Pires Lab

Organic 

Influence of Orchard Grazing on Soil Fertility and Pest Control While Mitigating Food Safety Risks, USDA-NIFA OREI. Pires A (UC Davis), Gaudin A (Co-PI, Dept. Plant Science, UC Davis),Wilson H (Co-PI, UC Riverside), Goodrich B (Co-Investigator, Dept. Ag Resource Economics, UC Davis), Sciligo A (Co-Investigator, TOC), Weimer B (Co-Investigator, UC Davis SVM), Pereira R (Collaborator, UC Davis SVM), Busch R (Collaborator, UC Davis SVM) Role: Principal Investigator. Effort: 8%.

Risk Assessment:
Pires Lab Co-Principal Investigator, Developing risk assessment, educational, and communication tools to lower food safety barriers for organic specialty crop growers , USDA-NIFA OREI . Baur P (PI, URI); Sciligo A (TOC), Pires A (Co-PI, UC Davis), Martinez-Lopez B (UC Davis), Mishra A (UG), Kumar D (UG). Role: Co-PI. Effort: 2%. Dedicated website pending, funding agency info. 

Press Release:
USDA Awards $2 Million to Study Livestock Grazing in Organic Orchards | School of Veterinary Medicine (ucdavis.edu)

Organic growers can face unique challenges in trying to meet both National Organic Program standards and food safety requirements. According to the NASS 2019 Organic Survey,regulatory problems were the greatest production challenge for growers, and our 2022 national needs assessment study, funded by an OREI planning grant (#2021-51300-34893), identified food safety as a policy and marketing constraint on the expansion of organic specialty crop agriculture. Specifically, complying with food safety requirements poses both operational and administrative barriers for organic growers. Operational barriers impact farm production decisions and practices. Administrative barriers impact a farm’s policy compliance and market access. Both barriers can hinder organic growers seeking to grow their operations as well as growers considering making the transition to organic certification, and we propose concrete approaches to lower these barriers. First, by developing a practical, user-friendly risk-assessment and decision-making tool for organic soil amendments. Second, by developing, demonstrating, and evaluating a suite of extension and outreach materials aimed at bringing all organic produce stakeholders—including organic growers, farm advisors, and organic and food safety auditors and certifiers, and buyers—to a common understanding of the unique food safety risks and farm management strategies specific to organic agriculture of fruit and vegetable crops covered by the Produce Safety Rule. Our long-term goal is to reduce both the operational and administrative barriers to compliance with multiple regulations by equipping organic growers and industry stakeholders with evidence-based tools and training to comply simultaneously with organic agriculture and food safety best practices and requirements

Developing Food Safety Tools and Training for Organic Produce Farms | The Organic Center (organic-center.org)

Press Release:

URI named lead researcher on $3.5 million USDA organic food safety research grant – Rhody Today

Advancing Global Health by Promoting Sustainable Small-Scale Farming
Productions in Chile and California: A Pilot Cross-Sectional Study

Seed Grants for Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Sustainability 2023. Global Affairs UC Davis. 

UC Global Affairs Announcement: 
UC Davis and UC|Chile Announce 2023 Recipients of the Seed Grants for Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration for Sustainability | Global Affairs

PI's:
Alda Pires (Associate Professor of Cooperative Extension and Associate Specialist, School of Veterinary Medicine, UC Davis)

Fernando Mardones (Profesor Asistente, Escuela de Medicina Veterinaria, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)

Funding: Seed Grants for Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration for Sustainability

The Farm Animal Risk Mitigation Prepare Prevent Evaluate (FARM PPE) Project is done in collaboration with Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Its goal is to develop and improve biosecurity measures on livestock and poultry operations of various scales, including alternative agricultural systems (i.e., small-scale, diversified, and backyard farms).
As part of this project, we organized a series of eight webinars, on animal health and biosecurity. All recordings are now available on the FARM PPE website. Additional webinars, more specifically targeted to alternative farmers, will be offered this year, so stay tuned! 

Integrated crop livestock farming uses winter cover crops and animals to benefit growers and the environment. Winter cover crops enhance soil fertility, structure, water filtration and storage and reduced nitrogen leaching. Livestock grazing of cover-cropped fields increase carbon inputs and nutrient cycling. However, recent concerns about microbial food safety are limiting expansion of this practice because it may introduce fecal-borne pathogens into soil with a potential for transfer to harvested produce. Thus, the goals of this project are to determine food pathogen persistence/survival in soil and transfer to vegetable crops, and to determine the relationship between soil health properties, environmental factors, and pathogen survival in grazed cover-vegetable production in three states (California, Minnesota, and Maryland). Using sheep as a grazing animal, this project has been started from May 2020 in collaboration with Agroecology Lab in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis, USDA-ARS, the University of Minnesota department of Soil, Water, and Climate, the University Maryland Eastern Shore Department of Agriculture, Food and Resource Sciences, and The
Organic Center. Results of this project regarding the benefits of grazing and food safety impacts will be communicated via online webinar, outreach events, and conference presentations.

Click here to learn more about the Multistate Integrated Crop-Livestock Project.

Many certified organic producers and small-scale farms rely on the use animal-based soil amendments (i.e., manure, compost) to improve soil fertility and quality. To reduce the microbial contamination of produce, a minimum waiting time is required between the use of soil amendments and crop harvest. One of the goals of our research is to characterize and identify risk mitigation strategies to reduce the risk of microbial contamination from foodborne pathogens commonly associated with human illness in fresh produce organically grown with animal-based soil amendments. Our ongoing projects are collaborative and involve the participation of the farmers, organic industry members, farm advisors (UC ANR CE), non-profit organizations (e.g. The Organic Center, Organic Trade Association), extension educators, researchers (University of Minnesota, University of Maine Extension, Cornell University, UC Davis (SVM, WCFS)), and state and national governmental agencies (e.g. USDA-ARS, USDA-ERS). The results of the data collected from our research directly benefits organic farmers and consumers by creating strategies to continue utilizing raw manure while limiting food safety risks. Moreover, our research will provide science-based recommendations to create new metrics for appropriate time-intervals used between untreated manure and harvest, and will inform ongoing FDA risk assessments and the organic and fresh produce industries.

Click here to learn more about the Multi-Regional Risk Analysis of Farm Manure Use.