“They love us dearly,” joked Mr. Ten Eyck, who recalled being photographed but did not know his picture was hanging in Manhattan. “We meet all of their standards and everything they want.” But he added, “They can’t get out of their own way.”

Retailers like Whole Foods, Walmart and Costco serve as some of the most demanding regulators of produce growers. The widest-reaching requirement is that their suppliers have detailed food safety and handling plans, which are customized by the farms, usually with the help of consultants. The plans are based on F.D.A. guidelines, but are entirely voluntary.

A spokeswoman for Whole Foods said that the company worked closely with its suppliers and was proud of its high-quality standards. The retailer declined to comment on Indian Ladder Farms.

Farmers to some extent have gotten used to the requirements and see the benefit for their businesses of creating a culture of food safety. But they complain that the rules are onerous, particularly the tediousness of documenting virtually anything that happens on the farm. Much of that documentation at Indian Ladder goes in the 13 logs kept in the packinghouse.

If something is not logged, the saying on the farm goes, it did not happen.

Mr. Ten Eyck says some of the requirements are impractical. The safety plan at Indian Ladder, for example, calls for someone to check the orchard each morning for mouse and deer droppings and address the problem before picking begins. The worry is that the droppings could get attached to a worker’s shoe, get tracked onto a rung of a ladder, end up on a worker’s hands and then on the apples.

Mr. Ten Eyck says the requirement was “ridiculous” in practice — the equivalent of finding an earring in the orchard — so Indian Farms came up with an alternative to scouring the orchard every morning. “We have trained the guys only to grab the rails of the ladder,” he said.

The safety planning comes with accountability: The farms are audited, usually twice a year — once planned and again as a surprise. The audits are in-depth, as the inspector examines the entire farm operation, including employee hygiene, labor laws and fertilizer application. The auditor also checks if everyone on the farm has received proper training. And they check the logs, too.