Expanded dairy animal welfare standards in Germany
In Germany, the “Initiative Animal Welfare” (ITW) organisation, which so far has developed a uniform labeling for meat (pig, beef and poultry) based on a four-tier system, wants to expand to the husbandry for milk and dairy products as of 2022. The ITW and its retailers have therefore started to create standards for the dairy area.
The German dairy industry has already its own system – the QM-Milch – which could be used as a base for the development of ITW standards. QM-Milch offers the advantage that there is already a comprehensive catalog of strict and verifiable quality standards for milk production, which are uniformly. This also includes an existing slaughterhouse and antibiotic database.
The discussion is how the ITW system with four animal welfare levels can be merged with the QM-Milch criteria such as QM animal welfare, which contains resilient animal health and animal welfare criteria. For milk producers, who successfully follow the criteria, an animal welfare surcharge for their associated expenses will be audited in the future.
Different surveys show that animal welfare is increasingly important to the consumer. The additional costs will hit the dairies, which also will have to think about separate pickup and processing, if/when dairy farms are being divided into levels.
The German dairies are in general ready for this challenge, but they also expect that the trading partners help to find a satisfactory solution, especially around the issue of financing.