Animal Welfare

At Johnsonville we define animal well-being using the Five Domains model, which focuses on how behavior, health, environment, and nutrition ultimately impact an animal’s mental state. We take seriously our obligation to be responsible stewards of the animals in our supply chain, and to make a meaningfully positive impact at every point in their lives. We do this by:

Actively managing, influencing, and educating our members, suppliers and industry peers around the importance of animal care;

Ensuring safe transport of animals from farms to our facilities, which includes monitoring weather forecasts and taking the necessary industry-recognized steps to ensure safe and humane transport;

Providing manifestly superior care to animals in our facilities.

Our goal is to be transparent about
our challenges and progress.

Please contact animalwelfare@johnsonville.com if you have any specific questions.

Sow Housing

No housing system is perfect. Gestation stalls are currently the most common form of pregnant sow housing and minimize sow aggression and injury, facilitate individualized care, feeding and monitoring. On the flip side, such housing means sows are confined in small pens that don’t allow any real movement, social interaction, or other behaviors essential to pig well-being.  Accordingly, Johnsonville publicly committed in 2013 to eliminate the use of gestation stalls in its supply chain by 2025.

Because Johnsonville neither owns farms or raises animals, our progress towards this commitment depends on what the rest of the industry is doing.  We’ll continue to support our suppliers who make animal-centric choices around sow housing, and continue urging those suppliers who haven’t made the switch to do so; but we do not expect to meet our 2025 timeline.  We will, however, continue to publicly report our progress on this important topic.

Keep It Fun. Keep It Together.

Keep your plates full, keep your tables fuller, and whatever you do, don’t forget to keep it juicy.