The Green Room

Understanding what happens on the farm

By Donnie Smith on October 12, 2012 Leave a comment

I want to talk about meat.  Not whether it’s morally or environmentally appropriate to eat meat.  Those debates have been raging in other forums for years and we’ll not settle them here.

I’d like to talk about how farm animals are raised and cared for.  Whether you’re an avid carnivore or a staunch vegan, we can all agree that it’s important for animals on the farm to be treated with care and respect throughout their lives.

At Tyson Foods, I work alongside about 100,000 people in the U.S. to produce a lot of meat for the tables of the world.  So we obviously have a point of view.

We also deal with a lot of farmers to source animals for our products.  More than 12,000 farmers, in fact, most of them longtime family farmers.  I can tell you for certain that nobody has more at stake, and nobody is more concerned about animals being responsibly treated than the farmers who care for them every day. It’s not just the right thing to do.  It makes good business sense in many, many ways.

Yet we’ve recently seen the debate on farm animal care dominated by those who are not farmers, focusing on narrow and often-misunderstood components of farming.   We’d like to propose a shift in the debate, to look at what happens to the animal from the time it’s born to the time it leaves the farm.

At Tyson Foods, we welcome the interest we’ve seen from our customers like Walmart and ultimately you the consumer in how things are done on the farm.  You have a right to be confident your food is being produced responsibly.

That’s why we’re announcing today an innovative program to take a more holistic look at how farm animals are treated and raised.   The program will have three primary components:

• FarmCheck™ —An on-farm audit program, ultimately involving independent third-party auditors to verify animal treatment, worker training and access to food and water.   If farmers are doing it right, let’s applaud them. If we discover those who aren’t, let’s do something about it.
• A new Farm Animal Well-Being Research Program to review existing research as well as fund and promote additional research.  We’ve made tremendous improvements in the way animals have been raised over the past 40 years.  Let’s build on that and continue to improve.
• Both the FarmCheck™ and the research programs will be overseen by a new, external, Animal Well-Being Advisory Committee that Tyson Foods is establishing.   Its members will include experts in farm animal behavior, health, production and ethics.  We want the best and brightest engaged in this.

To my knowledge, no other major meat producer has taken the steps that we are announcing today.   But we think it’s important because consumers want to better understand what goes on at the farm level.  Ultimately, we’re working hard with our farmers to help customers like Walmart provide food that is safe, accessible to everyone, and affordable, yet responsibly produced.   We all have a stake in that.