Certified production and the route to an overseas market: what Good Agricultural and Collection Practice asks of a farm, where GMP takes over, what EU-GMP adds on top, and what an importing regulator will want to see before a shipment moves.
These are documentation standards before they are agronomic ones. Most of the work is written evidence that what happened in the field and the drying room is what the file says happened: standard operating procedures, batch records, trained and named personnel, validated cleaning, controlled storage and a testing regime with results that can be traced back to a specific lot.
Two things are worth understanding before planning a farm around export. The certificate is granted against a defined site, process and product, so a change to any of them is a change to the certification rather than a detail. And the exporting side is only half the problem: each importing country runs its own import authorisation, its own permitted contaminant limits and in several cases its own inspection, which is where timelines are usually lost.
Where to start