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 raised hog, cattle and lamb production are 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 turkeys and hogs are controlled- atmosphere stunned
100%of farmers and associates handling live animals receive welfare training
52%of poultry houses have windows
26%of poultry have
enrichments
25%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.
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 foodservice 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 2021, we only conducted 42 tours as high pathogen avian influenza cases increased.
As part of its commitment to transparency about animal care, 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 (@KTYoungFarm), Laura Landis (@WorthTheWaitFarm), Val Nasir (@FollowValsFlock), Tara Green (@GreenGateFarmers_Wife) and Bobbi Jo Webber (@WebberFamilyFarm) - 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, raising 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, Pinterest and TikTok.
Working with farm families we have established three on-farm Poultry Learning Centers in Georgia, Kentucky, and North Carolina. At these educational facilities, the family hosts guests of all ages for a transparent, interactive experience to learn about various aspects of 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 help visitors understand what they see inside the chicken house, as well as when they receive the birds to how they raise and care for them while they are on the farm. Additionally, guests have the opportunity for hands-on learning using actual poultry equipment that replicates what they see through the window, including mechanized feeders and waterers and automated temperature-control technology.
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.
That’s why we’ve invested in Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) at one of our free-range poultry farms in Washington State to gather data on birds exiting and entering the “pophole” doors and time each bird spends in the pasture. Each bird is outfitted with a small tracking device on its leg that is wirelessly read by sensors on the inside and outside of the “pophole” doors to track the bird’s movements in and out of the house.
We believe this to be an industry first. While we have more work to nail down the technology, we believe in this approach of asking what the chicken wants and putting actual data behind our care practices.
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.
