ANIMAL WELFARE

At Murphy-Brown, we subscribe to the animal welfare position put forth by the National Pork Producers Council.

Biosecurity

Herd health is vitally important in hog production, and our biosecurity policy is intended to protect our pigs from disease and poor performance. Healthy pigs grow faster, perform better, have higher livability, are easier to maintain and produce the highest-quality pork products.

At Murphy-Brown our biosecurity program is divided into two parts: the animal production process at the individual farm, and movement of vehicles, animals, personnel and equipment between farms.

Before any visitors are allowed to enter our farms, they must complete a biosecurity questionnaire to determine whether they have been on other farms recently and whether they have been in contact with any hogs outside our system during the previous 72 hours. International visitors are required to complete a more thorough questionnaire and their waiting period before entering our farms is much longer. We have carefully developed procedures to prevent contaminants from being brought onto our individual farms by requiring all employees and visitors go through a “shower-in” process before entering. This process utilizes private shower rooms where those entering the farm take a head-to-toe shower and change into clean clothing before proceeding into the farm. Upon leaving the farm, all personnel and visitors “shower out” in a reversal of the entry procedure.

Equipment and supplies delivered to the farm must be disinfected prior to being allowed inside the farm complex. Additional biosecurity measures are taken on our genetic multiplication farms and at locations where semen collection for the artificial insemination process occurs.

Nutrition

It’s important for us to pay close attention to the nutritional needs of our animals. Here’s what Dr. Jeffrey A. Hansen, one of our in-house nutritionists, has to say about the feeding systems we have in place on our farms:

“With feed manufacturing capability in excess of 6.5 million tons per year and consumption of corn in excess of 150 million bushels, Murphy-Brown is one of the single largest consumers of U.S. feed grains in the world. We use computerized feed mills that manage product flow to ensure accurate product mix and no cross-contamination between inbound ingredient supplies and outbound feed products.

Our staff of skilled nutritionists has developed advanced feed formulation techniques that ensure every mouthful of feed meets the animals’ nutrient requirements at the best possible cost. These tools also allow us to utilize a wide array of nontraditional feed ingredients such as bakery by-products, distillers grains and wheat bran. We recover these valuable products, which might otherwise wind up in landfills.

We maintain a sophisticated quality assurance program that monitors our ingredients and verifies good manufacturing practices are followed for all of our feeds. High standards are set and achieved for animal feeding. Murphy-Brown is one of the few companies in the U.S. currently certified to meet the strict standards set for exporting pork to the European Union. Our manufacturing and distribution teams utilize state-of-the-art logistics programs to ensure we maximize the efficiency of our production operations while minimizing our use of fossil fuels.”

Comprehensive Animal Management

For many years, we used our own industry-leading animal welfare management program to ensure our animals receive proper care. Our Animal Welfare Management System (AWMS) was closely developed with two of the world’s foremost experts in animal behavior and animal handling. Experts from a variety of disciplines—veterinary medicine, reproductive physiology, production management, marketing, management system administration, legal, logistics, and public affairs—participated in an animal welfare committee to make sure animal well-being practices would be evaluated from many different perspectives.

A few years ago, based on our leading animal welfare role in the industry, we volunteered to provide input and recommendations to help the National Pork Board enhance its animal care program for all pork producers. That program became the National Pork Board’s Pork Quality Assurance Plus Program, better known as PQA Plus. The concepts and methods of AWMS and PQA Plus are essentially the same, but the PQA Plus program offers a unified, industry approach for animal welfare and food safety issues. The National Pork Board and National Pork Producers Council have set a goal of certifying all pork producers under the PQA Plus program by December 31, 2010. We encourage all 67,000 U.S. hog producers to become certified and have their farms assessed under the PQA Plus program by this date.

For more information on PQA Plus please visit the PQA Plus Web site.

Industry-Leading Accident Response Plan

We have livestock traveling America’s highways in transport vehicles every day. We only hire highly qualified drivers, but there still exists the possibility of our vehicles being involved in traffic accidents.

For the sake of animal safety and welfare, we’ve developed an industry-leading accident response program. Any time there is an accident involving our animals, trained Murphy-Brown employees put that plan into action, emphasizing the safety of the animals, fellow travelers and emergency personnel.

We retained the services of Jennifer Woods, an internationally recognized livestock handling expert, to analyze our accident response plan. This expert later stated, “No other company in the world is as prepared to respond to motor vehicle accidents involving livestock as [Murphy-Brown is].” She went on to call our program “the standard for the industry in live-haul emergency response.”

Landmark Gestation Stall Policy

We have committed to phasing out individual gestation stalls for pregnant sows at all company-owned sow farms and are replacing them with group housing. We announced the program, known as “free access,” in January 2007.

We based our decision on initial results from our own three-year study into sow housing to determine the impact such a switch would have on sows. Our research results showed that group housing arrangements work as well as gestation stalls in providing sows with proper care during their pregnancies. This landmark decision further evidences our commitment to industry leadership.