A Better Plan For Making Kits
      As a vital part of their testing operations, Food Safety and Inspection Service meat and poultry inspectors around the country use “sampling kits” to test for Salmonella, a harmful bacteria often found in meat and poultry products.

      It used to be that FSIS employees at the agency’s field laboratory in Athens, Ga., assembled all those sampling kits themselves when they had time. However, that was regarded by those employees as a headache that took valuable time away from important primary assignments. But now FSIS relies on employees at Hope Haven in Athens to assemble those kits--so FSIS’s employees can spend more time on the mission of the agency.

“That takes care of another successfully-assembled order of sampling kits,” concludes Robyn Johnson (left), an FSIS sample handling specialist at FSIS’s field laboratory in Athens, Ga. She is reviewing an inventory list with Alethia Abrams, program coordinator at Hope Haven, a center in Athens for adults with varying degrees of mental and physical disabilities. FSIS entered into a unique contract with Hope Haven, which now assembles those kits for FSIS inspectors around the country to use in testing meat and poultry products for Salmonella. --Photo by Daffna Vaughn

      Robyn Johnson, an FSIS sample handling specialist at the agency’s lab in Athens, explained that Hope Haven is a center for adults with varying degrees of mental and physical disabilities. “The workers at Hope Haven, who are called 'clients,’ can assemble anywhere between 500 and 1,500 kits per week, depending on our order,” she noted.

      So when FSIS needs kits, Johnson calls Hope Haven and specifies the number and type of kits needed for a particular period of time, usually a week. FSIS lab personnel collect the items needed in the kits, such as specimen cups, sterile sponges for swabbing carcasses, sterile filter bags, and sterile rubber gloves, and get them ready for pickup by Hope Haven.

      According to Johnson, the next step is that six to eight Hope Haven workers begin work on the kits immediately, monitored by two supervisors for quality control purposes. “The clients wear gloves and hair nets while they work in a sanitized area,” she pointed out.

      Hope Haven supervisor Daffna Vaughn trains the clients to assemble the sample kits. She noted that, since each client has strengths that can be nurtured and applied to the task at hand, she fits them to specific parts of the job. “Once I teach them how to assemble the kits, normally they don’t have a chance to forget,” she said. Vaughn has been involved with the contract between FSIS and Hope Haven since its inception in 1997.

FSIS’s Robyn Johnson (center) and Hope Haven’s Alethia Abrams (left) confer with Hope Haven’s Marion Baxter, who is busy assembling sampling kits. Elsewhere in Hope Haven’s work area,...

...Hope Haven’s Regina Stevens (left) and Claudette Allen assemble still more sampling kits, for ultimate use by FSIS inspectors around the country.--Photos by Daffna Vaughn, Robyn Johnson

      Johnson described the process as “an assembly line type of operation in which the only variable is the size of the order; the tasks don’t change.”

      “The men and women of Hope Haven work on one type of kit at a time, and can turn out between 25 and 50 kits per hour,” she affirmed. There are four types of kits that FSIS normally requests of Hope Haven.

      “Then twice a week a Hope Haven employee delivers the completed kits to our lab and picks up the materials needed for the next order,” Johnson said. “We then distribute those kits to our FSIS meat and poultry inspectors in meat and poultry slaughter plants nationwide.”

      Larry Dillard, the FSIS microbiologist-in-charge at the Athens lab, recalled that before his agency entered into a contract with Hope Haven to assemble the sampling kits, different FSIS lab personnel--including analysts, chemists, secretaries, and microbiologists--were being asked to do the assembling. And the kit assembling had to fit into the odd parts of the day, in between other tasks, and sometimes required employees working overtime on weekends to assemble the sample kits. “It was a dull drudgery for our employees,” he acknowledged.

“These sampling kits have our quality sterile sampling supplies inside,” confirms Terry Parker (center), an FSIS laboratory support worker at FSIS’s field laboratory in Athens, Ga. He and personnel from Hope Haven, a center in Athens for adults with varying degrees of mental and physical disabilities, are unloading the sampling kits, which were assembled by workers at Hope Haven under a unique contract. Those kits will then be shipped to FSIS inspectors around the country--who will use them to test meat and poultry products for Salmonella.--Photo by Robyn Johnson

      Then, during a local Combined Federal Campaign activity, Johnson toured Hope Haven’s facility in Athens. “I was impressed with the work its clients were doing,” she recalled. “Then it occurred to our FSIS group that maybe Hope Haven could help us with our sampling kits.”

      And in fact, she emphasized, the ultimate track record is that Hope Haven clients are able to assemble the kits faster than FSIS employees since they have more time to devote to that task. “This gives our lab employees more time to devote to other necessary jobs,” she said.

      “It’s a mutually beneficial partnership,” Johnson affirmed. “We’re promoting diversity in our work force, for even though Hope Haven workers aren’t literally working side by side with us, they contribute to our mission.”

      “Our partnership,” added Dillard, “gives Hope Haven clients the chance to perform a service for the community which has inestimable value, plus find a sense of purpose that is so critical to any individual.”
--Jason Waggoner

The Latest In Soil Surveys

A soil survey in cyberspace?

      That’s what’s happenin’ now, as the Natural Resources Conservation Service has launched its first soil survey web site in hypertext markup language (HTML), which means that users can navigate through it with their web browser. In turn, that on-line soil survey can provide its customers with easy access to soil maps and helpful land management information, for a farm or backyard garden--all at the convenience of the user’s home computer keyboard.

      The source of this NRCS soil survey website--which is the first one to link soil maps to soil information--is the agency’s field office in Napa County, Calif. According to Phill Blake, the NRCS district conservationist in that field office who was part of the team which developed the website, soil surveys are valuable in that they provide the basic information needed to manage soil properly. “Soil surveys provide information needed to protect water quality, wetlands, and wildlife habitat,” he advised. “Soil surveys are the basis for predicting the behavior of a soil under alternative uses, its potential erosion hazard, its potential for ground water contamination, and its suitability and potential productivity for cultivated crops, trees, and grasses.”

      Blake said that, in addition to agricultural producers, soil surveys are important to planners, engineers, zoning commissioners, tax commissioners, developers, and homeowners. “In a nutshell,” he summarized, “soil surveys help landowners decide whether their soil is good for crops or good for condos.”

“All those pages that went into previous hard copy versions of our soil survey, like the one here in my copy holder,” notes NRCS computer programmer Carmen Ortiz (left), “are now captured on this little disc here in my hand.” “So,” quips NRCS water resources planning services geologist Vern Finney (right), “can I borrow it?” --Photo by Anita Brown

      The federal government has been conducting soil surveys since 1899. Blake noted that the NRCS Napa County Field Office soil survey was first published in 1978, and the last copy of it was handed out in 1994.

      “It became a scarce information resource after that,” he acknowledged. For the next several years NRCS staff spent many hours each month copying soil information and piecing together soil maps for the public.

      “We had finally exhausted every avenue of delivering soil information to our farmers and ranchers and other soil survey users,” Blake advised. “So when the opportunity came along to be the guinea pig for publishing soil surveys on the web, we jumped in headfirst.”

      Carmen Ortiz, the computer programmer with NRCS’s Major Land Resource Area Soil Survey Regional Office in Davis, said that she and NRCS soil scientist Kit Paris worked with the NRCS Napa County field office staff to make sure the end product website, (NOTE: This particular weblink is no longer available) would not only be practical and useful, but also user-friendly. “The site features an extensive information base, including downloadable soil maps, soil quality interpretive maps, detailed descriptions of the more than 80 soil mapping units found in Napa County, and numerous tables of interpretive soil data,” she said. “The site includes all the good information found in Napa County’s original survey,” Paris added.

      “The value of doing this,” Ortiz noted, “is that, with budget dollars scarce for publishing soil surveys in hard copy, we can put them on the web or on a compact disc--and make them universally accessible and timely as well--for a fraction of the cost.”

      “Since we created that Napa County on-line soil survey, we’ve also completed on-line soil surveys for the western portions of Mendocino and Stanislaus Counties,” she affirmed. “We’ve got more in the works, because the demand for them is accelerating.”
--Jolene Lau

A New Way To ‘Marry’ Talent
      “We’re used to working with foreign agricultural officials and scientists--but the recent visit of Armenian legislators marked our initial venture into hosting parliamentarians, and even helping to directly influence policy decisions in another country.”

      Hiram Larew was commenting on an expanded direction of the International Programs Office, where he serves as director, in the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. That office is normally in the business of providing technical and educational expertise on agricultural matters to developing countries by, in effect, 'marrying’ the talent found at American land-grant colleges and universities with agricultural challenges globally.

      But its mission expanded when six legislators from Armenia recently conferred with International Programs Office specialists, among others, to get a better sense of American agricultural systems.

      “So not only have we been involved technically and educationally in Armenia,” Larew observed, “but now we’re working to respond to the needs of policy-makers in a country, and that’s an expanded role for us.”

      Larew pointed out that the International Programs Office is often “courted” whenever there is a need for technical and educational expertise “on the ground,” overseas. “That expertise is often best found at land-grant universities and colleges,” he underscored.

      And, like extension agents in the U.S., land-grant specialists who collaborate with the International Programs Office to address international agricultural problems generally work at the local level in their country of destination. Those assignments abroad may last from a few weeks to several months.

      The reason? “When you try to design something in Washington for application internationally, it can sometimes fail,” observed Tim Grosser, a CSREES international programs specialist who oversees the Office’s efforts in Armenia. And he should know something about designing and implementing a program on-site, since he has visited Armenia over 25 times in the last seven years.

Mike McGirr, a CSREES international programs specialist, noted that by bringing the land-grant system to the world, CSREES’s International Programs Office has been able to foster substantial progress in the development of agricultural systems that were lagging for a myriad of reasons. “But, perhaps equally as important to people back in the U.S.,” he observed, “the program has also helped to bring a global perspective back to U.S. universities, thereby better preparing tomorrow’s graduates to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world.”

      In fact, that was the case with CSREES’s first full-scale international project in Poland launched a decade ago. McGirr said that the Office provided technical and educational assistance as it helped Poland adjust its agricultural economy from a communist-based, state-run system to the uncharted territory of a free-market economy. Over 100 extension personnel from 31 land-grant universities participated. The Jan.-Feb. 1992 issue of the USDA News carried a story about that initiative.

      “For me, that initiative in Poland was a real recognition of the capability of the U.S. cooperative extension system to foster positive change in a foreign environment,” he said.

“And it appears that our efforts in Armenia have built upon that foundation,” McGirr added, “by drawing the interest of politicians, in addition to our agricultural sector counterparts who normally take notice.” 
--Afshin Mohamadi