Focus on animal welfare Global Animal Partnership, and the race to produce a slower growing chicken

Global Animal Partnership (G.A.P.)

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/G.A.P.Certified/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CertifiedGAP

GAP is a non-profit charitable organization that brings together farmers, scientists, ranchers, retailers, and animal advocates with the common goal of improving the welfare of animals in agriculture. The GAP 5-Step program is the only farm animal welfare rating system developed by producers working collaboratively with non-profit animal advocacy organizations, where retailers needs are integrated with concern about animal welfare, and where scientific research joins with on-farm wisdom.

History

GAP was founded in 2008 with assistance from Whole Foods Market. According to GAP’s website, Whole Foods had piloted its own animal welfare rating program, but Whole Foods CEO John Mackey felt that an independent organization would be more effective. In different phases, the Global Animal Partnership launched farm standards for broiler chickens, pigs, beef cattle, and turkeys. The organization intends to launch additional welfare standards for other species as it grows.

Mission

A farm animal welfare standards and labeling program for meat and egg products, in which every farm is third-party audited. Look for the label and #MakeItGAP.

5-Step Animal Welfare Rating Program

Standards

Beef cattle

• Step 1: There is at least 50% vegetative cover on pasture/range, and dehorning is prohibited.
• Step 2: Objects for grooming and scratching, as well as shade for all animals to rest together at the same time are provided.
• Step 3: There is no Step 3 for cattle.
• Step 4: Cattle are removed from pasture/range only when weather conditions put them at risk.
• Step 5: There is at least 75% vegetative cover on pasture/range. All physical alterations, including castration, is prohibited.
• Step 5+: Calves are weaned naturally, and transportation is prohibited.

Broiler chickens

• Step 1: Cages are prohibited and all physical alterations, including beak trimming, are prohibited.
• Step 2: Habitats are enriched to encourage foraging behavior, and cover or blinds are provided.
• Step 3: Chickens have continuous outdoor access during daylight hours.
• Step 4: Chickens have continuous access to foraging areas or pasture, including indoor foraging areas during inclement weather.
• Step 5: Season housing is prohibited. Perches for all birds to perch at the same time are provided.
• Step 5+: Chickens are killed on-farm or locally.

Pigs

• Step 1: Cages, stalls, and crates are prohibited, as is tail docking. There is bedding in all housing.
• Step 2: Enrichments to encourage foraging behavior are provided. The minimum weaning age is 35 days.
• Step 3: Pigs have continuous outdoor access during daylight hours.
• Step 4: Pigs have continuous access to foraging areas or pasture, and unrestricted access to wallows on pasture.
• Step 5: Litters of piglets stay. All physical alterations, including castration, are prohibited.
• Step 5+: Transportation is prohibited.

Turkeys

• Step 1: Cages, toe-clipping, and dubbing are prohibited.
• Step 2: Enrichments to encourage foraging behavior are provided. Toenail conditioning is prohibited.
• Step 3: Turkeys have continuous access to the outdoors during daylight hours.
• Step 4: Turkeys have continuous access to foraging areas or pasture with at least 50% vegetation or cover. Beak trimming is prohibited.
• Step 5: Seasonal housing is prohibited. Perches for all birds to perch at the same time are provided.
• Step 5+: Turkeys are killed on-farm or locally.

How to get certified for producers, farmers and ranchers:
https://globalanimalpartnership.org/producers/

Videos

https://www.facebook.com/G.A.P.Certified/videos/695306284679123

Articles

Whole Foods Chicken Certifier Upends Market With New Breed Rules

The biggest chicken producers in the U.S. will have to overhaul their breeding programs in a matter of just a few years to meet tough new guidelines major customers are embracing, part of a movement to ensure birds are healthier and more humanely treated.

The Global Animal Partnership, an animal welfare certifier whose five-step method is championed by Amazon.com Inc.’s Whole Foods, is set to lower the number of breeds that meets its standards. According to people familiar with the process, it’s virtually impossible for any conventional chicken breeds, which make up more than 90% of U.S. production, to make the cut due to their performance in a study that informed the results.

While the new rules don’t go into effect until 2026, the move could drive changes in the industry with over 200 companies including Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen Inc. and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. promising to transition to breeds that meet GAP’s standards.

The interest in more humane chicken breeding has emerged as problems cropped up with commercial broilers in recent years. The chickens that most of the world eats grow at lightning speed and prodigiously convert feed into protein. That’s made meat cheaper and more accessible to more people. However, high productivity had trade-offs. A two-year study commissioned by GAP had preliminary results seen by Bloomberg that concluded the world’s most ubiquitous chickens had poor welfare outcomes due to genetics. The birds sat for most of their lives, had more foot injuries and more problems like white strips of fat and tough, woody textures throughout their muscles. Their bodies grew faster at times than their organs, resulting in small lungs.

In the preliminary data, 77% conventional chickens that were 48 days old had woody breast, which is a tough, gristly texture, and two-thirds had white striping, which involves excess strips of fat in the meat. Slow-growing breeds, by comparison, clocked in at 12% and 6%, respectively, in the study.

“We’re driving toward super efficient, lots of muscle mass. But the birds themselves have problems,” Anne Malleau, executive director of GAP said in an interview about the project, before Bloomberg obtained the study. “Woody breast and white striping are relatively new muscle myopathies. Because of the selection, we’ve changed the muscle fibers. It’s a consequence of the selection that we’re seeing these muscle problems.”

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ASPCA: Farm Animal Welfare Certification Guide

This section provides background on Global Animal Partnership (GAP) and an overview of GAP’s:
• Standards • Label use guidelines
• Certification process • Marketing support
• Audit process • Costs

GAP Background
Mission. Global Animal Partnership (GAP) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Austin, Texas, dedicated to “working collaboratively to facilitate and encourage continuous improvement and higher welfare in animal agriculture.” GAP maintains multi-tiered certification standards (“Step
Levels” 1-5+) for each species. The more rigorous an operation’s welfare standards, the higher the “Step Rating” it may receive. Notably, GAP neither audits nor certifies farm businesses; it simply sets standards. It accredits independent certification companies to conduct audits and award GAP
certifications on its behalf.

History. GAP began as the Animal Compassion Foundation, a program of Whole Foods Market® (WFM) created in 2005. In 2008, WFM renamed the program and spun off GAP as its own independent non-profit entity so that GAP could partner with other retailers and foodservice outlets. Notably, WFM and GAP are still significantly intertwined. First, they continue to share some management personnel, though GAP is looking to develop its next generation of leadership from outside WFM’s ranks. Second, in 2011, WFM established a procurement policy of buying only GAP-certified fresh meats. As a result, according to GAP, the vast majority of current GAPcertified farm and ranch businesses maintain GAP certification in order to sell (or continue to sell) fresh meats into the WFM supply chain. GAP is currently working to build relationships with other retailers and foodservice outlets nationally and internationally.

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Controversy

In 2015 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against Whole Foods on the grounds that its labeling of animal products with the 5-Step rating program deceived customers. According to PETA’s complaint,
“The entire audit process for Whole Foods’ animal welfare standards is a sham because it occurs infrequently and violations of the standards do not cause loss of certification…Standards that are not actually enforced create a false impression of ensuring a more humanely treated, higher quality animal product — when in fact they ensure no such thing.”
The case was dismissed in April 2016 on the grounds that PETA had not shown that Whole Foods’ alleged misrepresentations defrauded consumers. According to Judge Nathanael Cousins, “Retailers do not have a duty to disclose product information unless it relates to a consumer safety issue”, and PETA had not raised any safety concerns.

In January 2016, a number of animal activist groups including DxE, PETA, Last Chance for Animals, and the Christian Vegetarian Association signed an open letter to Whole Foods condemning GAP’s rating system.

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The Race to Produce a Slower-Growing Chicken

The co-founder of Blue Apron is banking on a new model for bringing pasture-raised chicken to the masses. But carving out a niche in a complex, crowded market won’t be easy. 

Source: https://civileats.com/2019/05/28/the-race-to-produce-a-slower-growing-chicken/

On this Arkansas chicken farm, when the public tour starts at dawn, the doors to the chicken barns are closed to keep out night-time predators. Then, the doors are thrown open and there’s a rush of feet and feathers as thousands of chickens run, flap, and jump to reach the pasture. Soon, visitors are standing in a sea of pecking, clucking birds.

The experience is meant to drive home a point: In an industry dominated by birds that have been engineered to be too top-heavy to walk—forget about jumping or flying—these athletic chickens are unique. The 800-acre wooded farm, owned by the new food company Cooks Venture, aims to fundamentally change the way chickens are farmed.

Cooks Venture is one of several players angling to revolutionize the chicken industry by combining slower-growing chicken genetics, unrestricted access to lush pasture, and attention to soil and the ecosystem. And it wants to do so at a scale much larger than others, meant to one day rival America’s top poultry companies.

Producing slower-growing chicken on pasture, in numbers that can feed millions of Americans of all economic means, is a tall order. It’s a radical departure from how modern chickens are raised, and there is no definition of what exactly “slow growth” means. No one knows whether consumers will accept their higher price tag. Given the challenges and uncertainties, only a few companies have attempted this model in recent years—and some critics don’t believe that their slow growth approach goes far enough to protect critical heritage poultry genetics.

Cooks Venture says it has found a happy medium that can change chickens’ lives without costing consumers too much. “There’s a misconception that growing good, healthy food to scale costs a lot more money,” said founder Matthew Wadiak. “If people are willing to pay a dollar or two more—the cost of a coffee at Starbucks—we can create a better growing system, and a chicken that tastes good, is healthy, and has a good life.”

Wadiak co-founded Blue Apron, the nation’s largest meal kit company, in 2012. He stepped down a month after the company went public in 2017. Like other meal kit services, Blue Apron has lost popularity, with its value dropping by 90 percent in the last two years. Just this week, it was reported that the company may be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. It’s unclear whether pasture-raised chickens will be an easier sell to the American public.

Matthew Wadiak, Cook’s Venture founder. Photo by Chris Montgomery.

Distressed, Fast-Growing Chickens

Up until the middle of the last century, chickens of myriad breeds were raised mostly in backyards and on small local farms. They were dual purpose, kept for both eggs and meat. But as farmers began to specialize in the production of “broilers”—plumper birds raised specifically for meat—the industry became increasingly dominated by larger companies that controlled all stages of the production process.

In 1952, broiler production surpassed farm chickens as the number one source of chicken meat in the U.S. Within just a decade, 90 percent of all broilers would come from large integrated operations. Today, that percentage has climbed to 99 percent, according to the National Chicken Council.

The modern broiler industry’s rapid rise and prosperity came thanks to several advances, including the ability to add supplements and medication to chicken feed, from Vitamin D to antibiotics. Shutting chickens indoors allowed for complete control over their environments.

But the most consequential advance, the one that transformed the chicken into a full-fledged commodity, was genetic selection. Over the past few decades, poultry breeding companies created the most economic, fastest-growing, corpulent bird by selecting for certain genetic traits. They repeatedly bred Cornish Cross strains to grow more white meat in the breast with less feed. A typical broiler today reaches the desired 5-6 pounds of live weight in just about 42 days; it grows twice as fast, twice as large, on half the feed than a broiler did about 70 years ago.

These efficiencies have led to chicken becoming plentiful, cheap, and ubiquitous on dinner plates; its consumption has more than tripled since the 1960s and it’s the number one meat eaten by Americans today. In 2018, more than 9 billion broiler chickens were produced in the U.S., where consumers eat more chicken than anyone else—more than 93.5 pounds per capita in 2018.

But the broiler’s success has come at a steep price for the birds. In the first few weeks of life, their growth outpaces their skeletal system and organ development. The birds’ legs and frame cannot support their bloated breasts. They struggle to walk, are prone to deformities, and spend most of their time sitting and eating. Because they put on weight so fast, but their internal organs aren’t keeping up, their insides expand like a balloon. “It’s like an 11-year-old child that weighs 600 pounds,” says Frank Reese, heritage poultry breeder and owner of the Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch.

The chickens’ skin, in near-constant contact with the ground, is prone to infections. With weak immune systems, packed in artificially lighted barns with tens of thousands of other birds, they’re also more susceptible to diseases than chickens raised outdoors—hence the need to feed them antibiotics at sub-therapeutic levels. (Some producers have stopped or reduced this practice, but it has often led to higher rates of chicken disease and mortality.)

“These chickens are born to suffer. They’re genetically manipulated to grow so big so fast that they’re in constant pain,” said Josh Balk, head of the Farm Animal Protection team at the Humane Society of the United States. “Their cages are their genetics.”

Intense selective breeding has also impacted consumers and chicken producers. Tens of thousands of broilers are plagued by several muscle diseases, including woody breast (stiff wood-like meat that’s difficult to chew), spaghetti meat, green muscle disease, and white striping, costing producers millions of dollars in revenue. Some consumers complain that modern chicken is bland. And, increasingly, others have voiced concerns about the conditions in the factory farms in which they’re raised.

Capitalizing on consumer awareness, the nonprofit Global Animal Partnership (GAP), a group that was founded in partnership with Whole Foods Market and sets standards for farmed animal welfare, announced three years ago that by 2024 it would only give its animal-welfare certifications to farms raising slower-growing chickens. The announcement affects more than 600 currently GAP-certified farms and their 277 million chickens, a relatively small percentage of the nation’s 9 billion birds. However, that number could grow significantly as an increasing number of companies—including Whole Foods, Bon Appetit Management Company, Aramark, Panera Bread, Starbucks, Chipotle Mexican Grill, and Subway—have also vowed to sell meat only from slow-growing chickens.

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