Highlights Report 2024

Perdue Commitments to Animal Care:

Creating a Culture of Animal Care

Our Perdue Commitments to Animal Care, launched in 2016, is a four-part program to accelerate our progress in animal care by giving our chickens what they want, strengthening our relationships with our farmers, building trust with multiple stakeholder groups and creating an animal care culture for continuous improvement.

Our Position on Animal Care and Welfare

At Perdue Farms, our vision is “to be the most trusted name in food and agricultural products®”. That trust extends to our animal care and welfare commitments, and we embrace our responsibility to ensure animals are treated with dignity and respect. In fact, animal welfare is an important part of our Company value of Stewardship.

Our standards for animal care are guided by the Five Freedoms, the globally accepted gold standard for animal husbandry, including:

Freedom from hunger and thirst
Freedom from discomfort
Freedom from pain, injury or disease
Freedom to express normal behavior
Freedom from fear and distress

For us, the Five Freedoms align with our animal care goal of going beyond giving animals what they need, to giving them what they want.

Our approach to animal care is a process of continuous improvement involving a wide range of stakeholders, with a commitment to transparency. We believe that welfare goes beyond meeting the physical needs of animals and that success is measured by more than efficiency and productivity.

We take a collaborative approach to animal care, adhering to strict requirements under the guidance of a team of veterinarians and animal welfare professionals, and input from third-party experts.

Mistreatment or abuse of animals is never tolerated. All associates handling live animals are provided training, including their responsibility to report any violations of our animal welfare policies. The farmers and ranchers who raise animals for us share in the responsibility to provide care according to our best practices and standards, and to alert us to any issues involving animal health or welfare. We regularly engage them for their input as part of our continuous improvement process.

All species that are raised and sourced for our brands and products are done so under the following standards:

The avoidance of confinement for all species.
No artificial or hormonal growth-promoting substances used, including beta antagonists or ractopamine.
Antibiotics will only be used when prescribed by a veterinarian with duration limits to ensure the best animal welfare for the animals.
An emphasis on the freedom to express natural behaviors through environmental enrichments suitable for each specific species.
Animals raised and sourced throughout our operations have not been subject to any genetic modification or are derived from cloned stock.
The avoidance of routine activities such as tail docking, teeth clipping/grinding on pigs, beak trimming on poultry and tail docking on cows.
Travel times for all poultry and livestock are kept to a minimum and our goal is to not exceed eight hours.
Animals that are rendered insensible prior to being harvested.
Compliance with all legislative standards and raising and sourcing all animals from animal welfare organizations such as Global Animal Partnership, Certified Humane, American Humane, USDA Certified Organic, United Egg Producers certified, National Dairy Farmers Assuring Responsible Management and USDA Processed Verified.

At Perdue Farms, we take pride in being an industry leader in animal care and remain committed to our journey of continuous improvement and doing the right things for the right reasons.

Part 1:
Our Chickens' Needs and Wants

Our Progress

Part 2:
Our Farmer
Relationships

Our Progress

Part 3:
Openness, Transparency and Trust

Our Progress

Part 4:
A Journey of Continuous Improvement

Our Progress

Progress

Part 1: Our Chickens' Needs and Wants

Perdue will evaluate and implement production systems specifically designed to go beyond just the “needs” of our chickens to also include what our chickens “want.” We will chart our progress against the “Five Freedoms.”

Freedom To Express Normal Behavior

Freedom From Pain, Injury and Disease

Freedom From Hunger & Thirst and Discomfort

Freedom From Fear and Distress

1. Freedom To Express Normal Behavior

An important part of our commitments to animal welfare is understanding what a chicken wants and letting chickens act naturally. It’s also important that our flock advisors — those who work mostly closely with our birds and the farmers who raise them — better understand a chicken’s normal behaviors. That’s why we’re building a Perdue Normal Behavior Library of videos for training purposes. Our normal behavior videos illustrate such things as dustbathing, foraging, perching, preening, resting, social pecking, stretching, and playing.

As a companion to our normal behavior video library, we recognized that we also need to provide education on abnormal bird behavior. We created the first two piece of video content focus on feed management and water management quality issue, and plan to create more abnormal bird behavior content.

Pasture-raised birds exhibit different behaviors than birds raised in other production systems. To attempt to quantitate this we compared pasture-raised birds to three other systems characterized as no windows/conventional house, windows/conventional house, and slow- growing Rebro bird/enriched housing. Each system was studied at ages 10, 18, 26, 32, and 42 days. Activities we looked for included drinking, resting, walking, foraging, preening, stretching, social pecking, playing, and dustbathing. Generally, pasture-raised birds were more active. That activity was predominately in the two behaviors: preening and playing.

Our Full Report

2. Freedom From Pain, Injury and Disease

We remain committed to moving all our harvest operations from using electrical shocks to “stun” birds before harvest, to using a multi-stage, dual-gas technology Controlled Atmosphere Stunning (CAS) system to induce insensibility with minimal trauma. We started installation of our second chicken CAS system at our Dillon, South Carolina harvest operation but had to pause that project for financial reasons. We expect the system to be operational in November 2024. In November 2017, we successfully implemented our first CAS chicken system at our Milford, Delaware harvest plant. We installed CAS at our Washington, Indiana, turkey operation in 2012.

We initiated a joint project with an animal advocacy group to identify the real costs and benefits beyond animal welfare of Controlled Atmosphere Stunning versus electrical stunning at our Milford, Delaware chicken harvest operation. The project was paused due to other priorities for both parties. We expect to resume this project as we implement CAS in Dillon, South Carolina.

Our Full Report

3. Freedom From Hunger & Thirst and Discomfort

We are continuing to study the feasibility and potential benefit of On-Farm Hatching (OFH) to improve early chick care. We have conducted additional trails to determine whether taking chicks directly to the farm at 18 days of incubation and placing them directly on the litter to skip the stress of hatching and processing at the hatchery would be feasible. We remain enthusiastic about the viability of OFH and will continue our research.

Our Full Report

4. Freedom From Fear and Distress

We are conducting research to determine the relationship between specific farms and meat quality as it relates to muscle myopathies or “woody breast” syndrome. We learned we can now identify meat quality issues to specific farms. Through two-years of research, we found farms that were distinctly different in meat quality. Our next step is to understand why.

Our Full Report

Our Key Steps Forward from 2023

In October 2023, we held our eighth annual Animal Care Summit, bringing together animal care experts and advocates, customers, farmers and Perdue leadership.
Began construction of our second controlled atmosphere stunning system for chickens.
Identified farmers’ top concerns in caring for our birds.
Improved chick handling process across all company hatcheries
Researched farm-specific meat quality issues
Conducted research on Better Chicken Commitment-compliant, slower-growing breed.
Developed educational video content demonstrating normal and abnormal chicken behaviors.
Researched bird behavior in pasture versus conventional housing.

Perdue Farms Shares Industry-leading Commitments And Innovations At 8th Annual Animal Care Summit

In FY24, Perdue Farms hosted its eighth annual Animal Care Summit near its Salisbury, Maryland headquarters. The event plays an integral role in the company’s animal care strategy, with the latest summit focused on reaffirming the importance of, and
Perdue’s commitment to, ‘No Antibiotics Ever’ (NAE) practices.

“In 2002, we listened to consumers and made the decision to transform our company to remove all antibiotics from Perdue products. To accomplish that, we needed to enhance our animal care practices, ultimately benefitting the health, environment, and quality of our chickens,” said Dr. Bruce Stewart-Brown, Perdue’s Senior Vice President of Technical Services and Innovation and veterinarian who is helping guide Perdue’s approach to animal care. “Using antibiotics for preventive care can be a crutch, and we firmly believe a better, more sustainable approach is to provide better care, and stop covering up poor environmental conditions and bad practices.”

“At Perdue, our annual Animal Care Summit allows us to share our latest progress and challenges, including the balance of advancing animal care practices while leveraging our vertical integration to improve environmental impacts across our supply chain,” said Drew Getty, Vice President of Environmental Sustainability at Perdue Farms. “We’re proud of our long legacy of animal care, which dates to the company’s founding in 1920. It’s not always the easy way, but it’s the Perdue way.”

This year, summit attendees, including farmers, retailers, and animal advocates, experienced an interactive farm tour for an inside look at how Perdue is investing in the future, including:

A first-ever look into the future of chicken house enrichments, an innovative advancement that shows how enrichments can provide space improvements, giving chickens the opportunity to move beyond the floor of the chicken house.
A deep dive into on-farm hatcheries, showcasing the positive benefits of this unique practice and the interesting research behind Perdue’s strategy.
An interactive chicken feed demonstration, transparently explaining the benefits of the nutritious, all vegetarian, no-antibiotic-ever feed that is given to every Perdue chicken.

Dr. Stewart-Brown, Dr. Lance Price, professor at George Washington University, and Dr. Michelle Kromm, principal at FoodForward LLC, offered an in-depth look at the state of antibiotics in livestock, including roadblocks to curbing unnecessary use and the implications of overuse, from diminished efficacy of antibiotics for humans to lessened ability to treat sick animals. The panel also emphasized the importance of working closely with veterinarians to bring solutions to the broader animal agriculture industry.

In addition, attendees heard from experts on a variety of topics, including the Better Chicken Commitment and our research into slower growing breeds. Perdue presented the results of a 26-flock trial involving side by side houses comparing the current commercial breed compared to a GAP/BCC compliant slower growing breed. This trial also included a Life Cycle Assessment comparing the carbon footprint of these two breeds.

Perdue’s annual Animal Care Summit exemplifies the company’s transparency in its practices to key stakeholders by showing its progress to its Commitments to Animal Care program established in 2016, which includes:

Chickens: Based on the “Five Freedoms,” Perdue will go beyond just the needs of its chickens to also include what its chickens “want.”
Farms: Perdue will recommit to relationships with farmers who raise its animals.
Trust: To build trust, Perdue will be transparent in its programs, goals, and progress.
Continuous Improvement: Perdue will continue to build an animal care culture within the company through continuous improvement.

Read Less

A Discussion on No Antibiotics Ever

Better Chicken Discussion

Farmer & Rancher Panel: Managing & Enriching Animal Spaces

Animal Care: Our Journey of Continuous Improvement

Alternative Breed Research

2022

2022 Animal Care Summit Highlights

Meeting Demand For The Better Chicken Commitment

Transparency: A Panel Discussion

Exploring Chickens Preference For Free-Range Pasture Plants

Learn About Our Research Into Chickens Feed Preference

2021

Animal Care Summit 2021 Highlights

Strengthening Farmer Relationships Through Our New Young Farmer Development Group

Learn What We Are Doing With On-Farm Hatch System Research

Learn How Free-Range Paster Contest Winner Gets More Birds Outside

Using Radio Frequency Identification Technology To Understand How and When Birds Go In Free-Range Pasture

We’re Using Radio Frequency Identification Technology To Under How and When Birds Go In Free-Range Pasture

2020

Animal Care Summit 2020 Highlights

We're Advancing Beyond the Status Quo

Learn How Free-Range Pasture Contest Winner Gets More Birds Outside

Learn About Our 2019 Farmer Chicken Welfare Enrichment Design Contest

2019

Animal Care Summit 2019 Highlights

See More Animal Care Videos

What Others Say About the Perdue Commitments to Animal Care

Animal Welfare Advocates

"In my experience, Perdue has been first not only test new processes for raising chickens, but also most willing to talk about their results of those tests and show us as buyers what’s worked and what hasn’t worked."

Maisie Ganzler, Chief Strategy and Brand Officer, Bon Appétite Management Company

Farmers Raising Our Chickens

"The animals are treated with the best care and it's not just a facade. This is really what my farm looks like everyday. It's beautiful, there's windows, they run around, it's not dusty and there's no cages."

Bobbi Jo Webber, Perdue Poultry Farmer