One thing you'll notice about site visits is that it typically starts at the cutline "clean rooms" and works its way back to the barn. It never ceases to amaze me how often the facility operators ask me if I want to actually see the kill or the barn as if it's not critical to why I'm there. Quite frankly I've stopped visiting the cut floors and spend 90 percent of my time on the barns, the kill and de-hiding. The government focuses the bulk of their energies and time on the gut table animal health and pre-operational inspections. This is not where E. coli O157:H7 originates from!
Once you understand that the industry's current highest risk in the media is illness from a pathogen that comes from the intestines or manure, it's easy to bring intelligent input to a harvest audit. Unfortunately my experience is that when I point out manure contaminants that are transferred from a piece of equipment to piece of equipment, hide on the animal to a worker and back to the hide on the next animal etc., the production personnel often explain how they have a cleaning system downstream such as hot water or lactic acid. Every step in the process can and should be an opportunity to reduce the risk from getting downstream and to reduce the bacteria and pathogen load on the downstream interventions.