Animal Welfare in organic husbandry. Development of control measures on Animal Welfare in organic farming.

Good animal welfare is one of the highlighted key principles in organic agriculture. The aspect of this project has been to develop checklists to measure and document welfare through a system with clear and exact defined parameters. The result of the project will give a suggestion of how to build a control and evaluation system that makes it possible to do an objective evaluation of animal welfare. The system will also make a common Nordic- Baltic evaluation that equalizes the parameters, so that we get the same criteria in the whole region.

The system is also made in a way that makes it easy to adopt by the conventional farming industry. Conditions that are classified as not acceptable during the inspection will trigger off a necessary follow up by advisory consultations by veterinarian ore other advisors.

The project has finished checklists on dairy cows and poultry. The work will be followed up by making checklists on sheep and horses.

• Primary Source