FARM Animal Care Program Details Farm Selection Process for Third-Party Verification

 

While second party evaluations are the core component of a robust animal care quality assurance program, third party verification is equally as integral to demonstrating the integrity of the FARM Animal Care Program. This process ensures that second party evaluators and program participants are consistently and correctly implementing FARM Animal Care. Verifications are conducted by a trained and qualified verifier who does not have a conflict of interest in the operation or the outcome of the verification process.

By signing an annual FARM Animal Care participation form, a FARM participant is agreeing to, on behalf of their patrons, members or contractors, being eligible for a random sampling of facilities to be utilized for third party verification. Additionally, the Pledge of Participation signed by a facility representative during the second party evaluation acknowledges that same eligibility. Failure to participate in the third-party verification process will result in the facility and respective Participant being delisted from the FARM Animal Care Program.

How Are Facilities Selected for Third Party Verification?

Every six months, a stratified random sample of 100 farms that received second party evaluations in the previous six months will be drawn. Because dairy farms vary widely in size and location, stratification is used to ensure that the randomly selected farms are representative of all farms that received second party evaluations in the six-month window from which the sample is drawn. The strata that are used to conduct the random sample are based on herd size (<100, 100-500, 500+) and region (NE, SW, MW, SE, W). This approach ensures that the group of farms that are selected are representative of the larger dataset of all herds that received second party evaluations in the previous six-month period.

The chances of a given Participant’s farms being selected using this process are proportional to the number of their member farms evaluated in the previous six-month period. The same is true for each evaluator. In simple terms, the more farms a Participant had evaluated, the higher the chances that one or more of their members will be selected; the more farms an evaluator conducts second-party evaluations for, the higher the chances that one or more of their farms will be selected.

Once the results of the third-party verifications are received, the results of the second party evaluations and third party verifications are compared to evaluate consistency. The results of this consistency assessment are then used to inform future training and targeted follow up to help ensure that the FARM Animal Care Program is implemented consistently across the country.

Ensuring Evaluators Receive at Least One Third Party Verification

A secondary goal of this approach is to ensure that each second party evaluator receives at least one third party verification during each three-year program cycle. Once the methodology listed above is completed, a list of all second party evaluators that had no farms selected for evaluation in the previous 6-month period will be produced. One farm from a total of 25 evaluators will be randomly selected to receive third party verification in each six-month period. This process will be repeated each year. Please note that this secondary process will only ever result in second party evaluators that have not yet had a third-party verification in the current program cycle being chosen. In the final year of the program cycle, any evaluator that has not yet had a third-party verification will be chosen to meet the stated goal of ensuring that every second party evaluator has at least one third party verification conducted on one of their farms within a FARM Program cycle.