By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Deborah Van Fleet for Nebraska News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

If you consider yourself a conscious consumer, grocery shopping can get very complicated very quickly, with countless different labels implying that the food inside was produced humanely. It's important to know what these labels mean, and that can be difficult with a term like "organic," which is often used loosely in casual conversation. But what does meat or dairy being organic really mean for animals, farmers and consumers? We break the latest rules down in this explainer.

To start, the answer is more complicated than you might think. Just six percent of all food sold in the U.S. is organic, but any meat or produce that's marketed as such has to be approved by the United States Department of Agriculture. Although the Trump administration had suspended any updates to the organic standards, the Biden Administration reversed that decision, and earlier this year, the USDA announced its updated rules for organically-produced livestock.

The change was the culmination of a years-long push by some organic farmers to improve how animals are treated on organic farms, and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack celebrated the changes as a win for animals, producers and consumers.

"This organic poultry and livestock standard establishes clear and strong standards that will increase the consistency of animal welfare practices in organic production and in how these practices are enforced," Vilsack said in a statement. "Competitive markets help deliver greater value to all producers, regardless of size."

Before looking at what "organic" means under these changes, however, it's important to know what it doesn't mean.

Does 'Organic' Mean Pesticide-Free?

No. Organic doesn't mean pesticide-free, and this is a common misconception. Although the standards for organically-produced livestock do place some limits on the use of medications, antibiotics, parasiticides, herbicides and other synthetic chemicals in livestock farming, they don't prohibit the use of all pesticides - just most of the synthetic ones, though even then, there are exceptions.

What Do the Current Organic Rules for Livestock Require?

The purpose of the USDA's new Organic Livestock and Poultry Standards is to ensure "clear, consistent and enforceable" animal welfare standards, according to the Organic Trade Association. The rules cover all types of livestock: non-aviary species like lamb and cattle have one set of requirements, while birds of all kinds have another. There are also some additional rules that apply to specific species, such as pigs.

It's long - over 100 pages in total. Some of the rules are fairly simple, like the bans on certain practices, including gestation crates for pregnant pigs; others, like those addressing how much space livestock must have in their living quarters, are much more lengthy and complex.

One thing to keep in mind is that these rules only apply to farms and companies that want their products to be certified organic. It's perfectly legal for producers to ignore all of these requirements, so long as they don't market or refer to their products as "organic." They might instead opt for one of the food labels with less or no regulation at all, like "natural."

Lastly, although these rules take effect in 2025, there's one big exception: Any farm that's certified as organic before 2025 will have until 2029 to abide by the new standards. This provision effectively gives existing producers, including the largest ones, more time to adapt to the new rules than any new farms.

With that said, let's take a look at what these standards are.

New Organic Rules for Livestock's Outdoor Access

The new rules require organically-produced livestock to have access to outdoor space, a privilege many livestock are not afforded. Under the new rules, non-avian livestock like cows and lamb must have year-round access to "the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, clean water for drinking, and direct sunlight." If that outdoor area has soil, it must be maintained "as appropriate for the season, climate, geography, species of livestock." The previous rule required outdoor access, but didn't specify any maintenance requirements for outdoor areas.

Birds, meanwhile, need to have "year-round access to the outdoors, soil, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, direct sunlight, clean water for drinking, materials for dust bathing, and adequate space to escape aggressive behaviors."

The shelters must be constructed such that birds have "ready access" to the outdoors throughout the day. For every 360 birds, there must be "one (1) linear foot of exit area space;" this, according to the USDA's calculations, would ensure that no bird has to wait more than an hour to come inside or go outside.

Egg-laying chickens are required to have access to at least one square foot of outdoor space for every 2.25 pounds of bird at the facility; this requirement is calculated per pound, rather than per bird, to account for variations in size between different birds of the same species. Broiler chickens, on the other hand, are to be given a "flat rate" of at least two square feet per bird.

New Organic Requirements for Livestock's Indoor Space & Housing

The new organic standards also require farmers to give animals enough space to stretch their bodies, move around, and engage in their natural behaviors.

The indoor shelters for non-avian livestock state that the animals have to be given enough space "to lie down, stand up, and fully stretch their limbs and allow livestock to express their normal patterns of behavior over a 24-hour period." This is much more specific than the previous version, which only required enough space for "natural maintenance, comfort behaviors and exercise," and made no reference to how often the animals must have access to this space.

The new rules say that animals may be temporarily confined to spaces that don't meet these requirements - for instance, during milking - but only if they also have "complete freedom of movement during significant parts of the day for grazing, loafing, and exhibiting natural social behavior."

For birds, the indoor shelters must be "sufficiently spacious to allow all birds to move freely, stretch both wings simultaneously, stand normally, and engage in natural behaviors," including "dust bathing, scratching, and perching." In addition, although artificial lighting is allowed, birds must be given at least eight hours of continuous darkness every day.

The rules require that egg-laying chickens be given at least six inches of perch space per bird; chickens who are raised for meat, and non-chicken birds that also lay eggs, are exempt from this requirement.

Organic Rules for Livestock's Health Care

Under the new rules, all surgeries to treat disease in livestock must be carried out "in a manner that employs best management practices in order to minimize pain, stress, and suffering" of the animal. This is a significant addition, as the previous rules did not require farmers to do anything to minimize the pain of animals during surgery.

The USDA has a list of approved anesthetics that may be used on animals during surgery; however, if none of those anesthetics are available, producers are required to take alternative steps to ease the animal's pain - even if doing so results in the animals losing their "organic" status.

Banned Practices for Organic Livestock

The following procedures and devices are completely banned under the new rules for organic products:

• Tail docking (cows). This refers to the removal of most or all of a cow's tail.


• Gestation crates and farrowing cages (pigs). These are harshly-confining cages that mother pigs are kept in during pregnancy and after giving birth.


• Induced molting (chickens). Also known as forced molting, this is the practice of depriving chickens of food and/or daylight for up to two weeks in order to temporarily increase their egg output.


• Wattling (cows). This painful procedure involves slicing off chunks of the skin under a cow's neck for identification purposes.


• Toe clipping (chickens). This refers to cutting off a chicken's toes to prevent them from scratching themselves.


• Mulesing (sheep). Another painful procedure, this is when portions of a sheep's hindquarters are cut off in order to reduce the risk of infection.

The new regulations also contain partial bans on other common factory farm practices. They are:

• Debeaking (chickens). This is the practice of cutting off chickens' beaks to prevent them from pecking one another. The new regulations prohibit debeaking in many contexts, but still permit it so long as a) it takes place within the first 10 days of a chick's life, and b) it doesn't involve removing more than one-third of chick's upper beak.


• Tail docking (sheep). While tail docking of cattle is flatly prohibited, sheep's tails may still be docked under the new regulations, but only up to the distal end of the caudal fold.


• Teeth clipping (pigs). This refers to removing the top-third of a pig's needle teeth to prevent them from injuring each other. The new rules state that teeth clipping may not be performed on a routine basis, but is permitted when alternative attempts to reduce infighting have failed.

Do Organizations Other Than the USDA Offer Certification for Animal Products?


Yes. In addition to the USDA, several nonprofit organizations offer their own certifications for ostensibly "humane" food products. Here are a few of them; for a more thorough comparison of how their welfare standards compare to each other, the Animal Welfare Institute has you covered.


Animal Welfare Approved


Animal Welfare Approved (AWA) is a certification granted by the nonprofit A Greener World. Its standards are quite rigorous: all animals must have continuous outdoor pasture access, tail-docking and beak-trimming are prohibited, no animals may be kept in cages and calves must be raised by their mothers, among other requirements.


Over the last century, the chicken industry has selectively bred chickens to grow so abnormally large that many of them can't support their own weight. In an attempt to combat this, AWA standards place a limit on how quickly chickens can grow (no more than 40 grams a day, on average).


Certified Humane


The Certified Humane label is granted by the nonprofit organization Humane Farm Animal Care, which has developed its own specific welfare standards for each of the most commonly farmed animals. Certified Humane standards require that cows have access to the outdoors (but not necessarily pasture), pigs have adequate bedding and access to rooting materials, egg-laying hens have at least one square foot of space per bird, and perhaps most significantly, no animals of any kind are kept in cages.


Note that Certified Humane is not the same as American Humane Certified, a different program that many animal rights activists believe is insufficiently committed to animal welfare at best - and actively deceptive at worst.


GAP-Certified


The Global Animal Partnership, another nonprofit, differs from the other organizations on this list in that it offers a ranked certification program, with products receiving different "grades" depending on which level of standards they adhere to.


Most of GAP's standards focus on what sort of access animals have to pastures, and the organization has many different metrics for assessing this. It also addresses other areas of animal welfare; under GAP standards, cages are prohibited for both pigs and chickens, and beef cows may not be fed any growth hormones of any kind.


How Does 'Organic' Compare With Other Labels?


Animal products are often marketed as being "cage-free," "free-range" or "pasture-raised." All of these terms have different meanings, and some can have multiple meanings depending on the context.


Cage-Free


At least three different organizations offer "cage-free" certification: The USDA, Certified Humane and United Egg Producers (UEP), a trade group. Naturally, all three of them define the term differently; in general, all three prohibit cages, but some are more stringent than others. For instance, the USDA has no minimum space requirements for cage-free chickens, while Certified Humane does.


Additionally, all eggs produced in California are cage-free, thanks to the passage of Proposition 12.


In any event, a lack of cages doesn't necessarily mean these chickens are living happy, healthy lives. There's no requirement that cage-free chickens be given access to the outdoors, for instance, and although the UEP discourages beak-trimming on cage-free farms, it doesn't prohibit it.

Despite these shortcomings, studies have shown that cage-free systems significantly reduce the amount of pain that chickens experience on factory farms.


Free-Range


Under current USDA rules, poultry products can use the label "free-range" if the flock in question was "provided shelter in a building, room, or area with unlimited access to food, fresh water, and continuous access to the outdoors during their production cycle," with the stipulation that outdoor areas can't be fenced in or covered with netting.


Certified Humane's Free-Range standards are more specific, with a requirement that the chickens get at least six hours outdoor access a day and two square feet of outdoor space per bird.


Pasture-Raised


Unlike "cage-free" and "free-range," "pasture-raised" labeling is not regulated by the government at all. If you see a product that's labeled "pasture-raised" without the mention of any third-party certification, it's essentially meaningless.


If a product is Certified Humane Pasture-Raised, however, it means quite a lot - specifically, that every chicken had at least 108 square feet of outdoor space for at least six hours a day.

Meanwhile, all AWA-certified products are pasture-raised, regardless of whether those words appear on the label, as this is a core requirement of their certification.


The Bottom Line


The new USDA Organic regulations do hold organic meat companies to a higher level of animal welfare than non-organic products, and that includes large players like Tyson Foods and Perdue with organic product lines. The new standards aren't quite as high as those of some third-party certifiers, like AWA, and even for the best certifications, how animals are raised in reality depends on the quality of oversight and independent inspectors. Ultimately, "humanewashing" has become a common enough marketing practice that it's easy for even the savviest shoppers to be fooled by unverified or deceptive labeling. The fact that a product is marketed as "humane" doesn't necessarily make it so, and likewise, the fact that a product is marketed as organic also doesn't necessarily mean it's humane.




Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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Animal rights organizers are regrouping after mixed results at the ballot box in November.

A measure targeting factory farms passed in Berkeley but failed in Sonoma County. Measure J, to ban concentrated animal-feeding operations, only got 15% of the vote and Ordinance 309 to ban slaughterhouses failed in Denver.

Cassie King, an organizer with the Coalition to End Factory Farming, helped raise $280,000 to promote the ban in Sonoma County, even as opponents raised $2.2 million.

"We learned that money and the ability to lie during political campaigns is a very powerful combination of factors to be up against," King asserted. "I was shocked by the amount of misinformation that came out from the No on J campaign, just statistics that had no basis in reality."

Measure DD in Berkeley passed but is mostly symbolic since the only existing concentrated animal feeding operation, a horse racing operation called Golden Gate Fields, closed last June.

King stressed win or lose, the measures went a long way toward raising public awareness of the pollution and animal welfare issues at large factory farms.

"It's a test case, and whether it wins or loses, it's generating tens of thousands of conversations in the county and many more beyond," King contended. "And making the end of factory farming visible for a lot of people who haven't realized that it's something we can achieve in our lifetimes."

The "No on J" campaign and opponents of the Denver slaughterhouse ordinance argued the bans would have hurt jobs and tax revenue.

This story is based on original reporting by Seth Millstein for Sentient.


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Advocates said a lack of animal welfare laws is leading to pain and suffering on American factory farms.

Close to 99% of livestock is now raised in industrial-type facilities, where animal welfare groups said efficiency and profitability take precedence over animals' well-being.

Delcianna Winders, associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said while more than a dozen states have banned what are deemed torture-like confinement for animals, there is no federal law protecting them from abuse.

"If most people were aware that the animal they're sitting down to eat couldn't move throughout their entire life, just to give one example, I don't think they would want to support that," Winders contended.

Winders pointed out the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires animals be knocked unconscious before they are killed but corporations running factory farms are lobbying for the law to be weakened in order to speed up meat production.

So-called "ag-gag" laws in several states criminally penalize those who seek to expose animal suffering on farms, in slaughterhouses and at animal auctions. Winders added she is concerned a second Trump Administration could allow factory farm owners to further erode any remaining health and safety standards.

"They've been able to carve themselves out from complying with the laws that everybody else has to comply with," Winders asserted. "That certainly includes cruelty-to-animals laws. It also includes pollution laws, worker-safety laws, the whole gamut."

Winders advised people concerned with animal welfare to try more plant-based alternatives to meat and learn more about how their food is raised. She stressed as consumers increasingly turn to "organic" and "free-range" meat options, corporations are working to lower the standards for what those labels mean and the conditions under which those animals can be raised.

This story is based on original reporting by Seth Millstein for Sentient.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for West Virginia News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Every year, humans around the world eat 360 million metric tons of meat. That’s a lot of animals — or more precisely, a lot of dead animals. At any given point, there are 23 billion animals in factory farms, and countless more being farmed or caught in the sea. As a result, the number of animals killed for food every day is almost too large of a number to comprehend.

Animal Agriculture, by the Numbers

Before getting into the death toll, it’s worth remembering that animals suffer immensely in factory farms, and on the way to slaughterhouses, and in slaughterhouses. Around 99 percent of livestock are raised in factory farms, and factory farms prioritize efficiency and profitability over animal welfare. There are few laws protecting livestock from abuse and mistreatment on farms, and violators of those laws are rarely prosecuted.

The result is a significant amount of pain and misery for farmed animals, and that suffering is an important thing to keep in mind as we dive into the numbers behind these animals’ deaths.

How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?

Quantifying animal slaughter is relatively straightforward — except when it comes to fish and other aquatic life. There are two reasons for this.

First, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which tracks global livestock statistics, measures fish production in weight, not number of animals. Second, the FAO’s numbers only include farmed fish, not those caught in the wild.

To overcome the first challenge, researchers attempt to convert the total pounds of fish caught into the total number of fish themselves. Obviously, this is an inexact science that requires quite a bit of guesswork, and as such, estimates of fish slaughter tend to vary significantly, and are generally expressed in relatively wide ranges.

As for the second challenge, researchers Alison Mood and Phil Brooke have attempted to quantify the number of wild fish caught every year, first by pulling data from multiple sources and then by converting the total weight of wild fish to an estimated number of animals.

The following numbers are based on 2022 data from the FAO, except for the fish tallies: for farmed fish, the low end of the range draws on research by the Sentience Institute, while the high end is based on an analysis by Mood and Brooke. For wild-caught fish, the low end and high ends of the estimate are both based on a range provided by Mood and Brooke.

With that being said, here are the best estimates of how many animals are killed every day on a per-species basis.

• Chickens: 206 million/day


• Farmed Fish: Between 211 million and 339 million


• Wild Fish: Between 3 billion and 6 billion


• Ducks: 9 million


• Pigs: 4 million


• Geese: 2 million


• Sheep: 1.7 million


• Rabbits: 1.5 million


• Turkeys: 1.4 million


• Goats: 1.4 million


• Cows: 846,000


• Pigeons & other birds: 134,000


• Buffalo: 77,000


• Horses: 13,000


• Other animals: 13,000

In total, this means that every 24 hours, between 3.4 and 6.5 billion animals are killed for food. That comes to a lower-end estimate of 1.2 trillion animals killed every year. That’s a positively staggering number. For contrast, anthropologists estimate that the total number of human beings who’ve ever existed is just 117 billion.


A couple of things stand out about this data.


For one, if we exclude fish, the overwhelming majority of animals slaughtered for food are chickens. This isn’t a surprise, given that poultry consumption has skyrocketed over the last 60 years: between 1961 and 2022, the average person went from eating 2.86 kg of chicken every year to 16.96 kg — an increase of almost 600 percent.


The consumption of other meats didn’t rise nearly as much over that period. There was a modest increase in per-capita pork consumption, from 7.97 kg to 13.89 kg; for every other meat, consumption has remained relatively stagnant over the last 60 years.


Also notable is the relatively high death tolls of animals that many Americans might not think of as meat sources for humans. Slaughtering horses for meat is illegal in the U.S., but that doesn’t stop people around the world from killing 13,000 of them every day. Rabbit meat isn’t a common dish in America, but it’s wildly popular in China and the European Union.


Animals Slaughtered Who Are Never Eaten


One thing that’s particularly frustrating about all of this, from both an efficiency standpoint and an animal welfare standpoint, is that a sizable share of the animals killed for food are never even eaten.


A 2023 study published in Sustainable Production and Consumption found that 24 percent of livestock animals die prematurely at some point in the supply chain: they either die on the farm before they’re slaughtered, die in transit on their way to the slaughterhouse, die at a slaughterhouse but aren’t processed for food, or are thrown away by grocers, restaurants and consumers.


This wasted food adds up to about 18 billion animals a year. The meat from these animals never reaches the lips of any human, making their deaths — which, it should be stressed, are often excruciatingly painful and bloody — essentially pointless. What’s more, this tally doesn’t even include seafood; if it did, the amount of wasted meat would be many orders of magnitude higher.


In the U.S., around a quarter of animals in this category die on the farm from disease, injury or other causes. Another seven percent die in transit, and 13 percent are thrown away by grocers after being processed into meat.


Some of these “wasted deaths” are part and parcel of factory farm operations. Every year, around six billion male chicks are intentionally killed, or “culled,” on factory farms due to the fact that they can’t lay eggs. In the seafood industry, billions of aquatic animals are caught by accident every year — a phenomenon called bycatch — and are either killed or injured as a result.


It’s worth noting that these numbers vary significantly from country to country. The global average for wasted meat is around 2.4 animals per person per year, but in the U.S., it’s 7.1 animals per person — almost three times higher. On the other end of the spectrum is India, where only 0.4 animals per person are wasted every year.


The Hidden Death Tolls of the Environmental Destruction of the Meat Industry


The above death tolls only count animals who are farmed or caught with the goal of being eaten by humans. But the meat industry claims many other animal lives in more indirect ways.


For instance, cattle farming is the number one driver of deforestation around the world, and deforestation inadvertently kills a whole lot of animals that were never intended to be food in the first place. In the Amazon alone, 2,300 animals are at risk of extinction due to deforestation, as the clearing of trees wipes out their natural habitats and deprives them of the resources they need to survive. 


Another example is water pollution. The manure from livestock farms often leaks into nearby waterways, and this can have a ripple effect that results in many more animal deaths: Manure contains phosphorus and nitrogen, both of which promote the growth of algae; this eventually leads to harmful algal blooms, which deplete the oxygen in the water and clog the gills of fish, killing them.


All of this is a long way of saying that killing one animal for food often results in many other animals dying.


The Bottom Line


The astonishing number of animals killed for food every day, both directly and indirectly, is a sobering reminder of the impact our appetite for meat has on the world around us. From the animals slaughtered on farms to the creatures killed by agriculture-driven deforestation and farm pollution, the death toll that a meat-based diet demands is much higher and more far-reaching than many people realize.




Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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