Trainers:
Indu Upadhyaya is the Food Safety Extension Educator with UConn Extension.  She completed her PhD from UConn in Animal Science with a focus on Food safety and Microbiology. Before coming back to UConn as faculty, she worked in collaboration with the USDA Agricultural Research Service Poultry Production and Product Safety Research Unit as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Arkansas Center of Excellence for Poultry Science. She also worked as an Assistant Professor in the School of Agriculture at Tennessee Tech University, and was involved with developing a research program on poultry and fresh produce safety.

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With a degree in Geography and Natural Resource Management, Shannon Raider-Ginsberg has run and developed farming and agricultural education programs. As a farmer, she has worked all manner of farms from 20-acre certified organic CSAs to 450 acre Christmas tree farms, to community gardens, urban farms and her own vegetable operation. Shannon is currently the Farmer Liaison at Put Local on Your Tray working to dispel the myths preventing farmers and schools from engaging in meaningful procurement relationships.

 

Training Objective:

If you are ready to grow your business and have struggled to increase your CSA and/or Farmers market sales, come and learn how selling to schools can open up market access to small scale wholesale. Food safety is key to making trusting relationships with all customers. It is not a roadblock, and navigating food safety with schools is not as complicated as you might think. Come learn how to navigate these two systems, schools and food safety, and see if farm to school could be a good fit for your business.