See the details in our Company Stewardship Report.
Treating animals with respect means going beyond the minimum to keep animals healthy and to produce safe food. We view animal care as a journey of continuous improvement, evolving with advancements in animal husbandry and behavior, consumer questions and public concerns. This responsibility stretches across all of our raising programs and is shared by the farm families we trust to raise animals for us.
Our programs are designed so that we can raise animals in a reduced-stress environment where we don’t need to rely on human or animal antibiotics to keep them healthy, and we never use drugs for growth promotion or artificial growth promoters.
100%of chickens, turkeys, hogs, cows and sheep are raised under no-antibiotics-ever protocols
100%of hog, cattle and lamb production are raised under third-party verified humane animal care
100%of animals are raised under documented responsible care protocols
100%of animals are
pre-harvest stunned
100%of raised turkeys and hogs are controlled atmosphere stunned
100%of farmers and associates handling live animals receive welfare training
55%of poultry houses have windows
37%of poultry have
enrichments
27%of poultry have
outdoor access
0growth-promoting
drugs
FREEToll-Free hotline number to report welfare violations
USDAProcess Verified Programs for
all poultry
Perdue Farms is committed to the avoidance of confinement through all species. As of July 2022:
At Perdue Farms, we recognize that providing animals with appropriate, species-specific environmental enrichments can improve their living conditions and help encourage their natural behaviors. As of July 2022:
Perdue Farms is committed to the routine avoidance of activities such as tail docking of pigs and cows, debeaking of chickens and toenail conditioning of turkeys. As of July 2022:
Our objective is to ensure that all animal species, including chicken, turkey, pork, beef, dairy cows, and lamb, are rendered insensible prior to being harvested. As of July 2022:
Travel times for all poultry and livestock are kept to a minimum and our goal is to not exceed eight hours. As of July 2022:
Our beef, lamb and pork programs are incorporating additional welfare outcome measurements, including a commitment to reduce lameness. Baselines, targeted improvements, and reporting will be established in the coming year.
*All species raised and sourced for Perdue Farms brands.
As part of our pledge "to be transparent in our programs, goal and progresses," we committed to share key animal care metrics, openly criticize ourselves when appropriate, and honestly and respectfully answer those who constructively criticize us.
As part of our commitment to transparency, we routinely invite people to tour our farms and plants. We encourage our farmers to be open to visitors within the constraints of biosecurity and business needs. Over the course of a year, a range of stakeholders, including retail and food service customers, media, advocacy groups, community members, students, and government representatives, visit our facilities. We track the number of tours by audience and have a goal to conduct 100 tours a year. In 2022, we only conducted 70 tours and are on pace to meet our 100-tour goal in 2023. We are again sponsoring one of our farmers who holds a farm festival on his farm that draws upwards of 2,500 visitors. We will be giving poultry house tours and hope to get even more visitors than last year to visit the poultry house.
Perdue Farms is partnering with social media active farmers to help increase their visibility and share their stories with more people. Five Perdue Farms family farmers — Kenny Young (@KennyYoung K T Young Farm), Laura Landis (@WorthTheWaitFarm), Val Nasir (@ followvalsflock), Tara Green (@greengatefar-mers_wife) and Bobbi Jo Webber(@Webber-FamilyFarm) — are creating social media content including educational pieces about raising chickens as well as stories about their history, farms, families and animals. They are passionate about farming, rais-ing animals thoughtfully and always going the extra mile to produce a better tasting product, and enjoy educating their followers on social media about their work and what it takes to feed America.
By using the hashtags #PerdueProud and #PerdueFarms_FarmerAdvocate, their posts are shared across Perdue’s social media properties, enlightening Perdue Farms’ followers and reaching a wider audience for their information.
The farmers periodically receive product samples from multiple Perdue brands for fun unboxing videos, as well as product bundles and gift certificates to help engage their audiences. Look for our farmer advocates on all the Perdue social channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Working with farm families, we have established three on-farm Poultry Learning Centers. The family hosts guests for a transparent, interactive experience to learn about poultry farming and proper animal care. Built seamlessly into the side of a working chicken house, each learning center includes a large viewing room that allows guests to observe the birds undisturbed in their environment. Farmers explain what visitors are seeing inside the chicken house, as well as the timeline from when farmers receive the birds to how they raise and care for them. Guests can learn using actual poultry equipment that replicates what they see through the window, including mechanized feeders and waterers and automated temperature-control technology. The first viewing house opened in Kentucky in 2018. A second opened in Georgia in 2019. In early 2020, a third viewing farm in North Carolina opened for visitors.
We are conducting research to learn chicken preference for vegetation in the pastures of free-range and pastured-raised programs. Called Pasture Choice, our research studied the birds’ preference for 12 types of grasses, herbs, and plants, including alfalfa, clover, peas, buckwheat, sunflowers, and an herb mix. We focused on two plants at a time in pen trials and watched and scored the birds’ enthusiasm for each. The birds disliked only a few of the varieties, and young birds tended to prefer new plants in the pasture. We believe that pasture vegetation matters. We’ll work to understand how pasture forage affects meat nutrition.
We continue to study the feasibility and potential benefits of on-farm hatching (OFH) to improve early broiler chick quality and welfare.
Our initial studies at our Westover, Md. research farm involved the installation of an OFH system where eggs were incubated through day 18 and then taken directly to the farm to hatch instead of being placed in the hatcher. The eggs are placed in their setter racks in a suspended table or placed directly on the litter depending on the system. The room temperature is adjusted to keep the eggs at the desired temperature and then birds will hatch over the next 24 to 72 hours. We saw some success in improving chick quality and livability with this process.
In FY23, we researched other OFH systems and decided to conduct a pilot in FY24 with a system that transfers the pre-incubated eggs directly on a natural litter bed in the broiler house. As soon as every day-old chick is hatched, they have direct access to feed, water and light. We are the first U.S. poultry company to test this technology.
In FY23, we launched a project called “Pasture Choice” as part of ongoing research to encourage broiler chickens to enter the outside pasture. Operating under the premise that having the birds in the pasture is good for animal welfare, we believe having plants and grasses that will attract them to the pasture to encourage foraging will also improve welfare.
We’re looking at what plants will thrive in the pasture and, more importantly, what plants do the birds prefer. We’ve tested a variety of plants, including alfalfa, clover, buckwheat, marigold and sunflowers. Going forward, we plan to test a mixture of several plant seeds at one or more of our farm partners’ broiler operations and determine the contribution of these plants to the nutritional profile of the meat.
Strengthening relationships with our farmers is one of four pillars of our Commitments to Animal Care poultry program.
In 2016, we created Farmer Councils in each of our poultry live production areas – broilers, breeders and turkey – to share information and receive feedback.
Since then, 15 percent of our farmers have participated in the Farmer Council process. Councils meet four hours every six months to discuss how we can be the farmers’ choice to supply them birds. Our focus is to understand their business from their perspective – a key learning opportunity that is mutually beneficial.
We also established a Young Farmer Development Group to help us foster stronger relationships by meeting the young farmers unique needs.
Now in its third year, the Young Farmer Development Group consists of 12 next-generation farmers under the age of 30 across our broiler growing regions. We’ve conducted virtual meetings to explore their priorities for mentoring, including with experienced poultry farmers, information, and engagement, are developing a program to support their development and long-term success.
While it’s one thing to say free-range chickens can access the outdoors, we want to go further to ensure we’re making it easy, and that the environment is what they want, and not what we think is best.
For the nearly four-month pig gestation period, most sows (mom pigs) in the U.S. live in a gestation crate, a roughly 2-by-7-foot stall where the animals do not have enough room to even turn around, walk or socialize. When the sows are ready to give birth, they are moved to restrictive farrowing crates where they spend the next three to four weeks before going back to a gestation crate for breeding.
Since day one, Niman Ranch has banned the use of gestation and farrowing crates, believing intelligent animals like pigs deserve to have space to root, roam and exhibit their natural behaviors.
With multiple states and corporations setting policies and goals to end the use of crates, Niman Ranch has become a leading voice to highlight a better, more humane way to raise pigs. Niman Ranch farmers and company leadership were featured in numerous media outlets speaking on the topic, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Associated Press, CNN, Newsweek and more.
Learn about the steps we're taking to reach our goal of becoming the most trusted name in food and agricultural products.
