Bill Schene, director of sales and marketing for the firm, said the firm's document development program makes it very easy from growers, shippers, and packers to at least get a handle on their own food safety program. Any interested party can log on the site (www.primuslabs.com) and by answering a series of questions can develop a good agricultural practices manual, which will include standard operating procedures. In addition, the interested party can then conduct a self-audit. The audit will produce a score as well as remedial actions that can be taken to improve the score.

Schene the programs have been developed for fields, harvesting operations. When completed, the manual and a successful audit may be all an operation needs to do to be in compliance with new food safety requirements that many retailers are new requesting. Or more likely, Schene said, is that the creation of these documents is a good first step for a company to take. The self-audit, he said, is an excellent way for a firm to prepare for a third party audit.

"We created this to be something useful for everyone. We also see it as an education tool for the industry," he said.

The creation of the manual and self audits are free. The only requirement is that the user register. Schene said so far about 1,000 different parties have registered and have completed or at least started their manuals. "You don't have to complete it in one sitting. You can come in (to the website) and start the document development program and then finish later," he said.

Each user is given their own code so they can return at a later time to complete the work. Schene said it typically takes anywhere from a half-hour to two hours to complete a manual for each phase of a company's operation. Because any individual farming operation might have many different fields and harvesting crews, as well as packing and cooling facilities, it can be quite time consuming to complete a manual and audit for all the operations. Schene said many operations establish one account under PrimusLabs.com and then have each of their own growers go in and create the manuals or do the self-audits for each of their own fields.

"So one of our registered accounts may have 50 different growers creating documents," he said.

Once created the manual can be downloaded and printed out on any computer printer.

Schene said the on-line self-audit program has not been operational for very long so only about 100 growers have utilized that service at this time.