Sustainability
To raise and produce chicken, it takes fresh water, fertile soil and clean air. We rely on a healthy planet to do our job, and the U.S. chicken industry is committed to implementing and maintaining production practices that reduce our environmental impact and support a thriving planet Earth.
These practices allow us to be more responsible stewards of land and water, animal feed and management, and our communities. Now more than ever, our industry is applying continuous innovation in the service of optimizing the use of water, farmland, electricity and other valuable natural resources. Our goal is to nourish more people, generate less environmental impact, and use fewer resources.
If you’re not taking care of your soil and your air, then you have nothing. Making sure that we do that, either through our cropland production or in our chicken houses, it’s just our lifeblood. It’s important for us to run a farm that is sustainable because we have children who will inherit this farm, and we want to make sure they can have this farm in 100 years.
Chicken production has long had a less significant environmental footprint than almost any other animal agriculture industry. We have made meaningful strides in minimizing environmental impact with the help of technological advancements and improved animal husbandry practices.
While the work is ongoing and focused on the long-term, we’re proud of the results we’re seeing so far. Between 2010 and 2020, the U.S. chicken industry achieved significant improvements in the following key sustainability intensity metrics:
Our work will continue, as it must, to support our planet and society for the decades to come. Looking ahead, the U.S. chicken industry is focused on continuing to promote sustainable development, making additional improvements to the metrics above and forging new partnerships with other organizations to leverage our collective strengths. The future of our planet, people and communities depends on us doing our part.
To read more about sustainability in the chicken industry, read the 2020 U.S. Broiler Industry Sustainability Report.
