This letter is the second in a 3-part message from our founder, Aaron Gross. To read the previous letter in the series, please click here.

In 2007 when Farm Forward was founded there wasn’t a single organization in the country that even claimed to be exclusively focused on ending factory farming—it was, as it sometimes still remains, at best a smaller side project of an organization with a larger mission. At Farm Forward, we have only ever had one mission: ending factory farming. We give special priority to animal welfare, but our supporters are also climate activists, environmentalists, public health advocates, anti-racism activists, and many others ready to stand with us against the industrial farm and in favor of a transformed food system for all. We’re omnivores, vegans, flexitarians and every other kind of eater.

Though fifteen years old, we are still a new kind of organization. Factory farming is a new kind of problem and requires no less.

We’re proud that other nonprofits have joined us over the years; we’re pleased to see more resources at larger nonprofits directed to anti-factory farming efforts; and we’ve been especially honored to work with new philanthropists putting anti-factory farming efforts at the center of their portfolios. However, most of all, we’re grateful to all of you—our supporters and followers—for making it possible for us to spend our days fighting this important social transformation.

The Farm Forward team is made of individuals with a lifetime commitment to transforming animal agriculture—this is not just an ordinary job for us, but a calling. We work tirelessly to keep abreast of the unfolding realities of industrial farming so that we can identify the pressure points capable of truly weakening and ultimately transforming animal agriculture as we know it. We live in a world that demands specialists, and our specialty is building the public will to end factory farming.

For fifteen years we’ve been doing just that, and, with your help, we are just getting started!

Onward and forward,

Aaron S. Gross

Founder and CEO // Farm Forward

P.S. – Please consider supporting our efforts with a donation of $10 or more! Every donation in any amount helps demonstrate the public will to end factory farming and helps our efforts to secure funds from foundations and large donors.

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Thank you for reading the second letter from Farm Forward’s founder, Aaron Gross. The final letter in the series can be found here.

This letter is the first in a 3-part message from our founder, Aaron Gross. To read the next letter in the series, please click here.

As Thanksgiving leftovers disappear, I still find myself filled with gratitude for the movement we are building to end factory farming and transform our food system. In 2022, Farm Forward turns fifteen years old, and, as New Years approaches, it’s a powerful time to reflect on just how much strength we’ve built. Our movement is stronger and closer to victory than you may think.

In the last twelve months Farm Forward’s call to transform animal agriculture has reached more people than ever before. The videos that we helped create on humanewashing and the link between factory farming and pandemics alone have been viewed more than a million times.

But what’s more important than individual statistics is the way our and others’ efforts are beginning to create a seismic cultural shift. Factory farming itself was the result of a massive cultural shift whereby Americans took the power to farm away from historic farm communities and handed that power over to large corporations who promised us cheap, clean, efficient food. Instead, what they gave us was climate change, superbugs, environmental racism, and a scale of animal suffering so immense that we literally cannot comprehend it—the groaning of billions of land animals and trillions of sea animals in nightmarish conditions.

The factory farm—especially the poultry industry—increasingly needs to renew the lie that first allowed it to destroy traditional agriculture and take over meat production. In important ways, the factory farm still has the upper hand—more money, more media, more political clout—but anyone paying attention knows the balance of power has shifted.

Will you help us seize this unique moment when the pandemic and other forces have made factory farms particularly vulnerable?

Consumers are demanding more information about where their animal products come from, major retailers are dropping deceptive humanewashing labels, politicians are proposing moratoriums for the first time, plant-based meat companies are experiencing explosive growth, veganism is increasingly a mainstream choice, the climate change movement is finally realizing the impact of changing food systems, financiers are warning of the risks of investing in factory farms, and, as a result, even cultural icons like Harvard University are considering radically retooling their dining services to make plant-based proteins the new default.

We need your support to continue to raise the conscience of consumers.

The future isn’t here yet, but it’s clear it belongs to those of us who believe in a better way to farm.

Onward and forward,

Aaron S. Gross

Founder and CEO // Farm Forward

P.S. – Please consider supporting our efforts with a donation of $10 or more! Every donation in any amount helps demonstrate the public will to end factory farming and helps our efforts to secure funds from foundations and large donors.

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Thank you for reading the first of 3 letters from Farm Forward’s founder, Aaron Gross. The next letter in the series can be found here.

See also our subsequent blog post “Progress: An Update on Farm Forward’s Commitment to a Safe and Inclusive Workplace and Movement.”

Headlines from the last two weeks have documented serious problems with workplace sexual harassment within the anti–factory farming movement. The most thoughtful discussions have put the problems with harassment inside the broader frame of pay inequity and chronic discrimination based on sex, gender, and race. That such discrimination is unacceptable should go without saying, but apparently it needs to be said: Sex, gender, racial and other forms of bias are both ethically intolerable and socially debilitating. Such discrimination troubles all of us and threatens the moral energies that are the ultimate foundation of the movement to end factory farming. At the end of this letter, I list four concrete ways that Farm Forward is responding to recent events but please first allow me to put those next steps in context.

Though my colleagues and I at Farm Forward have for several years taken increased action to address sex, gender, and racial bias in our movement I myself did not sufficiently appreciate the scale of the suffering faced by colleagues at other organizations and the profundity of the harm done to our movement as a whole. To paraphrase Indian farmed animal advocate, Clementien Pauws-Koenegras, there is a big difference between seeing and seeing. I am grateful to all of those who helped us see the problems, often at great personal cost.

Farm Forward wants to seize this opportunity to make the anti–factory farming movement more just in our workplaces and we know many other organizations do as well, but getting a firm grasp on the full shape and scope of the problems also requires the patience to look clearly and closely. Not patience with the wrongdoing, of course—so much of the shame of the present moment is precisely a kind of perverse patience for the exploiters. Rather, I point to the kind of patience that allows us to cease the problem-solving just long enough to grasp as fully as we can what has happened, and the nature and implications of the environments in which these sorts of problems have occurred. The right kind of patience builds our endurance and creates not simply a basis for response, but for creating systems of responsibility.

Enabling sexual exploiters and creating workplace environments shaped by sex, gender, and racial bias are bad enough problems, but the deeper truth is that these problems are also symptoms. I see many in the anti–factory farming space hastening to respond with policies and trainings addressed narrowly at anti-harassment, which is good, but I do not see transformative potential in such policy and training alone.

Perhaps the greatest possibility for transformation towards greater justice and efficacy lies in taking seriously the longstanding call of many prescient voices to rethink the nature of our fight against industrial farming. As Farm Forward Faith in Food Fellow, Dr. Rev. Christopher Carter, has helped me articulate, we would do well to ask what it would mean to not only be a movement “for” animal welfare, food justice, or other values, but also one of many movements standing against oppression—against oppression as a mindset and material system.

It is one kind of victory to, for example, address sex and gender based inequity; it is another to address the sources that lead sex and gender based inequity to be so widespread in the first place. We want to do both. At Farm Forward, this means that in addition to policy and training work, we are asking how sex and gender bias in the movement have impacted strategic decision-making, how we can better understand the harms this has done to anti–factory farming work, and, above all, asking what new strategies now emerge as worthy of attention.

The roots of gender, sex, and racial bias in the nonprofit sector are longstanding and deep. As my colleague at Compassion in World Farming, Leah Garces, put it, “pressure must come from stakeholders at every level to tackle the problem at its root and prevent further harm.”

Below are four ways Farm Forward is responding:

1. Farm Forward already has a robust policy against sexual and other forms of harassment that describes in clear details our expectations of all employees. It is in fact the first policy we ever created and the first in our handbook. We are in the process of engaging the entire staff in a review of these policies, including instituting new training procedures. To read more about our internal policies against discrimination, see this link to our current employee handbook.
2. In order to ensure greater equity, Farm Forward salaries are set according to a compensation formula and not individually negotiated by employees. When we hire new people we openly discuss how their salary compares to other employees for transparency. In addition, we have recently hired an outside consultant whose charge includes a review of our policies for determining salary to ensure ongoing fairness.
3. While Farm Forward has received no complaints from employees to date (indeed, no full-time employee has ever left Farm Forward’s staff), we are in the process of developing and administering anonymous surveys and other procedures to ensure we are in fact achieving the safest possible working environment.
4. Farm Forward in partnership with the allied nonprofit we helped found last year, the Better Food Foundation, will allot at least $50,000 in spending to address sex, gender, and racial discrimination and its impact on strategic decision making in the fight against factory farming. Stay tuned for further announcements about these efforts.

While saddened by all the harm that has been done, the present moment is ultimately a lucky one. We are fortunate to be in a movement that has broken the silence about abuses that are, in the end, a problem in almost every sector of our society. We are fortunate to have the opportunity to build a better movement, and we will.

Onward and forward,

Aaron S. Gross
Founder and CEO

Unethical slaughter methods continue to be commonly used in the production of kosher meat sold in the United States and Israel, but resistance to these outdated practices is mounting due to public pressure. The most well known problem is the abysmal slaughter conditions common in South American plants that provide a large portion of U.S. and Israeli kosher meat, including the painful “shackle and hoist” method. More than four years ago, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate promised to stop certifying meat from animals killed using the shackle and hoist method as kosher, but the practice persists.

The largest American kosher certification agency, OU Kosher, also continues to certify animals from South America as kosher, despite the persistent use of these painful methods. The USDA even shut down a calf slaughter plant in New Jersey that regularly performed kosher slaughter due to humane violations.1

In response to these and other problems in kosher certification, the American Orthodox rabbi and founder of The Shamayim V’Aretz Institute, Shmuly Yanklowitz, declared in the Wall Street Journal, “As I learned about the reality of industrial kosher slaughter … I began to realize how far current practices of animal treatment and slaughter are from the traditional ethical values. I also found out that animals sent to kosher slaughterhouses are raised on the same cruel farms as those sent to non-kosher slaughter.”2

Rabbi Yanklowitz, who follows a plant-based diet, was challenged in the Jewish press because of these comments, so we asked animal welfare expert Dr. Temple Grandin what she thought of Rabbi Yanklowitz’s criticism of the kosher meat industry. “I support Rabbi Yanklowitz,” she wrote to us in early June, 2014. As far as Grandin is concerned, kosher slaughter itself is not the issue, but rather the very serious animal abuse and mistreatment that is all too common for animals eventually certified as kosher. In her email, Dr. Grandin put it simply: “There are many bad conditions in kosher plants.”

The severity of these problems has inspired resistance even from within the kosher meat business. One professional Jewish slaughterer (shochet), Yadidya Greenberg, has gone so far as to provide a “scorecard” for natural kosher beef, offering an insider’s perspective on the treatment of animals, the environment, and workers. Farm Forward applauds Greenberg, Rabbi Yanklowitz, and countless other religious leaders who, in Yanklowitz’s words, are working towards “a day when the kosher-meat and dairy industries respect the sentience of the animal and venerate the divine in creation“.3

See our original feature on kosher meat certification for more information.

Sign up for the Farm Forward newsletter to receive updates and important information about how you can get involved.

About a decade ago a small group of animal advocates introduced a first-of-its-kind bill in the Illinois legislature to phase out the barren battery cages now used in the production of eggs—cages so small that most all of today’s hens cannot even stretch their wings. The bill was roundly defeated. The United Egg Producers (UEP) so strongly opposed the bill that UEP representative Gene Gregory refused to even discuss the bill with animal welfare leaders.

Yet on July 7 this past week, Gregory (now the President and CEO of the UEP) and the CEO of the nation’s largest animal welfare group, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), announced that UEP and HSUS will cooperate to pass federal legislation that will phase out those same barren battery cages and replace them with larger “enriched cages.” It’s a fundamental change in the landscape of US animal protection.

No federal law has ever protected farmed animals except during slaughter and farmed birds have been excluded from even this protection, so the HSUS-UEP proposal is animal welfare history in the making. It’s also a history I’ve watched unfold from a unique angle.

When Gregory came to the Illinois legislative session a decade ago to oppose the bill introduced by Illinois Humane PAC, the Humane PAC representative he met was with Farm Forward’s then-CEO, Steve Gross, my father. I remember Steve’s frustration: “Gregory shook my hand perfunctorily and then adopted the poultry industry’s longstanding, informal SOP [standard operating procedure] to refuse to dialog with animal welfare advocates.”

The credit for breaking this dysfunctional pattern goes in large measure to HSUS’s CEO, Wayne Pacelle, who opened dialog between the American public and the poultry industry. His achievement was only possible because campaigns led by HSUS and Farm Sanctuary—supported by a massive coalition of groups including Farm Forward—had passed a series of state-level laws (like the one that failed in Illinois a decade ago) banning aspects of the intensive confinement of animals. A series of state-level regulations threaten to groups like the UEP more than a single, uniform national law. It was just plain common sense for the UEP to negotiate.

As historic as this new dialog is, it remains only a small step forward at the level of pragmatic change: by analogy, if egg-laying hens previously were confined to a closet, under the proposed HSUS-UEP agreement they will be confined to a walk-in closet. This is a meaningful and important, but also a limited improvement. The enriched cage system still prevents birds from engaging in many of the basic life activities that, well, make a bird a bird: running, jumping, feeling the sun, flapping one’s wings. Even more importantly, the joint HSUS-UEP proposal has not opened a conversation—not yet—about the unhealthy genetics of the birds themselves, which I and many welfare experts, like poultry farmer Frank Reese, would argue is today’s biggest welfare problem in the poultry industry.

The industry’s intensive breeding techniques, which changed the genetics of laying hens, led to these birds being caged in the first place. When these intensive breeding techniques managed to double the numbers of eggs hens laid each year,1 they also genetically compromised the immune systems of the birds. The industry isolated birds in cages so that they would be less likely to transmit disease. Cages, enriched or not, are an attempt to mitigate welfare problems introduced by the Frankenstein genetics of today’s laying hens.

Scientific studies have shown that today’s egg-laying hens have not only inadequate immune systems,2 but also fragile skeletons that result in a constant stream of bone breakages, and previously rare tumors3 and reproductive diseases.4 Although industry and animal advocates understand that genetics are the root cause of great suffering, few are talking about genetics because we have been, not without reason, focused on issues of how these birds are raised.

As the proposed federal legislation is discussed in more detail Farm Forward will be urging both parties to listen to something Frank Reese likes to say, “if you change production practices, you change production practices but if you change genetics, you change the industry.” Now that producers and advocates have agreed change is needed, it is time to discuss the 800 pound gorilla in the barn: breeding “high-efficiency” but unhealthy animals. In the end, it is only by addressing the genetics question that we can truly move farming forward. —Aaron Gross, Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Please consider a donation to support our efforts to make sure the most important issue in farmed animal welfare today—the problem of Frankenstein genetics—is taken seriously by policy makers. Join the Farm Forward mailing list below to receive updates and important information about how you can get involved.

Update (June 20, 2014): See Keeping Kosher Update feature.

Update (June 30, 2011): Farm Forward has verified that the Israeli chief rabbinate has not followed up on its promise to stop certifying as kosher meat from animals killed using the painful shackle and hoist method in South American slaughterhouses. We alerted Israeli activists to this lack of progress last month, resulting in this article in the premier Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. Farm Forward remains committed to working with the vast majority of American and Israeli Jews who, in the best spirit of the Abrahamic religions’ tradition of compassion for animals, want to see this cruelty ended. “The horrible deaths received by animals in these South American slaughterhouses is the most egregious animal welfare problem in kosher slaughter today,” notes Farm Forward founder Aaron Gross. “Farm Forward has a special commitment to working with religious communities of all kinds that want to address the problems of factory farming in ways specific to each community. Factory farming is not an ethical problem relevant only to secular society. It is a problem for any person of faith who believes animals are more than mere things.”

Update (June 23, 2010): Roughly a month after the release of PETA’s undercover investigation, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger announced that starting in 2011 he will no longer certify as kosher animals killed in slaughterhouses that use the widely condemned “shackle and hoist” slaughter method. Today roughly 80% of Israel’s kosher meat imports come from South American slaughterhouses that use shackle and hoist. The same slaughterhouses presently supply the majority of America’s kosher beef as well. Farm Forward commends the Chief Rabbi on his decision and is cautiously optimistic that the tremendous pressure his actions have created will lead to the end of shackle and hoist in kosher slaughter globally. We will continue our diplomatic efforts to end shackle and hoist until we can report that the practice has stopped.1

Original Feature

Earlier today the Los Angeles Times broke a disturbing and all-too-familiar story of egregious animal abuse caught on videotape by an undercover investigator.2 Farm Forward provided a range of consultation services that made the investigation a success. This investigation is especially significant because the abuse occurred at a kosher abattoir certified by the nation’s premier kosher certification agency, the Orthodox Union. The robust tradition of compassion for animals that is a shared feature of all the Abrahamic traditions has long been something that has inspired Farm Forward’s Executive Staff. For these very personal reasons, this systematic abuse of farmed animals and endangerment of workers is especially painful. But more than that, when religious institutions unrepentantly support the cruelty of the factory farm industry, they do more than simply contribute to suffering—they use the authority of religion to defend the indefensible. This should concern Americans of all faiths.

The investigation, spearheaded by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), showed that the nation’s largest supplier of kosher beef, Alle Processors, relies on South American abattoirs that use the cruel “shackle and hoist” method of slaughter. Virtually all experts in animal behavior—and the rabbinic authorities themselves—agree that the process of shackle and hoist slaughter causes animals more suffering and workers more danger when compared to all other techniques presently in use. The nation’s most respected expert on animal welfare during slaughter, Dr. Temple Grandin, said in response to the investigation, “It’s a really terrible practice and it needs to stop. It’s that simple.”3 The Conservative movement, accounting for nearly 40% of American Jewry, has had a policy for nearly a decade that prohibits shackle and hoist as a violation of the Jewish principle of compassion for animals.4 Farm Forward has learned that the Orthodox Union, which currently certifies meat produced by these methods, is quietly working to end the practice.

If the Orthodox Union would prefer to see an end to the use of shackle and hoist as a method of slaughter, why do they continue to certify meat that comes from facilities in which this practice is performed? Their answer is very clear: The importance of supplying a regular stream of kosher beef takes precedence over animal suffering and the danger to workers that is inherent in shackle and hoist. This is not Farm Forward’s deduction; this is what Orthodox Jewish leadership has publicly stated.5 And it’s not a fundamentally different position than that taken by many people concerned by factory farming who still eat factory farmed meat when no other is available. It’s a way of thinking that must change if the factory farm is to disappear.

A rare point of unanimous agreement in the often controversial realm of animal welfare is the consensus that, at very least, the animals we eat should be given a quick death with minimal pain and suffering. Despite this, a steady stream of undercover videos6 and even much of the publicly available record on conditions in America’s slaughterhouses has revealed consistent neglect in slaughter as practiced. As Farm Forward board member Jonathan Safran Foer put it in his most recent book, Eating Animals, “No jokes here, and no turning away. Let’s say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned, and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it. Several plants cited for bleeding or skinning or dismembering live animals have defended their actions as common in the industry and asked, perhaps rightly, why they were being singled out.” These abuses in kosher slaughter should concern us, but they must be seen as what they are, one facet of a much larger problem.

Ending factory farming will take far more than legislative and political victories, important as those are. Factory Farming is a part of our culture and this is why Farm Forward emphasizes the important role of culture makers—educators, artists, academics, clergy and others—in transforming the way America eats and farms. It’s for this reason that Farm Forward has given special attention to the issue of religious slaughter. It’s not because we simply want to end religiously sanctioned abuse of farmed animals but because we understand that America’s rich religious traditions are sleeping giants in the fight against factory farming.

Farm Forward provided vital consultation services to PETA that allowed them to conduct and release the results of this investigation with sensitivity and respect. “With the special complexities that surround religious slaughter,” says PETA president Ingrid Newkirk, “Farm Forward’s consulting has proved invaluable to PETA’s ability to win better conditions for animals at kosher facilities. This group is an indispensable and invaluable resource. . . .” And in the words of Temple Grandin, “Farm Forward’s Aaron Gross has played a critical role in improving kosher slaughter; from Agriprocessors to the current South American investigation his knowledge about both the Jewish and animal communities is invaluable.”

Farm Forward’s Aaron Gross has played a critical role in improving kosher slaughter; from Agriprocessors to the current South American investigation his knowledge about both the Jewish and animal communities is invaluable.” —Temple Grandin

Helping PETA with their investigation, though, is just one step. Increasingly, we are working with Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and other religious leaders who want to raise their voices against the factory farm. The Farm Forward team has been particularly active in working with Jewish leadership since helping with the first exposé7 of animal abuse in kosher facilities in 2004. Then as now, the work Farm Forward and others have done to bring these abuses to public attention is important but insufficient. The real work begins when the scandals fade from public attention: the work of transforming these glimpses of factory farming into commitments to end the whole broken system.

Please consider becoming a Farm Forward Founding Sponsor by committing to donate on a monthly basis. With a recurring donation of $25 or more a month we’ll send you a complimentary copy of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals.