Do Your Meat and Dairy Products Come From Animals That Have Been Raised Humanely?
By Charlotte Isles, Development and Communications Coordinator
Monday, October 16th was World Food Day and this week we would like to encourage you to think about where your food comes from.
At FACT we're committed to helping livestock and poultry farmers raise their animals outdoors on well-managed pastures. This means animals can move freely and engage in their natural behaviors. It also means they provide much more nutritionally superior meat and dairy products than from animals raised on factory farms.
Here are some ways you can make sure that your meat and dairy products come from animals that have been raised humanely:
Check your labels:
FACT recommends purchasing products that have third-party-verified labels, meaning that a credible outside source audits the farm to ensure it follows the practices implied by the label.
With this in mind, certification can be too time-consuming or expensive for a small family farm to pursue, so a farm in your local area may use humane practices but not be certified. Read more here.
Ask the right questions at the farmers market:
Farmers markets are an excellent opportunity to connect directly with farmers and learn more about the products you purchase while supporting independent family farms.
FACT recommends that you support farmers directly and engage with them to learn more about your food. Consider asking farmers at area markets:
Do your animals have access to well-managed pasture?
What do you feed your animals?
Do you use antibiotics, hormones, or any growth promoters?
Find your local humane food vendors:
FACT has compiled a National Directory of Local Food Vendors across the United States, supporting small family farms that deliver products or have curbside pickup.
Our goal is to give customers an alternative to large national distributors and supermarket chains. All of these vendors offer humanely raised meat, dairy, and eggs.
And don’t forget to reserve your holiday turkey!
Last year FACT put together our first-ever Pasture Raised Turkey Directory. We continue to update the directory annually and we hope that our directory will help you find a humanely-raised turkey this holiday season.
We are happy to share all of this information about where to find humanely raised food. However, we could not make all of this information available without your help. Consider supporting our efforts to ensure that our food is safe, healthy, and raised humanely by making a donation today!
You can also join our exclusive online community for monthly supporters, now available on iPhone and Android! As part of this community, you can look forward to diving deeper into the world of humane farming with exclusive content, connecting and sharing experiences with fellow supporters, and joining a diverse community passionate about food animal welfare, and sustainable farming. Our community is hosted on Makua, a new giving app connecting donors with nonprofits. Download the app on your cellphone here.
Photo Credit from top: Moonstone Farm in DC, Terra Vitae Farms in IL, and Bull City Farm in NC.