware that before you food fresh vegetables into it take a water they should have been spray washed they might not be perfectly washed something cellar mix you know small little leaves they will have a little bit of dirt on them but you want to have washed most of the dirt off before it goes in a tank of water now you might be putting it in a take a wider because you want to cool it if the vegetable is water from the air in the sun and the water is cold then the water will cool it down and that can be very helpful or you might want to put the vegetables in the water to chris you might want the water to go inside the vegetables to help them be very fresh just be sure that before you do that you have removed the soil and that you have been practicing safe sanitation by washing your hands and by washing your tools and your boxes so that there are germs that you cannot see going into the water and then spreading the vegetables and going inside of the vegetables it's important that you wash this tank out you should change the water once an hour as you are using it don't use the same water all day long drain it out and and scrub it and rinse it and put a sanitizer on it i'm going to show you some sand that ties your options and you might want to have more than one tank you might have your first tank where you have done the first rinse like with something like salad mix and then you might take it out and put it into a second take that even color to make the food get cold quickly there are products that it is a very good idea to put in the water they're called sanitizers and they will kill some of the germs that her in the water they will not kill all of a germ so you still have to have good sea practices the two products that i recommend the most are called  david they're from a country in the call ecolab and you can have them purchased and mailed to you and the reason i like those two products is that they are very safe to use they do not require a rinse and you'll not have to monitor the p h of the water so they're very simple to use and it's safe if when you're finished with the water if you empty the water out and it's not going through a septic system but just going into a woods or on the ground they are safe to you they're not going to cause pollution some people use chlorine bleach and it's easy to get up and store but you should not buy it if it's sent to or oxidized if you go to the store some of them will have the smells and you do not want to use th out i don't myself like to use chlorine bleach but many farmers use it the reason i don't like it is it has to be rinsed off so in there as an extra job for a few more more we don't want any more work we have enough work it also has to have the ph of the water control if the ph is not right it will not be effective and that means you take a little has a strip and you dip it in and if the ph is not right you have to add vinegar again more work which is why i do not like it it also can't be spilled into the woods or on the ground if it is very concentrated if it has more than ten parts per million it cannot be all so it can cause pollution problems so i have put it up there today not because i am recommending it but because many people use it and so i want to tell you these problems with it and these considerations you will have to take if you do use them it's important that you test that you have the right amount and this is not hard to do if you buy the tsunami or the sand from eagle while they also have test drips that you can purchase and it's just a little strip of paper after you put the san in the water you can dip the strip into the water and it will turn a different color there will be a little chart on the container that shows you what color it should be and then you can make sure you have the right amount oh that's a wonderful question she said do you have to let people know that you have you to listen to his or knowing to not have to let people know it is not a chemical in the sense that it is not a dangerous chemical sanitizer is made from something called hydrogen peroxide and it is safe to use that was a very good question because consumers are very concerned about what is in their food some people like to wash it take water right in the field toped in the box it was picked in this can save a lot of work the food will be kept together and you will have t it bring it all in and it also protects the food because it won't be bumping into the other food in the water if you do this you want to be sure that your field box is not dirty if there is dirt on the bottom of the box or you haven't washed the box then you would be putting all of that dirt into the water and that could have covered the jinns in it germs that could cause sickness so it's important before you put those in the water that they have been clean and that they do in that interview he was taking a live picture on the top you can see that before they're putting him in the water she  a lot of the dirt off of the cup and so that they're already pretty clean before they go in the water then they'll go in and they'll get cleaned more and being in the water will cool the well water is clean enough out of the well water and she has put the lettuce in and run it sit there all and then she takes an hour and puts it into a net those are just laundry announce that you can put  machine years and she had never thought about it so much from process is good she's putting them into a washing machine that's not used for washing anymore it's only used to spin the water out of the lettuce and she'll spend it on the spin cycle but the problem was that she was now washing her machinery and after she watched this video she realized oh it is very important that she washes her machine large and putting it back on the screen table to drive just a little and to look through it for any involved or badly and then she will put it into being the seller's so it's important that you wash your machinery and one very good trick that can help you if you have different colored russians because of course you don't want to wash your vegetables with the same brush that you wash your toilet or your floor where there could be had diseases that you don't want your vegetables so on this farm they have yellow brushes for cleaning about their own and red brushes for cleaning the machine and green brushes for cleaning the vegetables that helps to prevent an accident when i started talking i told you that temperature is very very important for the quality in the legs long lasting of your vegetables so it's important that you nor the proper temperature for each  the manual that you received has a page like this that tell of the correct temperature and you will see that some of the crowds like your lattice and broccoli if it be very cold but some cr like you cumbers they don't need to be as cold and if you get them to call you will cause damage to them they shouldn't be below forty five or fifty degrees if you do get them to call this is the sort of damage that happens very very quickly and again like the bruises it doesn't show up immediately so you can cause the damage on your farm by putting it in your room color and then getting them to call and it will show up in a day or two and you might not even know it let's talk a little bit about room coolers where you have a room that and you don't if you don't have a building it can be a little harder to make a room cooler some people like to make a portable cooler you could make one in a trailer that can be very useful because you can use it on the farm and then you can also use it to go to the farmer's market or to make your deliveries so i want to tell you about an inexpensive way to make a cooler you could make you can use an air conditioner and then you buy a unit called a cool buy if you can go on the internet you can look up cool mind and you'll find this little black box in this picture there is instructions on how to hook it up to an air conditioner and it will make the air conditioner go down to thirty six degrees which is is nice and call and it is much less expensive than putting in a compressor to use for making a call roll and it's less expensive to use and less expensive to fix so that can be a good way to do it on a farm you could put it on a truck you could put it on a trailer some people tell me they use a refrigerator to cool their vegetables well if the vegetable is already cold  way to keep it cold but if it's why arm there is no airflow in the refrigerator so it is very very slow all way to cool that's the bowls and really is not fast enough if you are going to be selling them and if they are why are so important that you kick the air out and there is one other tool i want to tell you about which is called air cooling so if you put your vegetables in a cold room and you put a very big fan next to them and then a tarp over the top of the vegetables you can pull the cold air through the vegetables and it will cool them much faster can be a good way to do it if you have whole wrong on your farm i went to santa claus and bought a big fan there was three and a half the a round cross for three hundred dollars and put it up against stacks of vegetables and pulled the air through it and that was very quick compared to just putting it in a room when you do that you have to think about if you are all that air moving through takes more sugar with it so it's ok while you're cooling yet but as soon as the vegetables are cool you must stop the moisture or you will dry the vegetables out and then they would not be good i want you to know about this tool called the cool and  because you can get the plans to make one of these and they're not very expensive north carolina's staying has the plans why and there is a link to it from the manual you received any of the line references that i make today i have them linked from my website or tina differently there is a farmer resource page you can go to and there are many of these references so i want to tell you about this tool cool and share because it's very affordable for small farmers it is made on a pellet with styrofoam barks the styrofoam you would buy building supply store and you make a box with the styrofoam and then they hook it up to an air conditioner and the cool by unit that i showed you just now that then has a fan and it forces the air through and cools very quickly and the reason they call it a cool air ship is because it's on a pellet so then you can put the entire box on the back of your truck and it will keep it cold when you go to deliver it so the active be a way to get of a machine that will cool for you and keep your full food cold as you're going to town to deliver and they're don't they're not very expensive compared to building a cooler truck ice is a really useful tool on a farm and is a very good way to cool food quickly you can't use ice out of crops like broccoli and asparagus corn kale those foods you can put ice on other food such as carrots you can put ice on carrots people usually don't it's not very necessary but it could be useful if you ever take carrots to the farmer's market on a hot day and then very quickly they became limp and dull and they were very nice i took this picture of the carrots with my son now at the minneapolis farmers market and the farmer who had them she was making a lot of money because the carrots looked so fresh and crisping glistening when she opened the box she put them in the trays and they sold very quickly it was a hot day when i took this picture and the farmer next to her did not have ice and their carrots were very limp and not nice looking and they were not selling at all so having ice is a very useful tool if you're going to the farmer's market to keep your food cold at the market i encourage if you sell at the farmers market and ask the market to buy ice machine that is just there for the farmers to use and then you could go with buckets you could use it for your they're hard to sometimes buy on your own farm it's hard to buy one for less than a thousand dollars and that used a new one might be five thousand but if you can't afford one on your farm it would be a good thing have  the farmer's market and i want to talk about one more thing here about trucking and shipping and that is if you are delivering in a vehicle without refrigeration how many  you have trucks or to have refrigeration that you drive your vegetables to town with be sure you insulate the truck because a lot of heat comes up from the road and the sun on the top and the walls you can go to a building supply store and get the full insulation and put it on the walls and the ceiling in the floor and then cover that was plywood and that will really help keep your truck pooler and before you load it park it in the shade so that it's not as high when you load it if you have the phone call on the form if you have a room cooler and you've made it call then if you put it into the insulated truck and cover it with insulated blankets it will stay pretty cold i've done there and gone to town for like four or five hours of delivery and the food stayed call i took those movers blankets that are so own insulated any kind of thick blanket and put them over the boxes of cold food and all hold that cold and so that's a good way to do that i want you to think a little bit about where you're packing your food if it have a building that you've made or if you have a row of to keep the sun are we sure you walk through and look for any sort of animal feces i took this picture in my own packing just a few months ago and you can see that there are some bird feces on the floor and there is the walk in cooler so this is a problem if someone walks through those feces and they're carrying boxes and then they go in the cooler they could be spreading serious food diseases you can see this in the ceiling above where those birds who i have a bird nest to prevent this from happening but when i looked up i found a hole in the net so i never had this problem before the net was keeping the birds from coming in landing on these rafters so be sure you have a way to keep the birds out and if you have a set up you still need to watch and make sure it's working because it might work and then it might stop working think about setting the bar xs on the ground once the produce has been washed and put in a fire is not ok you do not want to put those boxes on the ground so if you can make a little pellet this is just two pieces of wood with some plywood over the top and then the boxes are certainly there so they won't be on the ground and the two w dolly for care in the boxes can slide right under it and that will save carrying those boxes so much try to think about the supplies that you do is and keeping them clean here are some would be a good idea here you see how they are keeping their tomato boxes covered under plastic and that can be a really good idea to do that