Farm Forward

Call Directions Website Contact the organization

Join the movement to help change the way our nation eats and farms! We educate to create deep change that endures across generations.

Find us on Twitter and on Instagram Read more at: https://linktr.ee/farmforward Educate:
Farm Forward puts you in conversation with remarkable culture makers—religious leaders, educators, authors, and film makers—who strike at the roots that sustain factory farming. Eat:
Farm Forward provides you with thoughtful, simple, evolving recommendations on food choices that minimize animal suffering and increase sustainability—from certified high welfare heritage poultry to emerging plant-based alternatives. In a phrase: Eat conscientiously—as few animals as possible, ideally none. Farm:
Farm Forward partners with farmers who combine the best in traditional animal-centered husbandry and animal welfare science to reinvent animal agriculture. Because more chickens and turkeys suffer in factory farms than any other animal, we’re focused on establishing new models of post-industrial poultry farms.

10/05/2026

One of the meat industry’s most powerful tools over the past several decades has been humanewashing. Few labels are more successful at this than “humanely raised.” The label appears on meat and poultry products at most grocery stores across the country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has authority over many claims that appear on meat labels and for years set no meaningful standards for what meat producers needed to do to use the label.

After over a decade of pressure from advocacy groups, including Farm Forward, in 2024 USDA rewrote its guidelines for “humanely raised” labels on animal products. In our new report, we explore what’s changed since then. The short answer: not much.

For decades, the meat industry has worked overtime to persuade consumers that the animals who end up on their plates are not the products of factory farming. Its most effective tool in that endeavor is humanewashing: misleading marketing and language, often built around nice-sounding labels that cre...

09/30/2026

A thorough, well-reported look at how American cattle went from open range to 200,000 bodies packed on one square mile of concrete. The Blackshirt feedlot in Nebraska shows what the industry has been building toward for 70 years.

This article from Kiowa County Press traces how the industry got here, from the 1950s shift to grain finishing to a regulatory system with no ceiling on facility size. It also talks to the ranchers and neighbors living next to it. Farm Forward's executive director Andrew deCoriolis is quoted on why the scale is the problem.

A proposed 200,000-head cattle feedlot in southwestern Nebraska would become the nation's largest single-site facility, raising concerns among locals about water consumption, air quality, and environmental impacts.

09/25/2026

Iowa has the most factory farms of any state, which means the most manure. Excess runs off into groundwater, streams and lakes. Nitrates in drinking water are linked to colorectal, kidney, thyroid, prostate and breast cancer, and Iowa's rates for all five are above the national average. Its overall cancer rate is the fastest-growing in the nation.

Sentient Media mapped the manure output of all 10,830 of Iowa's factory farms here:

Here’s what the data reveal about the country’s factory farm hotbed.

09/17/2026

The IRS just released new guidelines that confirm that biogas made from livestock manure qualifies for a federal clean fuel tax credit. The credit is calculated by comparing a farm's biogas project against how it used to handle waste. Liquid manure storage is one of the highest-emitting methods there is so the farms with the dirtiest track records get measured against the dirtiest baseline, which means a bigger credit.

From Farm Forward's executive director Andrew deCoriolis: "The tax code doesn't distinguish 'a bad actor cleaning up' from 'a bad actor being rewarded for having been bad for decades.'" Smaller, pasture-based farms that never relied on liquid manure storage don't even qualify, because there's no dirty baseline to measure them against.

Read more here:

New Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guidance released last week confirms that gas extracted from livestock manure qualifies for a federal clean fuel tax credit, paving the way for increased investment in biogas projects.

09/11/2026

Give a list to this San Diego's Morning News episode featuring Farm Forward founder Dr. Aaron Gross as he discusses foodborne illness outbreaks.

There have been several food recalls this year, but is it an unusual amount compared to past years? Veronica Carter and Bret Burkhart found out from the director of the Center for Food Systems Transformation at University of San Diego, Aaron Gross. See om...

09/10/2026

In 2020, Rick Schiller, Steven Romes, the Porter family, Food & Water Watch, the Consumer Federation of America, and Consumer Reports petitioned USDA to declare the strains behind most salmonella outbreaks adulterants under federal law, the same legal mechanism that got E. coli O157:H7 out of ground beef in 1994. USDA denied the petition in 2022, saying there wasn't enough data.

There's more than enough data now. Our latest report finds that since 2014, the three salmonella strains most likely to make people sick have gone from a quarter to over two-thirds of what's found in chicken. Antibiotic resistance in those samples climbed too, from under half to nearly three-quarters.

Read more here:

The New Lede reported last week on a Farm Forward analysis of USDA sampling data that ought to end a long-running argument about how we measure

09/04/2026

In this podcast episode, Farm Forward founder Dr. Aaron Gross discusses the rise of foodborne illness outbreaks and how our food industry got us here.

Food safety concerns are growing amid recent outbreaks and recalls. We look at what it reveals about our food system. Then, a new study looks at how a vegan diet can alter how your body interprets DNA markers associated with aging and inflammation.

09/01/2026

Our latest report on salmonella is highlighted in this article from The New Lede: https://www.thenewlede.org/2026/08/poultry-cafos-salmonella-usda/

Our analysis of Food Safety and Inspection Service data from 2014 to 2025 found that the three salmonella strains most likely to make people sick now account for 68% of salmonella in poultry, up from just 25% a decade ago. Over 73% of salmonella-contaminated poultry in 2025 was resistant to at least one antibiotic critical for treating human illness. In 2014, that number was 48%.

From our executive director, Andrew deCoriolis: “We have a poultry industry in America that has become dominated by a single production system of giant animal factories, cramming thousands of birds together in filthy conditions that make foodborne illnesses like salmonella extremely likely. And we’re doing nothing on the regulatory side to protect consumers when the inevitable contamination happens."

Amid a busy season of summer food recalls and illnesses, sustainable farming advocates are warning that salmonella bacteria found in poultry is increasing strains most likely to cause illness, hospitalization and death, and that such bacteria are also increasingly resistant to antibiotic medicine.

08/20/2026

Big win for the future of aquaculture: plans to build the world’s first commercial octopus farm have been nixed!

An octopus farm proposal sparked global uproar from animal welfare advocates, scientists and ordinary people – including one 9-year-old.

08/13/2026

Researchers from the universities of Oxford and Sheffield analyzed nearly 2,750 samples of Campylobacter jejuni, the leading cause of bacterial food poisoning from chicken, and found that transmission between farmed chickens and wild birds has jumped more than 100-fold since 1900. Crammed together in industrial facilities, chickens act as a kind of sponge, picking up bacterial strains from the environment and giving pathogens more opportunities to develop resistance to antibiotics people depend on.

This tracks with what we found in our own investigation into salmonella: antibiotic resistance in positive poultry samples jumped from 48% in 2014 to 73% in 2025.

Our executive director, Andrew deCoriolis, put it simply: "When poultry companies cram tens of billions of birds into industrial facilities and dose them with routine antibiotics, they're not just risking outbreaks. They're running an evolution experiment on a massive scale and the bacteria are winning."

Learn more here:

The rapid growth of chickens — now, 31 billion globally — has sped up pathogen evolution, boosting persistence, antibiotic resistance and spillover to humans.

Address

Portland, OR

Telephone

+18773133276

Website

http://www.farmforward.com/donate

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Farm Forward posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to Farm Forward:

Want your organization to be the top-listed non profit organization in Portland?