Food Processing & Technology

Foodborne disease outbreaks associated with fresh produce have been reported from several countries around the world in recent decades due to Salmonella. The main route for the contamination of fresh produce in the field is through the use of fresh or partially contaminated manure/compost. Since the survival of Salmonella in manure or soil is affected by climatic and soil factors, the persistence of Salmonella in two soil types (sandy loam and clay) was studied under three temperature (5, 21, 37ºC), two moisture regimes (fluctuating and constant), with or without chicken manure amendments over 45 days of incubation under controlled condition with the aim of determining the persistence of Australian serovars of Salmonella under different environmental

conditions. A generalized linear mixed model was used to analyze Salmonella count data. All analyses were performed using the glimmer function from the lme4 package in R. All significant tests were done using Wald’s test and the level of significant was, P < 0.05. Generally, the survival of Salmonella is found to be longer under low temperature (5ºC > 21ºC > 37ºC), in clay soil, constant moisture and with chicken manure amendments. The next phase of the project was to determine the field conditions under which cover crops or cover crop-solarisation treatments might be used to remediate Salmonella-infected soil. Three different cover crops (mustard cv.caliente 199, radish and sorghum cv.fumigat8tor) and black plastic was used to treat Salmonella contaminated soil. Cover crop-solarisation treatment is appeared to be effective in suppressing Salmonella in the soil than cover crop alone.