Carrot traceability solutions:
Carrot packing processing solution reduces waste, enhances traceability
Carrot packing & processing, grading, sorting, sizing, washing, inventory, QC by farmsoft reduces waste and increases productivity in carrot packing and processing industry.
Farmsoft delivers reduced waste in the carrot packing traceability & quality control, processing, storage, distribution phases. By enforcing best practices, FIFO, inventory expiry monitoring, and easy stock takes to minimize waste and maximize packing profit. Use bar-code managed inventory, labeling, 3D pallet storage, to help reduce waste.
carrot packing processing washing waste traceability
carrot packing processing washing waste traceability
CARROT PACKING
Conduct recalls in seconds, with full confidence of accuracy and reliability. Minimize risk by ensuring accurate traceability is automatically captured. Pass audits with ease & reduce compliance costs using farmsoft's traceability guidelines. Trace fresh produce up and down the supply chain, over multiple traceability hops. Instantly produce farm records and any other farm traceability records if you optionally use our farm solution.
REDUCE ADMINISTRATION COSTS FOR CARROT PACKING
Minimize your administration costs with automatic paperwork generation. Ensure accuracy of paperwork by having necessary documentation (invoice formats, export documents, transport documents etc) automatically generated based on the needs of the specific customer - ensuring timely and accurate documentation. No more rejected orders because of bad documentation accompanying a shipment. Food traceability software made easy!
CONSISTENT QUALITY CONTROL FOR CARROT PACKING
Guarantee consistent, accurate, and efficient quality control is performed at any part of the fresh produce handling life-cycle; including during delivery, pre processing, post processing, and dispatch. Create quality control tests based on each customers requirements, and even create a daily factory hygiene test, employee performance tests and more. Accurate quality control helps to improve customer confidence and quality perception. Easily follow fresh produce quality control & fresh produce inventory guidelines.
BETTER PRODUCTION PLANNING & DISPATCH FOR CARROT PACKING
Monitor orders, assign orders to specific pack-houses (you can have unlimited processing sites in farmsoft), and allow micro monitoring of each production lines output requirements using dashboards. The dashboards ensure the correct products are produced at the correct time to fill orders. Dispatch teams are given details on their mobile device (or PC/Mac) and scan pallets onto orders. Administration teams can see orders are picked and ready for dispatch, and are presented with the correct documents for printing. All of these features result in improved accuracy of both production and dispatch processes.
OPTIONAL FARM SOFTWARE INTEGRATION FOR FARM TO PLATE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS
Optionally use farmsoft Farm Management software with our Post Harvest solution. Using both solutions provides an end to end solution from field to plate. Farm Management by farmsoft delivers full farm record keeping, farm inventory, cost monitoring, budgeting, best practice enforcement, and adherence to international farming standards. Use Farm Management by farmsoft to manage your own farms, or even hundreds of external farms that supply your fresh produce company.
Carrot Farming Software
Farmsoft carrot farming software delivers practical benefits for modern carrot farming.
Farmsoft Carrot Farming Software ensures your yield, traceability, and profit are always being monitored and measures. Manage and monitor your carrot farm from any location using your phone, tablet or PC/Mac. Easily generate hundreds of practical reports that help you evaluate performance, measure opportunities for improvement, and trace farming costs and farming records. Easily implement farm inventory, traceability, yield monitoring, farm budgeting, cost monitoring, quality control, and farm record keeping. Download the full carrot farming software brochure here.
Farmsoft Carrot Farm Software:
Contact your nearest farmsoft Carrot Farming Software expert to discuss your options to improve traceability, quality, and reduce waste today!
Farmsoft carrot farming software delivers practical benefits for modern carrot farming.
Farmsoft Carrot Farming Software ensures your yield, traceability, and profit are always being monitored and measures. Manage and monitor your carrot farm from any location using your phone, tablet or PC/Mac. Easily generate hundreds of practical reports that help you evaluate performance, measure opportunities for improvement, and trace farming costs and farming records. Easily implement farm inventory, traceability, yield monitoring, farm budgeting, cost monitoring, quality control, and farm record keeping. Download the full carrot farming software brochure here.
Carrot traceability methods:
Questions of value are central to understanding alternative practices of food exchange. This study introduces a practice-based approach to value that challenges the dominant views, which capture value as either an input for or an outcome of practices of exchange (value as values, standards, or prices). Building on a longitudinal ethnographic study on food collectives, I show how value, rather than residing in something that people share, or in something that objects have, is an ideal target that continuously unfolds and evolves in action. I found that people organized their food collectives around pursuing three kinds of value-ideals, namely good food, good price and good community. These value-ideals became reproduced in food collectives through what I identified as valuing modes, by which people evaluated the goodness of food, prices and community. My analysis revealed that, while participating in food collectives in order to pursue their value-ideals, people were likely to have differing reasons for pursuing them and tended to attach different meanings to the same value-ideal. I argue that understanding how value as an ideal target is reproduced through assessing and assigning value (valuing modes) is essential in further explorations of the formation of value and in better understanding the dynamics of organizing alternative practices of food exchange.
Introduction
The past two decades have shown a rapid increase in alternative ways of organizing food supply from farm to fork that challenge the industrial food system, which is sustained by practices of mass production, distribution and consumption (Goodman et al. 2012; Holt Giménez and Shattuck 2011). Simultaneously, grassroots food movements have called into question conventional quality standards established predominantly by a small number of experts, industry representatives or political authorities, and introduced alternative approaches to valuing “good food” (Goodman 2003; Pollan 2010). These have included, for instance, promoting new standards and pricing mechanisms (Raynolds 2000; Reinecke et al. 2012), developing new discourses and labels (Pratt 2007; Van Bommel and Spicer 2011), and establishing new practices of local food exchange (Brunori et al. 2012; Hinrichs 2000; Werkheiser and Noll 2014).
Questions of value are essential in all market exchanges (Helgesson and Kjellberg 2013), but appear particularly interesting in the context of alternative food practices (Dahlberg 1988; Forssell and Lankoski 2015). In moving away from globalized impersonal markets towards direct exchanges, people need to establish new quality standards and ways of valuing (Weber et al. 2008). On the one hand, studies have shown how formation of value is contingent on values, such as cultural frames, norms and discourses that motivate action (Doran 2009; Thompson and McDonald 2013). On the other hand, scholars suggest that value is formed through the properties of an object (such as its qualities or characteristics) as captured by labels and standards, or through a price reflecting multiple attributes or values attached to an object (Miller 2008; Reinecke and Ansari 2015; Van Bommel and Spicer 2011). But while these studies have broadly explored the formation of value and shed light on various valuation practices (for reviews, see e.g. Kjellberg et al. 2013; Lamont 2012), scholars have tended to treat value as either an input for, or an outcome of human practice (Muniesa 2011; Orlikowski and Scott 2013).
Motivated by examining value not as a fixed variable, but as collectively enacted accomplishment (Gherardi 2009; Graeber 2001), I mobilize a practice-based approach (Gherardi 2012; Sandberg and Tsoukas 2011) to examine how value is formed in alternative food practices. Due to the exploratory nature of the study, this paper is based on an open-ended and emergent research design (Wiedner and Ansari 2017) with insights arising from a longitudinal ethnographic study on food collective organizations in Finland. Food collectives are groups of households who procure local and organic food directly from small-scale farmers and other types of food suppliers and distribute it among the participating members. Food collectives provide an excellent setting for studying the formation of value, because they have emerged in a situation in which commonly agreed standards for local food as an object of exchange, or regulations for food collectives as an alternative practice for food exchange, have not existed. Therefore, food collective members have needed to work out for themselves what to value and how.
This study found that food collectives were organized around three value-ideals: good food, good price and good community. These value-ideals are contextual and continuously unfolding signifiers that guide action. In food collectives, value was formed through what I identified as valuing modes that engaged people in continual evaluation of the goodness of the value-ideals. While enabling people to evaluate the goodness of food, prices and community, valuing modes simultaneously functioned as ways of re-producing these value-ideals. I argue that this dynamic movement between evaluating and re-producing value-ideals is essential in understanding the formation of value. This study contributes to a better understanding of value as constituted in action (Graeber 2001; Heuts and Mol 2013; Hutter and Stark 2015; MacIntyre 2008) and adds to the previous research by problematizing the general belief that value resides in something that people share, or in something that objects have.
Formation of value in practices of exchange
Questions of value have attracted attention within a plethora of different academic fields (Aspers and Beckert 2011; Lamont 2012; Otto and Willerslev 2013). Research within the fields of economic sociology and anthropology question the dominance of economic approaches that equate (exchange) value with price (Graeber 2001; Muniesa 2011) and argue that in the economic sphere, like in other spheres of life, the formation of value should be understood as a culturally and materially mediated process. In this vein, an increasing amount of research labelled as valuation studies (Helgesson and Muniesa 2013; Lamont 2012), and research within economic sociology and anthropology more broadly, has suggested that scholars should look into how various practices enable people to assign or assess value (Fourcade 2011; Graeber 2001; Kjellberg et al. 2013).
Carrots: Tracing this Vegetable’s Roots
Carrots: Tracing this Vegetable's Roots | Food & Nutrition Magazine | Volume 9, Issue 1
Photography by Kate Cauffiel | Food styling by Christina Zerkis | Prop styling by Lindsey Parker
The mildly sweet, crunchy carrot has evolved from its Central Asian and Middle Eastern origins. Carrots first were grown for their aromatic leaves and seeds, but farmers in the Middle East began selectively breeding wild carrots to reduce the bitter, woody core and enhance their natural sweetness. Today, the core or taproot of the carrot plant is commonly eaten.
Carrots are a biennial plant, taking two years to complete a full biological lifecycle. During the first year, leaves form, then store sugars in the taproot. This energy helps the plant flower in its second year. The taproot consists of an outer core, called the phloem, and an inner core, the xylem. The pulpy phloem holds the sweet starch, while the tough-textured xylem transports water and nutrients from the stem to the root.
Available in a variety of hues including white, yellow, dark red and purple, carrots often are associated with the color orange. The reason is controversial, and perhaps political. One theory is that in the 17th century, Dutch growers began cultivating orange carrots to honor William of Orange, who led the struggle for Dutch independence. Scholars presume the vibrant new color resulted from crossing purple varieties with their white and red counterparts.
An evolution-based theory is that over time, a mutation caused the purple coloring to fade, bringing its yellow-orange core to the surface.
Although orange carrots dominate grocery store shelves, small-scale farmers have reintroduced other colors, much to the delight of geneticists studying the nutritional quality of vegetable pigments.
In the Kitchen: Carrots are affordable and easily accessible year-round, and the sixth most-consumed fresh vegetable in the United States. There is no shortage of imagination when it comes to cooking carrots. Classic preparation techniques include roasting, pureeing, stewing or juicing, and creative chefs are finding new ways to incorporate carrots into old favorites.
By combining pureed carrot with almond flour, the Italian favorite gnocchi is transformed into a higherprotein, more nutrient-dense version. To pay homage to carrot cake while lowering added sugars, top morning oatmeal with shredded carrots, maple syrup, vanilla extract and cinnamon. In French cooking, carrots, celery and onion make up the trio for mirepoix, the seasoning base for countless gravies, soups and sauces.
In the Clinic: Although naturally sweet, carrots are low in calories. An orange carrot that is 7 inches long and 1¼ inches in diameter contains 30 calories, mainly from carbohydrates, and 2 grams of dietary fiber. Orange carrots also contain potassium, important for blood pressure control and cardiac and renal health.
A rainbow of pigments means diverse nutrients. For example, orange carrots have vitamin A-promoting alpha and beta carotene, which are critical for healthy eyesight, while purple and red carrots contain anthocyanin and lycopene, respectively, powerful antioxidants linked to lower risks for certain cancers.
Interest in carrots is growing in cosmetics. Products featuring carrot powder, extracts or oil from carrot seeds can be topically applied for cosmetic purposes to possibly improve skin tone, reduce wrinkles and scars, and increase elasticity. However, research is very limited.
The lunchbox favorite baby carrots started as an attempt to salvage aesthetically “ugly” produce. Carrots that buyers perceive as undesirable in size and shape are shaved into 2-inch pieces. While they are convenient, baby carrots and other types of “fresh-cut” produce present an increased risk for microbial crosscontamination; therefore, certain practices are utilized in their processing to reduce this risk. Some concern has emerged over the use of chlorine in the washing of baby carrots, and other vegetables and fruits; however, chlorine-based solutions and other antimicrobial agents are important for food safety. The minimal amount used is defined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and food is thoroughly rinsed prior to drying and bagging. Additionally, the amount of chlorine used for washing carrots is less than the amount found in regular tap water.
In Quantity: Carrots are best stored unwashed, tightly sealed and in the coolest part of the refrigerator. Avoid storing carrots near apples, which produce ethylene gas. If left unwrapped at room temperature, carrots lose flavor and crispness. Maintaining moisture is vital: Remove the green stems and bundle carrots in a damp cloth. If carrots develop a “white blush” (a filmy coating that indicates dehydration), they are still safe to eat. Soak them in ice water to restore their color.
Improving carrot traceability systems:
Questions of value are central to understanding alternative practices of food exchange. This study introduces a practice-based approach to value that challenges the dominant views, which capture value as either an input for or an outcome of practices of exchange (value as values, standards, or prices). Building on a longitudinal ethnographic study on food collectives, I show how value, rather than residing in something that people share, or in something that objects have, is an ideal target that continuously unfolds and evolves in action. I found that people organized their food collectives around pursuing three kinds of value-ideals, namely good food, good price and good community. These value-ideals became reproduced in food collectives through what I identified as valuing modes, by which people evaluated the goodness of food, prices and community. My analysis revealed that, while participating in food collectives in order to pursue their value-ideals, people were likely to have differing reasons for pursuing them and tended to attach different meanings to the same value-ideal. I argue that understanding how value as an ideal target is reproduced through assessing and assigning value (valuing modes) is essential in further explorations of the formation of value and in better understanding the dynamics of organizing alternative practices of food exchange.