After decades of lobbying from animal-welfare groups and pressure from consumers and customers, two of the country’s largest meat producers, including Springdale-based Tyson Foods Inc., are changing pork policies on U.S. hog farms.
On Thursday, Tyson released new animal-welfare guidelines for its hog suppliers. Two days earlier, Smithfield Foods Inc. of Virginia and its hog production subsidiary, Murphy-Brown, recommended all of their contract growers convert from gestation crates to group housing for pregnant sows. Opponents of gestation crates contend they are small, confined areas where mothering sows spend their entire life unable to turn around or stretch out.
In a letter to its pork suppliers, Tyson laid out its guidelines for improvement, which included increasing third-party farm audits, installing on-farm video monitoring, improving current housing space and using anesthesia with tail docking and castration of piglets, as well as new rules for euthanasia of injured or sick piglets.
It is common practice in the pork industry to dock the tails and castrate piglets while they are awake and without anesthesia. Another acceptable practice is blunt-force euthanasia, which essentially is slamming a piglet into the ground several times to kill it.
These practices were documented in a video that surfaced in November and also showed large hogs, purportedly being raised by a former hog producer in Oklahoma, being kicked, hit and poked in the eyes by workers. Tyson immediately terminated its contract with the hog producer and retrieved its hogs from the farm.
Gary Mickelson, director of public relations for Tyson, said the new guidelines are meant to highlight the company’s commitment to responsible animal treatment in alignment with FarmCheck, Tyson’s animal well-being program checked by third-party on-farm audits and an advisory panel of experts in the field.
“The timing is not [because of] any one letter or incidents,” Mickelson said. “It’s our continuing effort to reflect our desire to respond to the needs, desires and expectations of our consumers.”
Under Tyson’s guidelines, the company suggests using methods approved by the FDA-approved Animal Medicinal Drug Use Clarification Act of 1994 for tail docking and castration for all piglets, whether company-owned or independently contracted,.
Tyson also will require contract farmers who raise company-owned sows to stop using blunt-force euthanasia and use an alternate method consistent with the American Veterinary Medical Association’s Guidelines for Euthanasia of Animals by the end of the year.
By use of video monitoring, Tyson hopes to improve human behavior, improve animal handling procedures and reduce bio security risks. How the monitoring would help with bio security risks was not outlined.
“At this time, we’ve only requested the installation of video-monitoring equipment on farms where there are Tyson-owned sows,” Mickelson said. “Tyson may request to see video as part of an audit or in response to a report of abuse, but video monitoring is intended to primarily serve as an internal management tool for the farmer.”
The new guidelines do not mandate the way hogs are treated. Instead, Tyson said it “urges” its farmers to abide by them. Only a small percentage of pork comes from Tysonowned pigs, with majority of pork produced by roughly 3,000 contract farmers who sell market hogs.
The contract farmers who manage Tyson-owned hogs were asked to institute the new practices by the end of 2014,which includes a redesign of gestation barns to improve the quality and quantity of space.
“Tyson is not taking a position against any type of housing system, whether it be gestation crates, stalls, pens or other type of housing,” Mickelson said.
In contrast, Smithfield foods announced Tuesday that it recommends all of its contract sow growers convert from gestation crates to group housing to allow the mother pigs to move freely.
In 2007, after input from its customers, Smithfield began transitioning pregnant sows on company-owned farms to group housing. By the end of 2013, 54 percent of the U.S.-based sows had transitioned. The company plans to complete the conversion by 2017.
Dennis Treacy, executive vice president and chief sustainability officer of Smithfield Foods, said in a news release that the company is poised to begin the transition after 50 companies, many of them Smithfield customers, announced that they will begin purchasing pork from suppliers who employ group housing.
“In line with our animal care initiatives and sustainability goals, and in order to meet the needs of our customers, we believed that it is now time to encourage conversion of pregnant-sow housing systems at contract sow-grower facilities,” Treacy said in the release.
“In fact, several growers have already converted or have made plans for the change.”
As an incentive, contract farmers who convert their gestation crates to group housing over the next eight years will receive contract extensions upon completion of the conversion.
Tyson, however, did not offer any incentives to its suppliers to adopt any of the new practices that were suggested.
Dave Warner, director of communications with the National Pork Producers Council, said the organization does not advocate one housing system over another because there are advantages and disadvantages depending on a person’s perspective, but that the management and care of animals is what is most important.
“A disadvantage to gestation crates is that the sow can’t turn around, but in a group pen there is a disadvantage because the pregnant sows will fight,”Warner said. “If you have good animal husbandry, it doesn’t matter where you live.”
Josh Balk, food policy director for the Humane Society of the United States, disagreed.
“It’s cruel to confine pigs to crates where they can’t turn around for their entire life,” Balk said. “We have met with food companies and consumers and they don’t want to see animals immobilized for their entire life. All animals, including animals raised for food, deserve good treatment.”
Warner said his main concerns, other than animal management and care, are for the farmers who will be stuck footing the bill to convert their production systems, and for the consumers, who he said could see a rise in the price of pork.
“It will fall on the farmers to convert to a group pen - the packer will have to pay more for the hog and smaller businesses could go out of business because they cannot afford a new system,” he said. “If a business goes out, there won’t be as many sows, which can cut supply. The demand stays and the price goes up.”
Business, Pages 27 on 01/11/2014