The Nebraska Department of Agriculture (NDA) Laboratory is applying for the Laboratory Flexible Funding Model (LFFM) in support of building and maintaining our human and animal food testing capacity so that we can continue working towards an Integrated Food Safety System. The laboratory works in concert with NDA Finance, Legal, and other internal shared services to provide administrative support to the NDA Commercial Feed Program (full AFRPS implementation as of March 2020) and NDA Food and Dairy Program. The laboratory provides consultation on lab testing requests and fulfills MFRPS Standard 10 and AFRPS Standard 10. NDA Laboratory requirements for sample collection are updated annually in a sampling agreement between the Laboratory and regulatory programs. We determine a sample collection calendar, discuss expectations for routine and non?routine samples, and completion of sample submission forms to establish chain of custody. NDA will modify the terms of our laboratory sampling agreements to meet the requirements of the Laboratory Flexible Funding Model. The laboratory ensures that all key personnel for this project have fulfilled necessary training and obtained authorizations (where needed) according to our quality management system. Staff perform the same training and authorization steps for all laboratory activities under scope (i.e., read and understand the procedure, observe the procedure, perform the procedure under observation, perform the procedure independently, manager reviews training record prior to conferring authority). Proficiency testing is an effective way to demonstrate ongoing competency for each test method. Post award, the NDA Laboratory will be in communication with FDA to discuss cooperative agreement specifics not covered in the LFFM. We will take part in planning national testing workflows and contribute to identification of Hazard?to?Commodity pairs. In addition, we look forward state laboratory workplanning in support of the one workforce concept. The laboratory prepares a monthly report using inputs from each laboratory section supervisor. These monthly lab reports are valuable in the preparation of federal grant materials and other agency reporting needs. We have also reported FDA data to eLEXNET as instructed in previous cooperative agreements. In 2019, Nebraska volunteered to participate in a pilot project with other state labs and FDA FERN to test a new data submission process to the National Food Safety Data Exchange (NFSDX). Steps involved mapping NDA test codes to match FDA codes and then use the new submission template to upload the data manually. Nebraska was the first state partner to achieve a successful upload of the NFSDX manual template during the pilot.
