Niman Ranch: AWI Approved
Good for the pigs, the family farmer and the community

By Diane Halverson

Paul Willis' farm: Where pigs enjoy being pigs, not production units. Photo by Diane Halverson.

To help end mistreatment of farm animals, the Animal Welfare Institute is supporting the Niman Ranch Company and its network of family hog farmers who follow humane husbandry criteria developed by the Animal Welfare Institute. AWI's criteria require that all animals be allowed to behave naturally. Unlike the crated sows on factory farms, the sows in the Niman Ranch program have freedom of movement, allowing them to fulfill their instinctive desire to build a nest when they are about to give birth. Unlike the factory farm pigs housed on concrete slats over manure pits, Niman Ranch pigs are raised on pasture or in barns with bedding where they can live in accord with their natures, rooting for food, playing and socializing. AWI's criteria require that the participants in the program be independent family farmers, that is, the farmer must own the animals, depend on the farm for a livelihood and be involved in the day to day physical labor of managing the pigs. This requirement helps to ensure that pigs are raised in modest numbers, making it easier to know and manage the animals as individuals.

Niman Ranch, which buys the pigs and markets the meat, also forbids feeding or otherwise administering hormones or antibiotics and prohibits the feeding of animal by-products. Unlike factory farmers, humane farmers in the Niman Ranch program do not rely on antibiotics to mask clinical manifestations of disease or to promote growth; therefore, they do not contribute to the devastating problem of antibiotic resistance among humans.

Paul Willis, the farmer who inspired AWI's involvement in the program, keeps 200 sows and their offspring on pasture or in barns bedded with straw on his Midwest farm. Niman Ranch rewards Willis, and farmers like him, by paying them a premium price. Niman Ranch products are available at 200 fine restaurants in California, at Trader Joe's stores in the West, at Whole Foods stores in northern California, and through the Williams-Sonoma mail order catalogue. Additional markets are being developed nationwide. In a 1995 Opinion Research Corporation survey, 93% of the adults surveyed believed that animals should be treated humanely, even when being raised for human consumption, and three-fourths opposed confining sows in crates, laying hens in battery cages and veal calves in crates. The Niman Ranch program gives a growing number of such consumers an opportunity to reject meat derived from pigs raised in animal factories and assists in the preservation of humane family farms, thereby helping to set a humane standard in raising of animals for food.

Reprinted with permission from the Animal Welfare Institute.