Ethical Eating Starts with Sustainable Meat Options

While fruits, grains and vegetables are often lauded as more eco-friendly, consumers should not shy away from meat and poultry, which can be a key component of a healthy diet. By looking past the label and understanding the production methods of your supplier, you can more easily choose a source that helps you meet your sustainable goals.

Maple Leaf Farms is a fourth-generation family business that understands the challenges of producing safe, nutritious food while being good stewards of our people, animals and natural resources. In fact, our founder, Donald Wentzel, had sustainability in mind when he started our company more than 60 years ago. After growing up on an Indiana farm and serving in the military, he had spent part of his career selling feed to duck producers on Long Island. He loved the industry, but thought it made more sense to raise the birds in the Midwest in the heart of the nation’s fertile cropland and more centrally located to markets throughout the country. And so, he put his ideas into practice and started Maple Leaf Farms.

As Wentzel’s son-in-law, Terry Tucker, took over leadership of the company, he continued Wentzel’s sustainable focus by making strategic moves to make the business more vertically integrated. With vertical integration, our company’s ducks continue to be raised on local family farms that are supported by company-owned operations like hatcheries, feed mills and more. Not only do these operations allow us to control the quality of important inputs and processes, but they help us more efficiently use the fossil fuels, water and other natural resources needed to produce our duck products. Here are just a few examples:

• Our feed mill purchases corn from local farmers to make our duck feeds. The waste generated at duck farms is then carefully applied to local farmland as fertilizer, helping to reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers.

• Our food processing plants carefully monitor water use to identify problems and opportunities for improvement. Ultimately wastewater is used to irrigate local cropland, recharging our local aquifer subsystem.
• Whether used for food, feather pillows, pet food or fertilizer, virtually every part of a duck goes into a useful product. And our teams are always focused on reducing and recycling resources needed to make these items.

Maple Leaf Farms is not alone in our commitment to sustainability. Years of innovations in farming and food production have improved the efficiency of and decreased the environmental impact of meat and poultry production in the U.S. all while continuing to provide the safest food supply in the world.

There are many points to consider when evaluating the environmental impact of meat and poultry because the footprint of these foods varies based on how they’re produced. What can’t be disputed is that these products are protein-rich food sources that are packed with essential micronutrients.

To learn more about our practices, check out our Farm-to-Fork story or follow us on our social channels.