We are taking proactive steps based on guidance from the CDC and the State of Ohio to ensure our workers are healthy. Currently, as all essential businesses are being asked to do by Governor Mike DeWine, we are taking the temperature of each worker who comes on-site every morning, following social distancing and hand-washing procedures during the workday, and, now more than ever, rigorously sanitizing food contact surfaces like harvest baskets, harvest knives, and work tables.
To protect our workers, we ask that you do not engage them in conversation while they are making home deliveries. (We want to be able to talk to you! But if you want to talk to us, please give us a call instead.) If you are coming to pick up your order, please sanitize your hands with the touch-free foam dispenser on the wall to your right when you enter the barn through the door by the chest freezer before opening the door to the cooler where your produce is stored or the freezer where meat items are kept.
In addition to making sure nobody works sick, we have been closely reviewing CDC guidance about whether or not healthy, symptom-free workers in essential fields with no symptoms should stay home if anyone in their household is sick. Our current understanding is that the CDC is currently recommending that healthy workers in essential fields can go to work despite having a sick family member (especially given lack of testing resources to confirm if an illness is Covid-19, flu, or something else). However, out of an abundance of caution, we are choosing to have employees and owners stay home if anyone in their household is running a fever or has been running a fever.
We share all of this only to be as transparent as we possibly can. Our understanding is that scientists have no reason to think Covid-19 is being spread through food or food packaging. As far as we know with Covid-19, in a typical grocery-store setting, you’re in more danger from the person in the checkout line behind you than you would be from the spinach in your cart. With that in mind, we are taking every precaution to ensure we minimize person-to-person physical contact on our worksite (to protect our workers) and in getting your order to you (to protect you and your family), in addition to our normal food safety procedures (to prevent food-borne illnesses on food that is consumed raw).
For additional information, check out this resource on consumer safety and Covid-19 created by Ohio State University.
Lettuce Heads Aquaponics and Farm 