Assured Produce

In partnership with the University of Hertfordshire - everysite and Assured Produce have completed a knowledge transfer project designed to improve the services and information available to members of assurance schemes. These developments included:

Online standards revision and publishing

The Assured Produce scheme provides over 50 crop specific protocol documents each containing dedicated advice for producers. The Generic Standards detail the actual standards that  members are assessed against and the accompanying comprehensive Guidance Notes include detailed background information to these standards and references to additional sources of information.

The crop protocols are unique to the scheme and describe best existing production practice. The protocols highlight integrated pest, disease and crop management systems for each specific crop and although they are not intended to be a ‘growers’ guide’ they do outline current commercially acceptable best practice. These documents are revised each year and all contain information on action that can be taken to minimise pesticide residues.

With so many documents to revise each year AP has a team of technical authors who keep the protocols up to date. Using the CASI standards editer, everysite manages these updates centrally and holds HTML versions of all of the documents online. These are then used to dynamically produce word and PDF documents for printing and distribution to members and certifiers.

Self-Assessments with detailed guidance

To improve the information and guidance offered to its members Assured Produce teamed up with the Agriculture and the Environment Research Unit (AERU) at the University of Hertfordshire and everysite. The resulting knowledge transfer programme has delivered extensive linked guidance for its members to the AP certification standard. Members are now able to access an online self-assessment checklist that has all of their audit questions linked to online help, advice and documents from the industry leading ADLib library.