Food markets all over the world are under pressure for supplying raw materials. It is important now for small and medium scale producers to be able to satisfy demand, moreover the internal one, with efficient production systems and compliance to quality standards.
Every Country has its own laws and regulatory schemes on food production. Food safety, food traceability and food suitability for human consumption are key concepts that have a great impact on agricultural and zootechnical industries.
Food safety can be described as the result of the control on all the food processing, preparing, stocking phase and the measures that must be taken in order to guarantee safety for human consumption, or, in other words, foods must not pose a threat to the people who are going to include them in their diet. Food products must not be chemically or bacteriologically contaminated within a certain range, and they must not contain potentially dangerous particles, such as non edible materials. The major and more common contaminations are due to bacterial presence in the food, such as salmonella, campylobacter, listeria etc. that provoke food borne diseases. These contaminants can be detected during laboratory analysis that aim at authorizing or revoking the placing on the market of food products for human consumption. These procedures should be performed everywhere in the world, but they don’t. Governments in emerging countries are not equipped with effective and centralized control systems, with protocols to verify the adherence to international standards and vigilance on each phase of the production chain. In such Countries food safety comes after food security. The significance of food security is the basic access to always available food sources, that guarantee the proper satisfaction of nutritional needs and allow people to live a healthy life. In emerging countries, more than in those where food security is already been granted and all efforts focus on guaranteeing food safety, it is necessary to promote the adoption of tools that can enable local producers to vigilate themselves on the quality of their food products first instance, since they often are small farmers within the household who work for their subsistence.
Control at a local level to have a positive global effect
Farmers and breeders are the baseline for food systems. They manufacture the raw materials for the supply chain and its different processing phases. Breeders and farmers should start from data recording and data keeping. All over the world, with no geographical or economic distinctions of any sort, the food producer is responsible first row for its venture, its family and for the people who consume their products. In order to allow every farmer to succeed in this virtuous practice, we at Farm4Trade have developed a Suite of tools that enable farmers to keep track of every phase in the life of an animal and every event the animal may incur in. As already mentioned, breeders are totally responsible for the data recording process, from birth to slaughter, and from medical treatment to the nutrition of each animal. We make the data collection easier through the adoption of user-friendly and constantly evolving tools to increasingly meet the need for integration with other services to automate and centralize data collection as much as possible. In addition to the Farm Management App for data recording, and the Feed Formula App for the calculation of rations and the correct management of animal feed; we are also successfully developing biometric recognition tools, based on PhAID technology, which allows to know everything about an animal by simply taking a picture with a smartphone. An important advantage for the breeder, considering that PhAID allows direct access to all the info related to the animal in a few seconds. The farmer becomes stronger and more prepared in dealing with buyers, other farmers, institutions, farmers' cooperatives.
Our goal is to strengthen food safety mechanism from the farm, to slaughterhouse, to consumer’s table
Therefore, we are developing tools that allow to monitor the animal’s health also during slaughter operations. Thanks to ADAL technology, an automated system for the image acquisition able to perform analysis through computer trained to detect animal lesions and diseases, we can establish the presence of pathologies in carcasses, estimate the health risk for breeding and for animals still alive and finally to suggest corrective and preventive measures to adopt. This system will allow farmers to prevent economic losses arising from the production of low quality products (milk or meat) that will not achieve the minimum quality standard required to reach the market.
It is the simplest and most accessible technologies that help improve everyone's quality life.
Through the application of sustainable breeding techniques based on the use of our precision tools to plan every action that has to be carried out on a farm, the breeder acquires greater awareness and control over how and where to intervene, how many and which animals to treat, how to formulate the feed. So that it can also be possible to save costs and resources, avoid waste and optimize production processes. We turn to small and medium-sized farmers, who have always guaranteed quality and excellence, now they can take a step forward! They are the first link in the chain, those who can and must defend and promote food security, in all its meanings, in the world market.
References
- What is food security?
- Food Security, Safety, and Sustainability—Getting the Trade-Offs Right
- One Health for Food Safety, Food Security, and Sustainable Food Production
- (CFS) Global Strategic Framework for Food Security & Nutrition (GSF)
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