Food Animal Concerns Trust

Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT) is a nonprofit organization in the U.S. concerned with food safety and animal welfare. FACT was founded in 1892 as the first U.S. organization devoted exclusively to addressing the public health problems that result from raising farm animals in confined and inhumane conditions.[1]

Mission

Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT) promotes the safe and humane production of meat, milk, and eggs.

FACT envisions that all food-producing animals will be raised in a healthy and humane manner so that everyone will have access to safe and humanely-produced food.

History

FACT was involved with some of the first calls for cage-free eggs in the U.S. food supply. In 1984, FACT launched the NEST EGGS Project. The project was designed to demonstrate that farmers would make money selling eggs from uncaged hens. The Nest Eggs Project produced eggs from approximately 675,000 hens without cages on its farms.[2] In 1986, FACT then launched the Rambling Rose Brand Veal Project. FACT developed a husbandry system for raising veal calves on pasture instead of in crates.[3] Currently, FACT opperates a Humane Farming program and a Food Safety program.

Humane Farming Program

FACT's Humane Farming program is mainly made up by the Fund-a-Farmer initiative. Fund-a-Farmer provides resources to farmers to improve the conditions on their farms through grants, conference scholarships, and webinars.[4] To date, the Fund-a-Farmer project has provided 67 scholarships, and 67 grants for farm improvement projects.

Food Safety Program

FACT works with the FDA and corporations to reduce the overuse of antibiotics on farms, and to combat the use of vetrinary drugs that cause disease in humans. Issues include: encouraging popular restaurants to source their food from farms that use antibiotics responsibly, ensuring that the cancer-causing swine drug carbadox is withdrawn from the food supply, and encourgaging the FDA to collect data from farms related to antibiotic use in order to inform analysis of antibiotic resitance in humans.[5]

References

  1. "About Us". FACT. Retrieved 2016-10-13.
  2. "About Us". FACT. Retrieved 2016-10-13.
  3. "About Us". FACT. Retrieved 2016-10-13.
  4. "Fund-a-Farmer Project by Food Animal Concerns Trust". Fund a Farmer. Retrieved 2016-10-13.
  5. "Food Safety". FACT. Retrieved 2016-10-13.
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