ProTerra V4.1 – Forum Activity to Day 5 – Traceability

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Case Study

Consider the information below:

Company	Super Soy
Location visited	Sorriso, Mato Grosso, Brasil
What the company does	Soybean farming and grain storage
Types of production	GMO and Non-GMO
Hectares planted to soy	150,000

At the audit to the above company you discover the following:

·          GMO and non-GMO crops are approximately respectively 70% and 30% of the total production.

·         There are ten equal sized grain storage silos (1 to 10), numbers 4 and 5 are dedicated non-GMO and contain “Non-GMO only” labels.

·         There are invoices for purchased non-GMO seed.

·         Employees state planting and harvesting equipment is cleaned prior to use on non-GMO fields.

·         Farm records identify the fields planted with non-GMO seed.

·         There are records of semi-quantitative GMO strip test analysis on harvested soybeans. Records demonstrate these tested soybeans are placed into the storage silos number 4.  

·         Last year’s invoices from Super Soy Farm to the local grain crusher (next economic operator) contain grain silo numbers 4 and 5 printed on the invoice. 

Comment on the following regarding Principle 10- Traceability and Chain of Custody:

1.     Cite potential non-conformance(s) you identified.

2.     What type of visual evidence and/or documentation would you use to eventually confirm the potential non-conformance?

 

Good work!!

[Yuliya Bushina]

1. As we can see, the organization shown soybeans’ strip test analysis, but records demonstrate these tested soybeans were placed into the storage silo number 4, but there were not information about strip test of soybean in silo number 5. Although last year’s invoices from Super Soy Farm to the local grain crusher (next economic operator) contain grain silo numbers 4 and 5 printed on the invoice (i.e soybeans were taken from siloes 4 and 5). If the organization are not be able to show strip test results of soybeans from silos number 5 (which have a label “non-GMO only” and had been transferred to buyer) it will be a non-conformance to 10.3.1.
Non-conformance: The organization don’t maintain full segregation for each lot of ProTerra certified product. Last year’s invoices from Super Soy Farm to the local grain crusher (next economic operator) contain grain silo numbers 4 and 5 printed on the invoice (i.e soybeans were taken from siloes 4 and 5) but the organization didn’t confirm consistently employed standard operating procedures – no records demonstrate that soybeans placed into the storage silo number 5 had strip test records.
2. Employees state planting and harvesting equipment is cleaned prior to use on non-GMO fields – to prove this we need to see records of flushing or cleaning planting and harvesting equipment. Plus, when conveyances used we need to see records of inspection and cleaning this conveyances (10.3.3).

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