The fraud, corruption, and systemic animal abuses of Alexandre Family Farm revealed by Farm Forward have resulted in the filing of a consumer class action lawsuit against the mega-dairy. Humane Farm Animal Care, the group behind the “Certified Humane” label, has also been sued as part of the action. This civil case follows a separate case enforcing California criminal statutes that prohibit animal cruelty, filed against Alexandre in late 2024, which indicts the dairy for serious and pervasive animal abuse.

The new civil case alleges that Alexandre and Certified Humane falsely represented Alexandre products as “humane” while Alexandre engaged in shocking and widespread acts of animal cruelty. For example, Farm Forward’s investigation found that Alexandre staff poured salt into the eyes of hundreds of cows, sawed off the horns of more than 800 cows through tissue laced with nerves without any pain management, cut off a cow’s teat with an unsanitized pocketknife, dragged a cow who was unable to walk across concrete, for years provided no routine veterinary or hoof care management, and transported sick, injured, and lame cows to auction rather than treating or euthanizing them.

If the court finds that Alexandre and/or Certified Humane engaged in false, fraudulent, misleading, unfair, deceptive, and/or unlawful conduct in their representations about the humane status of Alexandre products, the suit could result in Alexandre having to pay affected consumers more than $5,000,000. This lawsuit puts producers everywhere on notice that today’s consumers will hold them accountable for humanewashing—false promises of animal welfare. 

In addition to holding Alexandre accountable, the lawsuit builds on questions our investigative report raised “about whether the Certified Humane program adequately or effectively audits businesses approved to use their label” (“Dairy Deception” page 31). The suit alleges that, based on Certified Humane’s own representations, Certified Humane was aware of the conditions at Alexandre in the years leading up to our report, yet took no action to remove Alexandre from its certification program or prevent Alexandre from using the Certified Humane logo on Alexandre’s products or website.

Consumers in the class action suit will be represented by Richman Law & Policy (RLP), an experienced litigation firm that focuses on consumer protection and the domestic food supply. RLP has represented and/or co-counseled with groups including Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Global Witness, GC Resolve, and Food and Water Watch. RLP served as lead counsel in Jones v. Monsanto (W.D. Mo.), which resulted in a $39.55 million fund for consumers, along with agreed-upon changes to Roundup weedkiller products labels. RLP was co-lead counsel in Goldemberg v. Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies, Inc. (S.D.N.Y.), which resulted in a $7 million fund for consumers and agreed-upon changes to the marketing of Aveeno personal care products.

Lawsuit includes new findings of Alexandre’s animal abuses and Certified Humane’s complicity

While primarily relying on the evidence uncovered by Farm Forward, the lawsuit also reveals new findings of an independent investigator, previously unknown to Farm Forward, who visited Alexandre during the period covered by our investigation. 

The investigator found calves in barred hutches who were covered in feces, urine, and mud, many of them standing in pools of waste rising above the calves’ hooves, the slurry completely covering the only area where the calves could lie down. 

In clear violation of Certified Humane standards, calves in these hutches could not set one foot outside, had no access to an exercise area, and were left in hutches for a full month longer than the eight week maximum allowed by Certified Humane standards. One calf had an ear tag that appeared to show a birth date four months prior to the investigator’s visit, suggesting that the calf had been hutched for two months beyond Certified Humane’s eight week age limit. 

The investigator, who has observed many calf hutches on many farms, describes the hutches as the least sanitary the investigator had ever seen.

Certified Humane is incriminated by these conditions as much as Alexandre. Certified Humane assures customers that animal products bearing the Certified Humane Raised & Handled logo “come from operations that meet precise, objective standards for farm animal treatment.” Yet Certified Humane took no action to prevent Alexandre from using the Certified Humane logo on Alexandre’s products or website, despite Certified Humane’s standards requiring that the calves must be:

• kept clean
• isolated in individual hutches no later than eight weeks of age
• provided access “at all times” to an area for laying down that is bedded, comfortable, dry, and sloped to provide drainage 
• provided an outdoor exercise area when weather conditions permit 
• able to lie down and rest “without hindrance” 

A turning point for humanewashing

Together, the Farm Forward investigation, the Atlantic article, and now this class action lawsuit are a turning point in holding producers accountable for humanewashing—the common practice of marketing animal products with deceptive packaging, labels, and certifications to promote the illusion of animal well-being, while concealing the extent of animals’ abuse, neglect, illness, and suffering.

Animal agriculture’s worst animal abuses cannot be prevented by simply buying the animal products that farms and certifications themselves dishonestly claim are better. Ultimately, we need federal consumer protection laws that meaningfully define and enforce terms like “humane” and “sustainable” on products. Until we can secure those common sense regulations, we must use the legal system to hold companies and certifications accountable for humanewashing.  Since this case could begin a new chapter for both consumer protection and animal welfare, consumers, law firms, and meat, dairy, and egg companies across the country will watch closely how it unfolds.

American consumers have seen unprecedented increases in the cost of animal products over the past few years, with egg prices having more than doubled in the past eighteen months and combined meat, poultry, fish, and egg prices reaching a historic high. While inflation has impacted all food categories, two significant factors have disproportionately driven up animal product prices: the devastating impact of avian influenza, and systematic price manipulation by major meat producers. These price increases reveal deeper issues within our industrial food system and its vulnerability to both natural and human-caused disruptions.

The Impact of Avian Influenza

Egg Prices Hitting Record Highs

The ongoing avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak has become the deadliest bird flu in U.S. history, leading to the culling of 150 million poultry in the U.S. since early 2022—an average of 138,000 domestic birds slaughtered and discarded every day.

This strain of bird flu, designated a “highly pathogenic avian influenza” or HPAI, spreads rapidly through industrial farming operations where tens of thousands of birds are crowded together in close quarters, providing a perfect petri dish for multiplying the infection. The genetic similarity of commercial broiler chickens amplifies their vulnerability to the illness. Thanks to the global monopoly that just two companies—Aviagen and Cobb-Vantress—hold over broiler chicken breeds, and generations of selective breeding to increase productivity, the chickens on farms largely lack genetic diversity, and their immune systems are often weaker than those of heritage breeds. So when even one bird tests positive, the entire flock of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands must be destroyed to prevent further spread.

Every state in the union has now been affected by outbreaks of the latest highly infectious bird flu in commercial flocks. The mass culling of laying hens has severely disrupted egg production, causing prices to spike dramatically. Grocery stores and restaurants have seen their egg costs rise from $2.25 per dozen last fall to a record $6 or $7 today, with organic and specialty eggs reaching even higher prices.

Grocery stores use eggs as “loss leaders,” discounting egg prices in order to attract customers who then spend more on other products with higher profit margins. So rising egg costs have hit consumers less hard than grocers. But consumers have definitely noticed the price hike; according to the Consumer Price Index, between December 2023 and December 2024 retail egg prices rose a whopping 65 percent.

Some grocery stores have limited the number of cartons of eggs that their customers can purchase on a given day due to egg shortages. At the same time, the loss of broiler chickens as a result of avian influenza has increased chicken meat prices, while the culling of turkeys has led to both shortages and price increases during winter holiday seasons.

The implications go beyond higher prices for retail eggs and poultry. Restaurants, manufacturers, and ingredient producers that have to pay higher egg prices pass their increased costs onto consumers. And it’s not just economics at stake. Public health experts have been ringing alarm bells about the potential for this deadly avian influenza strain, which has already jumped from animals to people, to begin to spread person-to-person, leading to the next global pandemic.

How does bird flu spread?

Poultry who have been infected with avian flu shed the virus in their feces, nasal secretions, and saliva. Healthy birds pick up the virus when they come into contact with these substances. The virus can also be spread via surfaces that an infected animal has come into contact with.

Unfortunately, birds are not the only species at risk of contracting avian influenza. In just the United States, there have been 490 confirmed cases of the disease in nonhuman mammals, including 80 domestic cats, in 35+ U.S. states. Among the wildlife victims are mountain lions in California, red foxes in Colorado, and harbor seals in Maine.

The disease can also infect people. While in 2022, there was just one human case in this country, there have been a confirmed 67 human cases of bird flu in the U.S. since 2024, leading to the first human death from bird flu in the U.S., in 2025. This is a rapid increase in human cases, given that only about 954 cases have been reported to the World Health Organization worldwide since 2003. In that time period, half (49 percent) of avian influenza infections in humans proved fatal.

The risk of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI)  leading to the next human pandemic is so significant that in early 2025, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced awarding $590 million to Moderna to develop vaccines against H5N1, H7N9, and up to four other subtypes of HPAI. Unfortunately, even vaccines that are well matched to strains of HPAI currently circulating in poultry may become far less effective as soon as these influenza viruses mutate—and influenza viruses are notorious for mutating rapidly.

How can the further spread of bird flu be prevented?

While some of the 145 million poultry who have died in the U.S. due to bird flu died of the H5N1 virus itself, most were apparently healthy birds who were culled due to a concern that they may have been exposed to the virus and could pass it on to people, poultry, or other animals.

The industry kills birds who may have been exposed whether they’re showing signs of disease or not, as a means of preventing the spread of this deadly disease. Some in the industry have also claimed that killing the birds swiftly, usually within 24 hours, helps to prevent the animal suffering that the illness would likely cause.

However, the ways in which thousands of birds are killed at once have drawn widespread criticism for being cruel. One of the prevalent methods is to cover chickens in a water-based foam. The birds are rendered unable to breathe and die of asphyxiation. An alternative but equally cruel method of killing the birds, and one recommended by the USDA, is to seal off the sheds they live in and pump in carbon dioxide, leading to asphyxiation. If for some reason these two methods don’t work, farmers are advised by the department to use “ventilation shutdown.” The airflow into the barns is shut off, and this causes the temperature inside to rise to fatal levels. Producers kill their birds en masse using one of these three methods because it is more cost effective than slaughtering the birds individually.

While economically advantageous for corporations, slaughtering poultry in these high numbers puts workers at particularly high risk for contracting the virus themselves. For example, the Center for Disease Control reported that working in extreme heat under large fans during a “mass depopulation” event on a Colorado egg farm, in which an entire flock of chickens was asphyxiated by carbon dioxide, made it difficult for workers to keep on their protective equipment, likely contributing to the workers contracting five bird flu infections. This mass slaughter strategy also comes at great cost to taxpayers, since the government provides subsidies to poultry producers after a “depopulation” event.

Farm Forward recommends a far more effective means to prevent the spread of bird flu in the U.S., consisting of three steps taken that can be taken simultaneously. First, we recommend that with public health in mind, consumers eat conscientiously, as few poultry products as possible, ideally none. Actively and seriously reducing demand for poultry products will lead to decreased poultry production. Second, poultry producers must take their own role in public health seriously, and shift away from overcrowded, unsanitary barns of genetically modified birds in favor of pasture-raised heritage poultry. Third, poultry should be vaccinated against bird flu to stop the spread. (The USDA recognizes several licensed vaccines for H5N1 in poultry, but the use of these vaccines has not been authorized for this outbreak.)

The EU, China, Ecuador, and Mexico have embraced poultry vaccination against bird flu, with excellent results. For example, from Autumn 2022 and April 2023 France had reported 315 outbreaks, but from Autumn 2023 to April 2024, it reported just 10 outbreaks. Thanks to systemic vaccination of poultry, some countries have temporarily achieved infection-free conditions before isolated flare-ups have recurred.

However, the U.S. industrial producers of chicken meat appear to be uninterested in vaccinating poultry against bird flu. In 2023, The National Chicken Council told CNN that it opposes vaccination largely because vaccination would reduce profits from the export market. The public needs to pressure the government and industrial producers to take the pandemic risk of H5N1 seriously enough to institute systematic vaccination of chickens raised for meat, chickens raised for eggs, and all other poultry.

There is one sure way to address the virus’s spread through poultry: eliminate industrial poultry farming. While completely doing away with mass-confined poultry farms is the most effective way of stopping bird flu, and much progress could be made toward that goal, a complete, country-wide transition away from industrial poultry farming is unlikely in the near future. Therefore, the industry that persists must reinvent itself by providing far more space for the birds, shifting toward hardier breeds, and vaccinating all poultry. 

The Impact of Bird Flu on Dairy Prices

Partly due to ripple effects from avian influenza, cow dairy prices have also risen significantly. When egg prices spike, some consumers switch to cow dairy products as protein alternatives, increasing demand. Additionally, the cost of feeding dairy cattle has risen due to supply chain disruptions and increased grain prices, further driving up the cost of cows’ milk and dairy products.

Notably, cows are susceptible to the current strain of avian influenza, and in just the 10 months following the first detection in U.S. dairy cows in March 2024, 950 dairy herds in 16 states have been infected. Infected cows often produce significantly less milk.

Although fragments of the virus have been found in pasteurized milk, the pasteurization process neutralizes the virus’s ability to infect humans. However, raw cows’ milk can transmit the virus to people. When the FDA tested 275 raw milk samples from four affected states, it found that 14 percent of the milk samples contained actively infectious virus.

Price Manipulation in the Meat Industry

While bird flu has created genuine supply challenges for eggs, other poultry products, and cows’ milk and dairy products, investigations have revealed that major meat producers have also exploited economic circumstances to inflate prices artificially. Several recent developments highlight this issue:

1. JBS Settlement: In 2022, JBS agreed to pay $52.5 million to settle a price-fixing lawsuit that accused the company of conspiring with other major meat processors to reduce supply and drive up prices. In 2023, JBS agreed to pay an additional $25 million to settle similar price-fixing charges.
2. Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Mountaire Settlement: These companies, along with ten others, faced multiple lawsuits and investigations for allegedly manipulating chicken prices through coordinated production cuts and information sharing with competitors. In 2023, they agreed to pay over $284 million to settle the lawsuits.
3. A Pattern of Behavior: Several major meat processors had previously faced scrutiny from White House economics advisors for price gouging consumers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, while increasing their net profit margins by 300 percent.

Why aren’t prices coming down?

Despite the resolution of several price-fixing cases, consumers continue to face high prices for several reasons:

1. Industry Concentration: Just a handful of companies control the majority of meat processing in the United States, limiting competition and maintaining artificially high prices.
2. Ongoing Vulnerability: Due to their overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions, and genetically uniform animals, industrial farming operations remain particularly susceptible to avian influenza and other disease outbreaks, creating persistent supply chain risks.
3. Corporate Profit Margins: Many major meat producers have maintained higher prices even as their costs have decreased, prioritizing profits over consumer affordability.

The Role of Industry Consolidation

In the United States, four companies (Cargill, Tyson, JBS, and National Beef Packing) control approximately 85% of beef processing, 70% of pork processing, and 54% of chicken processing. This concentration of power allows these companies to:

• Control supply chains
• Influence market prices
• Resist regulatory oversight
• Maintain higher consumer prices even when production costs decrease

Looking Forward: What Can Consumers Expect?

While some relief could come from

• New antitrust enforcement efforts,
• Improved disease prevention measures, and
• Emerging competition from smaller producers,

experts suggest that meaningful price reductions would require

• Stronger antitrust enforcement,
• Greater industry competition, and
• More resilient and distributed food production systems.

The U.S. government’s response to avian influenza has been anaemic, and egg supply issues are likely to be ongoing. Already at a near-record high price as 2025 began, the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that egg prices will increase by 20.3 percent by end of 2025.

Conclusion

The current high prices for meat, eggs, and dairy reflect natural challenges, inadequate government responses to bird flu outbreaks, and corporate behavior within our food system. While avian influenza has created genuine supply disruptions, evidence suggests that major meat producers have exploited these circumstances to maintain artificially high prices. These rising costs, combined with concerns about industry consolidation and vulnerability to disease outbreaks, present an opportunity for consumers to reevaluate their food choices.

Many consumers are finding that reducing their consumption of animal products not only helps manage grocery bills but also decreases their exposure to price volatility in the meat and dairy markets. Unsurprisingly, mainstream media is increasingly running stories on alternatives to animal products, such as CNET’s 2025 article “Egg Prices Are Ridiculously High. Try These Alternatives.” For consumers who care about their pocketbooks, it’s significant that plant-based proteins like legumes (beans, lentils, peanuts, etc.), grains, and tofu often cost significantly less per serving than their animal-based counterparts, while providing nutritional advantages. Additionally, these plant-based alternatives aren’t subject to the same supply chain disruptions caused by animal disease outbreaks.

Incorporating more plant-based meals can be both budget-friendly and environmentally conscious. Whether motivated by rising prices, the climate and environment, animal welfare, pandemics prevention, or health considerations, consumers have more ways than ever to reduce their dependence on increasingly expensive animal products while maintaining a nutritious diet.

Farm Forward is proud to announce the launch of a new nonprofit, the Center for Jewish Food Ethics (CJFE)—the culmination of our eight years of incubation and support for farmed animal advocacy in the Jewish community.

In 2016, Farm Forward launched our in-house program, the Jewish Initiative for Animals (JIFA) as the centerpiece of our religious outreach. Every day since, JIFA has advanced its first-of-its-kind mission to help Jewish communities align their food choices with their Jewish values. 

JIFA supported Jewish communities connecting animal welfare, food, farming, and advocacy with Jewish identity, values, and rituals. It started off with a bang in 2016, by training educators, reviving non-factory-farmed kosher heritage chicken for the first time in decades, and designing the animal welfare audit of the Hazon Seal of Sustainability, a LEED-style certification with animal welfare provisions that were adopted by institutions serving 17,000 individuals and an additional 2,000 families.

With Farm Forward’s help, JIFA continued to accomplish great things over the next eight years, including:

• Leading training programs for Hillel International—representing over 500 Jewish community campus centers globally—on serving plant-based food by default.
• Providing programming for 100+ Jewish camps, synagogues, youth groups, community centers, schools, college programs, affinity groups and conferences to spark inquiry into how Jewish values can influence how we treat animals. 
• Developing educational materials such as the Jewish Animal Ethics Community Study Guide, The Ark Project Service-Learning Workbook, and many Jewish holiday resources. 
• Supporting the first American Jewish organizations, including synagogues, in committing to serve plant-based foods by default at all of their events. 
• Co-organizing yearly interfaith webinars, the most recent drawing more than 400 participants from five countries. 
• Presenting on animal welfare and Jewish food justice to countless conferences, and shifting several of those conferences to serve higher welfare animal products and more plant-based foods.
• Providing educational resources used by 1,500+ educators and students, and delivering educational presentations to 5,000+ people.
• Placing content in leading Jewish publications including The Forward, Jewish Journal, JWeekly, Tablet, and Times of Israel, as well as major media outlets like Religion News Service and The Washington Post, on why kosher shouldn’t be factory farmed, reimagining our food practices, pandemic risk, and sustainable food choices. 
• Launching the Jewish Leadership Circle, supporting and recognizing Jewish institutions (including Yale University’s Hillel) shifting to higher welfare animal products and reducing animal consumption.
• Inspiring more than 250 rabbis and senior Jewish leaders and 20,000 individuals to call out kosher humanewashing of factory farmed animal products and urging institutions to adopt more sustainable food practices.
• Commissioning novel research on consumers’ perceptions of kosher certification, and unearthing new American misconceptions about what a kosher label means for animals, workers, and the planet.
• Posting 11 billboards, and social media reaching hundreds of thousands, directing viewers to JIFA’s “Is this Kosher?” website. 
• Influencing the Rabbinical Assembly to pass a resolution stating that “shifts to our institutional food practices, such as reducing factory-farmed animal product consumption, would help us to better achieve our values.”

The aforementioned resolution tasked the Rabbinical Assembly’s Social Justice Commission with creating a subcommittee that would “revisit [the RA’s] work in the area of ethical food consumption.” This led directly to forming JIFA’s Partnership for Sustainable Dining with the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), which has yielded the first-ever Jewish denominational cohort to establish plant-forward food policies and continues under the direction of CJFE. Not only have the cohort members immediately slashed their buying and serving of meat and dairy, but their commitment to upholding this practice as an expression of their religious moral values has wide-reaching cultural significance. Normalizing plant-based foods as the default among Jewish communities, while intensive work, shows that plant-based eating is, in fact, a resonant way for them to put Jewish values of compassion, justice, and repair into action.

JIFA’s stellar run over the past eight years validates Farm Forward’s commitment to movement building, and our approach to community-centered advocacy. Our theory of change assumes that advocates can be highly influential when they focus their advocacy within their own community, and ground their objectives in the unique cultural, political, economic, and overlapping social justice concerns specific to that community. This strategy is quite distinct from campaigns run by national organizations in which mainstream advocates target particular demographics with the aim of mobilizing that demographic to support the agenda of the larger movement. 

The value of JIFA’s authentically embedded, community-focused advocacy has been recognized as so significant that JIFA and its longstanding partner in this work, Jewish Veg, can now come together to create a new nonprofit to steward this work indefinitely. The new CJFE will continue to transform dining practices, and establish more sustainable and humane food sourcing, as the norm in Jewish spaces. 

Formerly the Director of JIFA, CJFE Executive Director Rabbi Melissa Hoffman writes, “Over the eight years Farm Forward incubated JIFA as one of its programs, culminating as JIFA’s partner and fiscal sponsor in this launch, our close work with Farm Forward made a deep impact both practically and philosophically on JIFA & CJFE. Practically, CJFE would not exist if not for the support and guidance JIFA received from Farm Forward. Philosophically, we continue to be proud to serve as a vehicle to bring Farm Forward’s values and experience transforming the food system to Jewish institutions, as a model for change for other religious communities.”

CJFE will carry on JIFA’s legacy of sparking inquiry into topics of food justice through the lens of long and evolving Jewish traditions and values, while strengthening communities in the process. We celebrate that CJFE’s three inaugural staff members are all former staff of JIFA (under the incubation of Farm Forward), that two of its Board members, Lisa Apfelberg and Ilana Braverman, are similarly former JIFA staff, and that a third Board member, Dr. Aaron Gross, is Farm Forward’s founder and CEO. 

This is not the first time that Farm Forward has spun off a new nonprofit organization. If the wild success of Better Food Foundation and Greener by Default are any guide, CJFE will be a force to reckon with in the years to come.

To learn more about CJFE and stay apprised of their work, head over to their website (check out that logo!) and add your info to the “Stay in the Know” form at the bottom of any page.

Three U.S. Senators, working closely with Farm Forward, have urged the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) to strengthen its guidelines on animal welfare and environmental labeling claims, citing widespread deception in food marketing that harms both consumers and independent farmers.

In a letter addressed to USDA Deputy Under Secretary Sandra Eskin, Senators Richard Blumenthal, Cory A. Booker, and Sheldon Whitehouse outlined serious concerns about the current guidelines. The letter notes that the guideline “falls short of what is needed to protect producers and consumers from the unfair misuse of animal welfare and animal-raising claims.” 

Farm Forward, which helped draft the letter, strongly supports these Senators’ efforts to reform labeling practices, and has additionally called for mandatory testing requirements for “antibiotic free” claims.

The Senators emphasized that 78 percent of consumers pay premium prices for products with higher welfare claims, while 85 percent believe the government should establish and enforce clear definitions for animal welfare labels. However, the current guidelines allow major agricultural corporations to exploit these labels without meaningful verification.

The letter quotes an Indiana turkey farmer’s statement to the New York Times of how higher welfare producers like him are disadvantaged by the prevalence of mega-corporations’ misleading labels: “Big Ag has co-opted and bastardized every one of our messages … When they use a fancy label with absolutely meaningless adjectives, there’s just no way we can compete.” Humanewashing labels undermine independent farmers who invest in implementing the actual animal-raising practices they advertise.

The Senators proposed three key recommendations, which Farm Forward endorses:

1. Mandatory third-party certifications for animal welfare claims like “humane” and “humanely raised”
2. Stronger definitions for terms such as “free-range,” “grassfed,” and “pasture-raised”
3. Prohibition of inherently misleading negative claims, such as “hormone-free” labels on poultry products where hormone use is already illegal

In addition, Farm Forward calls for mandatory testing of products labeled as “antibiotic free.” Currently, these labels often rely solely on producers’ unverified claims, which at times blatantly mislead consumers about antibiotic use in meat production. Perdue, which touts their leadership on antibiotic stewardship, vocally opposes both mandatory on-farm testing by the USDA and sensitive testing at slaughterhouses, raising serious questions about their commitment and transparency.

“At a time when our nation is losing independent farms at an alarming rate, we cannot allow mislabeled products to continue tipping the scales in favor of further consolidation,” the Senators wrote, emphasizing that major agricultural corporations cannot be trusted to self-regulate.

With Farm Forward, these senators find self-evident the importance of protecting the integrity of food labelling, ensuring fair competition in the agricultural sector, and providing consumers with accurate information about their food choices.

To supplement the Senators’ letter, Farm Forward—along with Consumer Reports, ASPCA, Compassion in World Farming, Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), and George Washington School of Public Health Milken Institute’s Antibiotic Resistance Action Center—wrote a letter to USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) calling for the following actions, among others:

• FSIS should prohibit use of negative antibiotic use claims on products from animals that test positive for antibiotics
• FSIS should require regular testing for all negative antibiotic use claims, not only for new applications but also for companies already approved for these claims and selling in the marketplace
• FSIS should require producers whose product tests positive for antibiotics to demonstrate how they have adequately addressed the root causes of the problem before they are allowed to resume making the claim
• USDA should conduct and report publicly on its own testing for antibiotics on all food-animal species for all products labeled with negative antibiotic use claims
• Following a public comment period and participation from all relevant stakeholders, FSIS should codify minimum standards for all animal-raising claims, rather than continuing to employ incredibly vague definitions that allow a huge spectrum of systems to use the same raising claims, failing consumers and producers alike
• FSIS should require (not simply recommend) ongoing third-party verification to substantiate label claims concerning antibiotic, environmental/carbon, and animal welfare claims
• FSIS should provide financial and technical assistance to small producers to help them access meaningful third-party certification
• FSIS should set clear definitions of environmental-related claims such as “regeneratively raised”, “raised using regenerative agriculture practices”, “sustainably raised”, “carbon neutral”, “low-carbon” and “environmentally responsible”
• FSIS should prohibit the recently approved “Low-Carbon Beef” claim as inherently misleading, since conventional beef production emits more greenhouse gasses than any other food product

Farm Forward will continue to work alongside legislators and other stakeholders to advocate for essential reforms in food labeling practices. Label integrity for environmental, animal raising, and antibiotics claims will help not only the environment, animal welfare, and public health, but also consumers and independent farmers. Having labels that mean what the public believes they mean will be win-win for everyone—at least, everyone who’s not trying to scam the system. We’ve seen recent progress, with the USDA recommending voluntary verification for some label claims. It’s time for USDA to turn those recommendations into requirements.

Our investigation of fraud, deception, and animal welfare abuses at Alexandre Family Farm (Alexandre) revealed that Alexandre’s national reputation for high animal welfare is largely a mirage. It is highly likely that milk sold across the country—including in products like toddler formula and ice cream—came from abused, neglected, and mistreated cows who were allowed to linger in their suffering. Maddeningly, many of these products were sold under humane labels that ideally should signify something meaningful for animals.

This is a clear case of humanewashing: when marketing and certifications create an image of exceptional animal treatment meant to assuage consumers, despite the reality being far more grim.

It’s no secret that “ethical” dairies like Alexandre are used to market the entire industry to consumers, giving a halo of respectability and credibility to the very factory farm corporations that make cruelty and abuse endemic. But the corruption at Alexandre has spread further, as its lies rippled not only through the organic, higher welfare dairy market but beyond.

Alexandre’s “ethical dairy” status has been used to lend a veneer of respectability to natural food retailers like Whole Foods Market, food companies like Alec’s Ice Cream and Cheddies Crackers, and even baby and children’s food companies like Serenity Kids and Once Upon a Farm. All of these companies actively use Alexandre’s halo of respectability to entice conscientious consumers to buy their own products. Alexandre’s humanewashing stains a swath of companies and products that perpetuate Alexandre’s deceptive claims.

Whole Foods Market named Alexandre a “Supplier of the Year” in 2021, and markets its partnership with Alexandre as “Restarting Dairy”—likely an effort to leverage Alexandre’s reputation to improve the public image of dairy, which has been declining over the years. Whole Foods proudly showcases a video with Alexandre co-owner Blake Alexandre, who notes that seeing Alexandre’s products on Whole Foods shelves “gives us a tremendous sense of pride and it also highlights the fact that we’re making a difference. It’s a small difference, but what we’re doing here on the farm is contributing in a positive way to the betterment of our society and humanity.”1

Jarringly, that same flashy video can’t conceal some of Alexandre’s inhumane practices. The video inadvertently documents cows with extremely low body condition scores (suggesting disease and/or malnutrition), as well as hundreds of plastic calf hutches (widely seen as inhumane)2345 where Alexandre isolates calves from their mothers, other cows, and other calves. Alexandre’s hutches do not even include the standard patch of ground in front that would allow calves to go outside; a veterinary expert who reviewed our report noted that hutches were never meant to be used as cages, and “calves not able to step outside their hutches is a horrific perversion of use.” Even Whole Foods Market’s rosy portrayal of Alexandre unintentionally reveals systemic and unnecessary suffering.

Update! Following the release of our report, Whole Foods Market appears to have taken down its Restarting Dairy page that referred to the Alexandres as “environmental stewards,” proudly noted that “Whole Foods Market has been working with the Alexandres for over a decade.”

In addition to supplying cows’ milk to Whole Foods, Alexandre sells it to food manufacturers, including baby food and kids’ snack companies and leading organic cheese, cracker, and ice cream companies. Alexandre promotes a partnership with Serenity Kids, which sells baby food and “toddler formula” (and according to the Serenity Kids website its toddler formula “meets FDA nutritional requirements for infant formula”).6 Serenity Kids notes that its formula’s milk ingredients come from Alexandre, “which is known for its quality, ethical practices.” Serenity’s President and Co-Founder Joe Carr glowingly recounts in a video featured on Serenity’s YouTube,

At Serenity Kids we support American family farmers that treat their animals ethically … We are just super excited to have now created a product that proves that you can make formula … created in a way that’s great for the planet and great for the animals. -Joe Carr, President and Co-Founder, Serenity Kids7

Once Upon a Farm was co-founded by actor Jennifer Garner. A recipient of the Clean Label Project’s “Purity Award,” until recently Once Upon a Farm produced only completely plant-based foods for infants, toddlers, and children. In January 2024 it announced that it will incorporate Alexandre’s products into some of its foods marketed to kids 12 months and older,8 noting (correctly) that Alexandre is “the leading regenerative organic certified dairy farm in the U.S.” Once Upon a Farm products are sold at Whole Foods, Target and Costco.

Alexandre also supplies to Rumiano Cheese, which claims “a deep commitment to … animal welfare”9 and sells Organic cheese to thousands of grocery stores nationwide, including grocery giants like Safeway, Vons, Whole Foods, and Costco. Rumiano boasts that their cheese “benefits the animals and consumers by helping produce healthy and humane dairy products.”10 Rumiano Cheese buys milk from milk suppliers like Organic West that process milk from  Alexandre and resell it to a wide variety of outlets.

It doesn’t end there, but continues with prominent relationships with food companies like Alec’s Ice Cream, which markets “the first-ever regenerative organic ice cream—one that’s improving our world through the way it’s created” and that “improves the lives of animals.”11

Update! Following the release of our report, Alec’s Ice Cream appears to have taken down and removed from its site navigation its Our Impact page, which claimed that regenerative farming “improves the lives of animals,” that its products are “positively changing our planet for a better future,” and that Alexandre is “proving that cows actually help reverse climate change.”

Cheddies Crackers, which differentiates its products in large part by marketing them as Certified Humane and Regenerative Organic Certified. In addition to stating “Happy cows make the best milk,” Cheddies notes on its homepage,

Our cheese comes from regenerative farms, like the Alexandre Family Farm in California. These farms are like VIP clubs for cows – they get the royal treatment. -Cheddies Crackers website

All of these suppliers use Alexandre’s certifications and marketing to differentiate their products, trying to convince a public that is increasingly skeptical of cows’ dairy products because of their health, animal welfare, and environmental impacts that it’s acceptable—even beneficial—to eat their products. In the marketing language of one of Alexandre’s buyers, “Every time you enjoy Alec’s ice cream, you’re making a positive impact.”12

In other words, Alexandre’s deception is propagated in the market by the companies that use Alexandre’s products and reputation to hide the ubiquity of the ethically repugnant practices that are virtually unavoidable in dairy, given the present structure of the industry.13

Taking Action

Below is a list of companies that sell Alexandre products or source them for ingredients. Farm Forward asks these companies to cut ties with Alexandre and if possible reformulate to take cows’ milk out of their products. We will update you on how each company responds to our request.

• Whole Foods Market
  • Whole Foods Market stopped marketing Alexandre products.
• Once Upon a Farm
• Serenity Kids
  • A day after receiving our outreach in April, Serenity wrote to note that they had opened their own investigation as a result of our report and would take appropriate action based on what they uncover. Almost four months later, they still claim that their investigation is “ongoing.”
• Alec’s Ice Cream
  • Alec’s Ice Cream, which relies on Alexandre dairy, has taken down and removed from its site navigation its Our Impact page, which claimed that regenerative farming “improves the lives of animals,” that its products are “positively changing our planet for a better future,” and that Alexandre is “proving that cows actually help reverse climate change.”
• Cheddies Crackers
• Rumiano Cheese
• United Natural Foods (UNFI)
• Providore
  • The natural food store completely has dropped Alexandre as a supplier as a result of our investigation.
• Luke’s Local
  • The premium grocery retailer in San Francisco with three locations has cancelled its orders of all Alexandre Family Farm products.
• Walt’s Wholesale Meats
  • Walt’s, which specializes in slaughtering dairy cows for meat for human consumption, has stopped accepting all cows from Alexandre Family Farm.
• Gus’s Community Market
  • The California grocery with five locations has pulled its Alexandre promos and reduced Alexandre’s product lines and shelf space as a result of the investigation’s findings.

For more updates, including certifications that have delisted or suspended Alexandre, see our Timeline of Alexandre Dairy Investigation.

Update: December 5, 2023: The EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act has been assigned bill numbers: S.3390 in the Senate and H.R.6569 in the House of Representatives.

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In anticipation of the 2024 Farm Bill, we are proud to play a part in introducing new federal legislation that would leverage billions of dollars of food spending by USDA to help build a more just, healthy, and sustainable food system. 

Introduced by Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass) and Congresswoman Alma Adams (NC-12), the Enabling Farmer, Food worker, Environmental, and Climate Targets through Innovative, Values-aligned, and Equitable (EFFECTIVE) Food Procurement Act would direct and support USDA to shift toward values-aligned food procurement. The legislation would benefit workers, farmed animals, and the environment alike, and has been endorsed by more than 200 organizations.  

The vast majority of USDA’s food purchases are not congruent with its own values-based goals and policy objectives like mitigating climate change, conserving natural resources, building resilient supply chains, supporting socially disadvantaged producers and worker well-being, and expanding healthy choices for schools and its other program beneficiaries. 

The EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act would change that. The Act was inspired by a new Federal Good Food Purchasing Coalition (FGFP Coalition), of which Farm Forward is a founding member. The FGFP Coalition grew out of the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP), a flexible metric-based framework that encourages large institutions to direct their buying power toward six core values including equity, nutrition, valued workforce, animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and community-based economies. For years, we have led the team that updates GFPP’s animal welfare value area. As GFPP has been implemented by dozens of cities, municipalities, and school districts across the country, we have seen the outsized role that the federal government plays in food purchasing. This year we joined with other GFPP leaders in a concerted effort to redirect those federal food dollars, almost 40 percent of which in 2022 was spent on animal products. In 2022, The biggest food purchaser in the federal government, USDA, spent more than four billion dollars on commodity foods for school districts, food banks, low-income seniors, foreign aid, and Indian reservations. 

The USDA primarily purchases from a handful of agricultural megacorporations, many of which have repeatedly violated labor, environmental, and animal welfare laws. For example, Tyson Foods accounted for 43 percent of USDA poultry spending in 2022, despite incurring more than 30 workplace and environmental violations within three years of receiving their contract, and USDA suspending program personnel at Tyson due to what USDA termed “egregious violation of the humane handling requirements” that very year. 

The EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act would shift USDA away from evaluating bids based only on cost to evaluating bids based on multiple values, including equity, worker well-being, climate mitigation, animal welfare, resilient supply chains, and nutrition. While increasing transparency in USDA spending, the Act would (among other things) measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with USDA’s procurement, provide grants and technical assistance to small and socially disadvantaged producers and businesses, and shift USDA’s purchases of animal products from the lowest common denominator to more pasture-raised livestock, more farms participating in independent animal welfare certification programs, and more plant-based proteins.

The social and environmental benefit of such shifts would be staggering. Earlier this year the FGFP Coalition produced a report on federal food purchasing with findings including: 

• The USDA is the largest direct food purchaser in the federal government, and combined with the Department of Defense accounts for 90 percent of direct federal food purchases, which totaled more than $9 billion in 2022.
• The USDA Foods Program had a carbon footprint of more than 19 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent between the school year of 2018 and 2019, equal to the annual emissions from 4.1 million cars.
• Replacing 25 percent of federal animal product purchases with plant-based sources of protein would spare 26,736,641 animal lives, make available 9.3 million acres of land (equal to the size of Maryland), save $248 million, and reduce 1.6 million tons of Co2e annually—more than the equivalent of taking every passenger vehicle in Washington, D.C. and Alaska out of commission, all year, every year.

On November 7, Farm Forward and other representatives of the FGFP Coalition met with Senator Richard Blumenthal’s (D-CT) office, and we’re pleased that Senator Blumenthal has now signed on as the bill’s Senate cosponsor. 

You may be interested to review the FGFP Coalition’s report on how we could better leverage federal food purchasing for climate, environmental, and social benefits, and the Civil Eats article about the Act. But most importantly: all U.S. residents can contact their senators and representatives to ask that they support the EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act. Just look up their phone numbers on the Senate and House directory, and call them to ask your Senators to support S. 3390, Senator Edward Markey’s EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act, and your Representative to support H.R. 6569, Congresswoman Alma Adams’s EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act.

Good food purchasing at the federal level is the next step in how we are building a better future for American workers, communities, ecosystems, and farmed animals. Together, we are building a future free of factory farms.

Farm Forward welcomed the federal government’s recent request for public guidance on its new “National One Health Framework to Address Zoonotic Diseases and Advance Public Health Preparedness in the United States” (NOHF-Zoonoses), spearheaded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 

We submitted a comment we consider critical for addressing zoonotic disease and public health preparedness: factory farming creates perfect petri dishes for endemic and emergent zoonotic diseases. Deintensifying existing poultry and pig farming—while placing a moratorium on new factory farm construction—is the public health measure that would most dramatically reduce the risk of the next pandemic virus. 

With the CDC itself reporting that 3 out of 4 new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, and that bird flu has broken out more than 800 times in 47 states since January 2022, mostly affecting birds in factory farms, it’s critical that the One Health Framework include attention on the issue that will most materially reduce future risk of zoonotic diseases—namely industrial animal agriculture. 

We call on world leaders to bring the age of factory farming to an end.

Here’s the bulk of our comment as submitted to the CDC and HHS:

—

Given that the NOHF-Zoonoses draft’s Appendix A, the “Prioritized Zoonotic Diseases of National Concern in the United States,” prioritizes “Zoonotic -Influenza” as number one zoonotic disease of concern and “Salmonellosis” as the number two zoonotic disease of concern, any national effort to address zoonotic diseases and advance public health preparedness must include focus on reforming industrial animal agriculture. So including the word “agricultural” in Objective 2.4 and the phrase “animal agriculture” in Objective 5.2 is essential.

Industrial pig and poultry farms are the United States’ top breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases, due to the crowded conditions of thousands of immunocompromised animals. Influenza viruses such as H1N1 (swine flu) and H5N1 (bird flu) evolved on pig and chicken farms. Genetic analyses have shown that crucial components of H1N1 emerged from a virus circulating in North American pigs, and an analysis of 39 antigenic shifts that played a key role in the emergence of particularly dangerous influenzas showed that “all but two of these events were reported in commercial poultry production systems.” Since Appendix A of NOHF-Zoonoses lists zoonotic influenzas as the first priority, animal agriculture must be specifically mentioned in the document. 

Farmed animals today are overwhelmingly genetically uniform, immunocompromised, lodged together by the tens of thousands, and routinely administered subclinical antibiotics—a perfect petri dish for cultivating antibiotic resistance, as well as endemic and emerging zoonotic disease threats. 

Addressing industrial animal agriculture is not optional but essential. The adoption of the One Health framework presents a critical opportunity to nudge our country’s animal agriculture toward higher welfare, more sustainable farming practices that enhance rather than imperil public health.

Farm Forward welcomed the World Health Organization (WHO) Intergovernmental Negotiating Body’s recent request for public guidance on the question, “What substantive elements do you think should be included in a new international instrument on pandemic preparedness and response?”

We submitted a comment we consider critical for pandemic preparedness: factory farming poses the greatest future pandemic risk. With the CDC reporting that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, it’s critical that the global public health community focus on the issue that will most materially reduce future risk of pandemics—namely factory farming. 

We call on world leaders to bring the age of factory farming to an end.

Here’s our comment as submitted to the WHO:

Any global effort to reduce pandemic risk must focus on reforming industrial animal agriculture. Deintensifying existing poultry and pig farming while placing a moratorium on new factory farm construction is the public health measure that would most dramatically reduce the risk of the next pandemic virus.

Factory farms, especially pig and poultry farms, are breeding grounds for pandemics. Influenza viruses such as H1N1 (swine flu) or H5N1 (bird flu) evolved on pig and chicken farms. Genetic analyses have shown that crucial components of H1N1 emerged from a virus circulating in North American pigs, and an analysis of 39 antigenic shifts that played a key role in the emergence of particularly dangerous influenzas showed that “all but two of these events were reported in commercial poultry production systems.”

Influenza and coronaviruses move fluidly between animal and human populations, just as they move fluidly between nations. When it comes to pandemics, there is not animal health and human health—not any more than there is Korean health and French health. Farmed animals today are overwhelmingly genetically uniform, immunocompromised, and lodged together by the tens of thousands—a perfect petri dish for creating pandemics.

The era of intensive confinement of farmed animals must come to an end.

World leaders must build a future without industrial animal agriculture, and transition toward plant-based foods and sustainable farming practices that enhance rather than imperil
public health.

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Lead image credit: We Animals Media

United Nations scientists warn that a climate catastrophe is coming, and a leaked UN document urges a shift to plant-based proteins as a strategy to stave off the most dire scenarios.

Read on to learn about political, institutional, and individual remedies already underway. Though it can feel like actions of an individual, institution, or state do not matter, when it comes to climate change, the opposite is true. Every bit of climate change mitigated matters, so every meal matters.

“Code red for humanity”

Released last month, part one of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) sixth report (AR6) pulls together findings from more than 14 thousand peer-reviewed studies. In the strongest language the IPCC has ever used, and for the first time, the IPCC stated that it is “unequivocal” that humans have caused “widespread and rapid” changes to ocean, land, and atmospheric temperatures, and that many of these changes are “irreversible.”

The report says that because climate change is cumulative, we will see unavoidable intensification over the next 30 years. That is, even if the world dramatically cut emissions starting today, a hotter future is certain. In all scenarios, by “the early 2030s,” average global temperatures will rise 1.5°C over preindustrial levels.

That kind of temperature change may not sound like much, but it brings with it cataclysms and catastrophes. As the New York Times explained upon the release of the report,

“At 1.5 degrees of warming, scientists have found … Nearly 1 billion people worldwide could swelter in more frequent life-threatening heat waves. Hundreds of millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. Some animal and plant species alive today will be gone. Coral reefs, which sustain fisheries for large swaths of the globe, will suffer more frequent mass die-offs.”1

Unless we dramatically cut emissions, we can expect additional degrees of warming over 1.5°C as the century progresses, bringing more wildfires, floods, rising sea levels, and animal and plant extinctions.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres says that AR6 is nothing less than “a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable.”2

Humanity must act decisively, now, if we are to limit average global temperature rise to just 1.5 degrees. Thankfully, the report states, there is still time to act.

Leaked UN report urges switch to plant-based protein

Not scheduled for public release before March 2022, the leaked third section of AR6 focuses on ways to reduce human impacts to the climate. It reads in part, “A shift to diets with a higher share of plant-based protein in regions with excess consumption of calories and animal-source food can lead to substantial reductions in emissions, while also providing health benefits …”3

The recommended shift to plant-based proteins builds on a 2019 IPCC special report that stated that plant-based and sustainably produced animal-sourced food “present major opportunities for [climate] adaptation and mitigation.”4

This is because of industrial animal-sourced food’s disproportionate impact on climate. For example, in 2018 Oxford University researchers published in the journal Science a study of nearly 40,000 farms in 119 countries that found “meat, aquaculture, eggs, and dairy use ~83 percent of the world’s farmland and contribute 56 to 58 percent of food’s different [greenhouse gas] emissions, despite providing only 37 percent of our protein and 18 percent of our calories.”5

According to AR6, “strong, rapid, and sustained reductions” in methane emissions are critical if we are to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C and thereby prevent the worst climate scenarios. This is no surprise: over the first 20 years after methane is emitted, it is over 80 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic methane is the cause of more than 25 percent of today’s global warming.6 Meat and dairy production is the largest source of human-caused methane, from enteric fermentation (a digestive process of ruminants like cattle) and manure emissions.7 In fact, if cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.8 9

Following the release of the 2019 IPCC report, Hans-Otto Pörtner, an ecologist who co-chairs the IPCC’s working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, said,  “We don’t want to tell people what to eat, but it would indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect.”10

The political and personal: every change matters

Some US politicians have put forward policy options that take seriously industrial animal agriculture’s contributions to the climate catastrophe.

In July 2021, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA) reintroduced the Farm System Reform Act (FSRA), which would place an immediate moratorium (pause) on construction of new and expanded large confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), and phase out the largest CAFOs by 2040.11 The Act is the boldest vision for American agriculture that we have ever seen put forward on a national policy stage. Federal legislation related to animal farming more typically reflects the vision of a small number of corporate meat companies’ lobbyists and advocates in government. In contrast, the vision outlined in the FSRA contains several first steps toward Farm Forward’s own vision for agriculture—ending factory farming, leveling the playing field for independent farmers, and raising fewer animals for food.

Another example: In June 2021, Reps. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) and Jamaal Bowman, Ed.D (D-NY) introduced the “Healthy Future Students and Earth Pilot Program Act,” which would fund healthier, climate friendly, culturally appropriate plant-based entrée options for public school students. “At the same time as we invest urgently in the transition to renewable energy, we must build sustainable food systems at every level of our society—and our public education system can lead the way,” said Rep. Bowman.12 He noted that the bill would advance food justice in marginalized communities and support local farmers of color while fighting the climate crisis with healthier, plant-based food. The bill would fund $10 million in grants for a voluntary pilot program to help school districts address challenges in transitioning to plant-based meals, such as lack of culinary training.13

While politicians debate, it is incumbent that individuals and institutions take their own steps to mitigate climate change. Farm Forward has long supported efforts to reduce meat consumption, and recently began promoting DefaultVeg, an approach to dining which uses simple behavioral “nudges” to encourage institutional and home diners to choose more climate-friendly foods, without restricting anyone’s choices. The use of plant-forward defaults is enormously effective: for example, making plant-based meals the default menu option while giving people the choice to opt in to meals with animal products (an approach called “Greener by Default”) can increase the selection of more sustainable plant-based options by an average of 60 percentage points and up to 80 percentage points. Dozens of institutions are adopting plant-based nudges, from Harvard recommending them in its catering guide to organizations like Climate Nexus and the American Lung Association committing to use them for their events.

Sometimes when facing a problem as vast in scope as the climate crisis, it feels like actions of an individual, institution, and even a city, state or nation do not matter. In fact, when it comes to climate change, the opposite is true. Every fraction of a degree of temperature rise in the decades ahead will have consequences, particularly for the world’s most vulnerable. So every action matters, every bit of climate change mitigated matters, and every meal matters.

And they matter, too, because individual and institutional decisions often ramify: they influence and motivate other individuals and institutions, redefining what is “normal” and even eventually leading to political change. Decisions made for dining room tables, offices, schools, hospitals, and university departments become the social norms that change society and eventually change politics.

The good news embedded in the IPCC report is that there is still time to act to avoid the worst scenarios. No one person, institution, or country can do everything. Still, we can each do something. Do what you can, knowing that every day, more and more people are doing the same. And please donate to Farm Forward so that we can keep this good work going.

Header image: Food photo created by freepik – www.freepik.com 

Farm Forward’s board has added four new members, and we couldn’t be more excited!

Our new Board of Directors includes authors, scientists, religious leaders, scholars of ethics, and a climate change leader. Together, they have professional expertise and experience helping people and animals in Canada, China, India, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

One of our recruitment priorities was candidates’ commitment to promoting the values of diversity, equity and inclusion in our organization, and in the work we do to fight factory farming. Our new board composition also better reflects the gender and racial diversity of the communities we work in and with.

We are grateful for the outstanding service of our outgoing board members, Ian Duncan, John Mackey, and Steven Gross.

Our new board includes the following directors, all leaders in their respective fields:

Rev. Christopher Carter, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of San Diego

New board member Rev. Dr. Carter’s work explores how religion and the institution of factory farming affect food choices within the African American community. He is a United Methodist pastor, holds a seat on the steering committee for the prestigious Animals and Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion, and has been a Farm Forward Faith in Food Fellow since 2016. He is about to release a new book called The Spirit of Soul Food.

Rabbi Jonathan Crane, Ph.D.

Rabbi and Ethicist

Founding board member Dr. Crane is a Scholar of Bioethics and Jewish Thought at Emory University in Atlanta and is the author of the book Eating Ethically: Religion and Science for a Better Diet. He holds rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College and a Ph.D. in religion from the University of Toronto. Crane has served Jewish communities in North America, India, and China. He sits on the national board of the Society for Jewish Ethics.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Author

Founding board member Foer’s internationally bestselling first book, Everything Is Illuminated, was named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and won numerous awards, including the Guardian First Book Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. His second book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, also a bestseller, was hailed by Salman Rushdie as “ambitious, pyrotechnic, riddling, and above all … extremely moving.” His third book, Eating Animals, offers a critique of factory farming and was written in close collaboration with Farm Forward. It was the inspiration for the documentary of the same name with Executive Producer Natalie Portman. Foer’s novels have received widespread acclaim and awards and two have been made into major motion pictures. Foer has taught writing at Yale and is on the faculty of New York University’s Creative Writing Program.

Nicole Gross-Camp, Ph.D.

Professor of Environmental Science & Sustainability at Allegheny College

New board member Dr. Gross-Camp is an interdisciplinary conservation scientist with over seventeen years experience working in East African tropical forests. She has held teaching positions in the UK and the US. Her overarching interests are integrating social and ecological needs to achieve long-term equitable conservation. In her career, Dr. Gross-Camp has received over twenty prestigious research and leadership awards.

Bernard Rollin, Ph.D.

University-distinguished Professor, Professor of: Philosophy, Animal Sciences, Biomedical Security, and University Bioethicist at the University of Colorado 

Founding board member Dr. Rollin is one of the world’s leading scholars in animal ethics and actively lectures all over the globe. He introduced the first university course on veterinary ethics, helped pass the federal Animal Welfare Act, has published seven books on animal protection and consciousness, and served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

Krithika Srinivasan, Ph.D.

Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

New board member Dr. Srinivasan’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of environmental social science, post-development politics, and animal studies. Her current research revolves around intersectional approaches to social, ecological and animal justice in the context of contemporary development. She is Farm Forward’s South Asia Adviser and is working to establish the first human-animal studies program in India at the Tata Institute in Mumbai.

Jodie Van Horn

Ready For 100 Campaign Director, Sierra Club

New Board Member Van Horn spent 15 years in the environmental movement working on campaigns to combat climate change, and is currently leading a nationwide clean energy advocacy campaign at the Sierra Club. She believes that ending factory farming can be a crucial part of the climate action agenda.

Aaron Gross, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Theology & Religious Studies at the University of San Diego

Farm Forward’s founder and CEO, Dr. Gross has played a leadership role in a wide variety of national and international farmed animal welfare campaigns in the Americas, India, and the Middle East since the mid-1990s. While collaborating with novelist Jonathan Safran Foer on Foer’s internationally best-selling critique of industrial farming, Eating Animals, Aaron saw the need for an organization devoted entirely to ending factory farming and founded Farm Forward in 2007. Aaron has served as CEO from the beginning and grown the organization into a leading national nonprofit with eleven full-time staff. Alongside Foer and director Christopher Quinn, Gross is a co-writer for the new Eating Animals documentary film narrated by Natalie Portman. In addition to his advocacy work, Aaron is an internationally respected expert on religion and animals who teaches courses on animals and religion, food and religion, and modern Jewish thought. He has authored two scholarly books and numerous articles dealing with animal and food ethics from both religious and secular perspectives, including his critically acclaimed The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications (Columbia University Press, 2015). Gross currently serves as President of the Society for Jewish Ethics and on the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States.

Welcome new board members! We look forward to our work together promoting conscientious food choices, reducing farmed animal suffering, and advancing sustainable agriculture.

Two days ago, Pope Francis was challenged by 12-year-old Genesis Butler to try eating a plant-based diet for Lent, with a promise of a million dollar donation to a charity of his choice should he say yes. Ms. Butler cited motivations including climate change and animals. This campaign may be surprising, but the links between plant-based diets, climate change, animals, and religious values should not be.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably already familiar with the many connections between industrial animal agriculture and climate change, but you may be less familiar with their link to religious organizations. Faith organizations have published dozens of religious statements on how their spirituality calls them to fight climate change. And religious communities can make excellent forums to discuss the connection between farmed animals and climate change.

While no major religion testifies consistently about our obligations to nonhuman animals or the environment,1 all of America’s major religious faiths—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and indigenous faiths—guide and encourage increased respect and care for nonhuman animals. Empathy, compassion, stewardship, care for creation, lovingkindness, and nonviolence are just a few of the practices commonly encouraged by these traditions, and over the years, their inclusion of nonhuman animals in the circle of compassion has only increased.

Advocates for issues like environmentalism and animal welfare would do well to pay greater attention to religious communities. Houses of worship take seriously the challenging moral questions of our age. This is the role they’ve played in society for centuries. Religious leaders speak to the open hearts and minds of people seeking guidance in their moral and ethical lives. People of faith are interested not only in these ethical precepts, but in how to apply those teachings in their lives with integrity.

In the past, as I’m preaching a sermon about human responsibilities to other animals, or about how our support of factory farms contributes to the desecration of the environment, I’ve worried about how the congregation will receive my words. After all, the links between food, animal welfare, and climate change is a subject that many would rather avoid. Yet consistently I’ve found these topics very well-received. It’s not unusual for congregants to contact me later to let me know that after the presentation they decided to reduce their meat consumption or even go entirely plant-based. One congregant who decided to go vegetarian recently wrote, “Thank you for helping me do something I’ve been hoping to do for such a long time.” Spiritual communities provide fertile soil for genuine ethical consideration, even transformation, that is not always possible in the secular world.

When a topic such as compassion for animals is lifted up in a house of worship, this indicates to believers that the subject matters greatly, deserving not only consideration but action in everyday life. When a faith community begins to discuss adopting an institutional food policy, plant-based eating is demonstrated to be not only an ideal but also a practical choice. Engaging these topics in our communities gives adherents a place to process their own changing viewpoints, and as the community becomes more accepting—even encouraging—of plant-based diets, community norms reinforce and support the individual shifts, leading to lasting changes.

Whether we believe in a God who has a plan for humanity, or that spirituality has more to do with actions than beliefs, or that we are on our own to make our way in this universe, these beliefs place a special responsibility on us: to build a more decent society. For me, that means engaging religious communities to reflect and act on their own traditions’ best teachings about our responsibilities to the environment and to other animals. For more about how to involve faith communities in this topic, contact us.

All of us have a role to play. Whether or not you happen to be the Pope, going plant-based for Lent—or encouraging others to do so—is a good place to start.