Over the past 10 years, the quality assurance landscape of dairy welfare has evolved dramatically. This has led to the development of a wide variety of programs and policies aimed at assessing, improving, and assuring on-farm welfare standards are met. At their core, these systems set out to establish and enforce minimum standards (some with links to regulatory expectations), while promoting continuous improvement to ultimately improve welfare on dairy farms, assure supply chains that expectations and concerns are met, and in some cases, to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
The National Dairy Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) Program has emerged as a comprehensive industry-led quality assurance program across a variety of critical aspects of dairy production, from animal welfare to environmental stewardship. Animal care has been, and continues to be, one of the foundational elements of the Program.
In an effort to better understand the current quality assurance landscape in the dairy cattle sector, the FARM Program commissioned ACER to:
In order to thoroughly compare the FARM Program to various international quality assurance programs, an evaluation framework was developed to pinpoint the key aspects of each animal welfare program that should be compared and contrasted. This included information on (1) program ownership, structure, and goals; (2) key program design features, welfare standards, and evaluation structure; (3) program implementation and enforcement; and (4) compliance and corrective actions.
An online jurisdictional scan was then conducted to identify relevant dairy industry quality assurance programs to include in the comparison analysis. This included a search and review of scientific and gray literature. In an effort to scope the project, only programs and welfare schemes from North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand were sought out. The previously developed evaluation framework was populated for each program.
Ten of the programs were further investigated through in-depth interviews with program representatives. The programs selected were chosen with the intention of exploring programs that were perceived as being well developed, successful, unique, and/or most relevant and applicable to the U.S. dairy industry. Each interview also explored each program’s position on a series of key welfare standards, including facility management, animal management, pre-weaned calves, non-ambulatory animal management, euthanasia, fitness to transport, and program management.
In general, standards within the FARM Program are fairly consistent with what is seen for dairy cattle quality assurance across the globe. This includes expectations around non-ambulatory cattle, euthanasia, animal transport and fitness prior to transport, pain mitigation for disbudding, and training and continuing education.
There are also opportunities for improvement that the FARM Program could seek to explore based on areas where global programs are more advanced. These include: specificity regarding acceptable types of pain mitigation for disbudding, strengthening expectations around calf feeding, and consideration of establishing positions on identified priority areas acknowledged by other global programs, such as group/pair housing of calves, tethering, and outdoor access.
FARM has consistently shown alignment with global expectations for dairy cattle welfare and exceeds many other programs in areas of their content, structure, transparency, revision process, evaluation process, and stakeholder engagement. Based on this evaluation, the FARM Program can be considered one of the more comprehensive and robust dairy cattle quality assurance programs in the world today.
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