Growing for Quality - A Good Agricultural Practices Manual for California Avocado Growers

Enclosed please find the booklet entitled “Growing for Quality ­ A Good Agricultural Practices Manual for California Avocado Growers ­ Version 1.0.” The manual was developed by the CAC Fruit Quality and Food Safety Task Force consisting of growers, packers, pest control advisors, and grove managers who dedicated countless hours to the task. It is intended to help you, the grower of California avocados, deliver the highest quality fruit and the safest product available, so that as an industry we can maintain California’s position as a leader in the U.S. market.

As the domestic market becomes more competitive with Mexico, Chile and other suppliers providing avocados year-round, it has become imperative for California’s growers to raise the bar on fruit quality, as well as providing consumers the assurance that we will always supply a completely safe product.

The manual herewith provides voluntary guidelines to help growers deliver the very best product under the safest growing and harvesting conditions. The Task Force is well aware that the standards for growing and handling avocados have been set very high in this manual. In fact we fully recognized that it would be almost impossible to meet all the requirements set forth in the manual ­ because the manual describes the most stringent production practices and safest fruit handling techniques for an industry that strives for excellence in both. No doubt this will provide a challenge for many growers. However, we hope that as an industry we face this challenge head-on with the realization that the game has changed. We need to raise our standards of operation if we hope to distinguish our fruit from our competitors and remain profitable.

Enclosed with the manual are two self-audit booklets that should be used to assess your own operations. The intention is for you to do a voluntary self-audit approximately every six months to ensure that you are doing your part in our industry-wide effort to achieve excellence in fruit quality and safety. To “pass” the self-audit a grower needs to get a score of 70% overall. Not all practices described in the manual and self-audit apply to every grove operation. Please ignore those that are not applicable to your situation and calculate your “score” using an adjusted “total possible points.” We will provide additional self-audit booklets periodically, as well as on request.

Over the next few months we will be holding workshops across the industry to help growers understand the manual and self-audit. Please watch your mail for announcements on dates and locations of these workshops.

The costs of printing the enclosed materials, as well as all postage charges were borne ENTIRELY by the Governor’s Buy California Initiative and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. This manual will be periodically updated as new information becomes available. A companion manual has been developed for fruit handlers in order to provide seamless fruit quality and safety guidelines from farm to consumer.