Humane Farm Animal Care

Humane Farm Animal Care is working to reshape the U.S. farm animal agriculture system through a market-based solution. This solution enables individuals to vote with their wallets for the way they want their food to be produced. It meets the emerging demand for products from animals raised to humane care standards, a demand generated by increasing visibility in books, the media, and nonprofit advocacy. It gives farmers who treat animals—and workers—humanely a way to stand out and prosper.

HFAC seeks to inspire individuals to be changemakers by asking for humane products. This demand motivates retailers, restaurants, and food service companies to find qualifying producers and pay them fairly, and to ask for change from existing suppliers.

HFAC will continue to operate the Certified Humane® program’s status as the program with the highest standards for humane animal treatment from birth through slaughter, accountability, transparency, and integrity.

HFAC will continue to work with leading experts in the field of farm animal welfare and continue to review and improve the HFAC "Animal Care Standards".

HFAC will inspire individuals to become change makers through Consumer Outreach by continuing to produce and distribute compelling educational materials for consumers to raise awareness about the Certified Humane® program and humane farming issues generally. HFAC will continue to encourage more volunteers to become active in their communities as part of our “Take Action” plan. In addition, HFAC will continue to help farmers change the way they raise animals through the producer educational outreach efforts by providing materials, by exhibiting at key industry events, attending meetings, and giving presentations so that farmers, ranchers, processors, and product manufacturers can learn about the Certified Humane® program.

HFAC will manage the certification program with the most highly-qualified, well-trained inspectors for on-farm, slaughter, and traceability inspections. HFAC will continue to update the website with all new information as it becomes available, including the “Standards”, list of “Who is Certified”, staff, board members, press, Program/Policy Manual, and all other relevant materials in order to continue to be transparent.

HFAC’s Scientific Committee will continue to review and update” Animal Care Standards” as warranted by current research and best practices. Also, the Scientific Committee will provide information to farmers (in the form of white papers, research briefs, and other tools) about how they can change practices to improve the welfare of their animals.

Certification Program: Maintain the Certified Humane® program’s status as the program with the highest standards for humane animal treatment from birth through slaughter, accountability, transparency, and integrity.

HFAC has an outstanding staff with knowledge and experience in farming, communications, and certification. HFAC’s board of directors provides additional expertise in the areas of retail operations, communications, social media. HFAC’s 42-Member Scientific Committee is international, with members in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, and all over the U.S. The Scientific Committee members are leading experts in the field of farm animal welfare.

Hundreds of individual volunteers, who “Take Action”, will help make a difference for future growth.

Over 70 national, regional, and local humane organizations endorse HFAC and the Certified Humane® program. Each of these organizations has their own members that they do outreach to.

What has contributed to our 17 years of growth and will continue to help us grow in the future is our reputation for integrity, fairness, transparency, and expertise and that we never forget that our mission is to improve the lives of farm animals.

In 2003, when HFAC was founded, 143,000 animals were raised under HFAC's “Animal Care Standards”. Now in 2020 alone, HFAC certified the humane treatment of over 260 million animals bringing the total number animals benefiting from living by the Certified Humane standards since the founding of the program to over 1-1/2 billion.

Consumer demand for Certified Humane® products continued to grow: Certified Humane® products are now available in over 80,000 retailers worldwide. HFAC has always had strong support from humane organizations.