The People Behind EFI: Vernon Peterson of Abundant Harvest Organics for Homegrown Organic Farms
Owner of Abundant Harvest Organics farming operation, Vernon Peterson, is the fourth generation in his family to grow stone fruit along the Kings River in California’s Central Valley. Vertically integrated with his own packing shed and allied with fruit marketing company Homegrown Organic Farms, Peterson packs and ships his own farm’s fruit and that of many of his neighbors.
Already a leader in the industry, Peterson came to Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) with the hope of securing a social certification that would benefit his farm and business. His company’s EFI Leadership Team started training during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Peterson’s farming operation and packing shed became the fastest organization to complete EFI certification after receiving training, satisfying the more than 300 EFI standards in labor practices, food safety and pest management just two months.
Peterson was the first recipient of the Organic Grower Summit’s Grower of the Year in 2017. He served on the CCOF board for many years and is a graduate of the California Agricultural Leadership Program.
We talked with Peterson about how EFI has benefited his business and why it stands out from other certification programs.
Q: As an organic grower, you hold many certifications and facilitate multiple audits a year. How has your experience obtaining EFI certification been different?
A: EFI is the only certification that brings value to our farm. The other certifications are valuable in the marketplace and necessary in order to participate in the wholesale market, but that doesn’t help us on the farm. Those certifications don’t help us get our job done better, but the training and implementation of teamwork that comes with EFI genuinely does help us do our job better and get a better product to the consumer because everybody up and down the chain is working together.
The process with EFI has been pleasantly good. We have USDA Organic, PrimusGFS, GLOBALG.A.P., and were formerly certified by Fair Trade USA. We are real intent on trainings and safety, and we were already doing a lot of that. I think EFI has helped us tie all our certifications together in a good way.
The training and implementation of teamwork that comes with EFI genuinely does help us do our job better and get a better product to the consumer.”
– Vernon Peterson
Q: You went through EFI training in the early months of the pandemic and were certified just a few months later. How did EFI affect your team’s ability to respond to the pandemic?
A: You know it’s been a real benefit to have the Leadership Team during the coronavirus outbreak, so we could sit down and talk about what’s going on, how we keep people safe and why we are doing the things we do.
Members of our EFI Leadership Team could talk about how are we going to work safely in our environment and those leaders could go back to their individual units and bring the message of, “We’re going to keep working, we’re going to work safe, and ask whether anyone had further suggestions.”
We’ve implemented maybe a dozen new procedures over the course of the first few months of the outbreak, and EFI gave a way for people to have buy-in on how we’re going to deal with the pandemic.
Q: What would you say to other growers considering EFI certification?
A: If you’re willing to invest the time, you will end up with a better organization when it’s all over, but it isn’t going to be a simple thing. It’s more complex than an Organic or food safety inspection, for instance. EFI is not a simple inspection or certification. There is a lot of work that goes into it, but if you’re committed to it and you stick with it, you will end up with a better organization on the other end.
Written by: Amy Beth Dingle, Freelance Writer for EFI
