Setting a Path for the Okja Project
From an initial Idea to an actual concept
The initial question that sparked all further progress of our project was “what do we eat every day and what impact does it have?”. As it is commonly known meat consumption largely affects the environment, however the decision to become vegetarian or vegan is individual to every human. Ultimately this gave us the idea to come up with a way of helping people to be more conscious of their dietary habits.
Our main goal is to further bring about the animal cause, the goal of improving the living conditions of farmed animals to be as natural to them as possible to ensure their physical and mental wellbeing. Additionally humane slaughtering conditions in which animals are killed quickly and with as little pain as possible are mandatory.
After we had a name and a general idea of what we wanted our project to be about we had to come up with the actual way we could be helping in further advancing the animal cause without just copying the work of others.
What was clear to us from the start was the fact that we needed to have a fixed set of criteria for when farming conditions are suitable and when they are not. While brainstorming we came up with a few ideas of how we would be able to go about this. It took us some time to settle on something and find out which would be the most practical concept to realize. The set rules being a central aspect of our project proved to be sort of a guiding light as we always knew that our final concept had to be able to make farmers adhere to them.
In the end we settled on the creation of a label that certifies farming conditions adequate to the animals right on the packaging.
In order to create our label all these concepts need to be authorized by a council consisting of specialists and representatives of public authorities and consumer associations. Lastly a competent body of the state needs to give their approval.
To get a better picture of the impact of animal farming on the environment we researched data on the subject of the total meat production in the world as well as documentaries about factory farming and the harm it does to animals.
Just to give you an example of what we found out while doing this we will look at the beef-production of 2018 (data from www.ourworldindata,com). In that year alone 71 million tons of beef were produced. Taking into consideration the fact that producing 1kg of beef takes 25kg of plant-based animal food we are looking at the environmental impact of producing 1,775 billion tons of plant based food. Bear in mind that additionally to this the animals use up water, electricity for the various machines and the emissions of processing the meat.
And this is only the impact of the 71 million-tons-share that beef has in the total of 318 tons of meat produced in 2018.
After finding out about these things we needed to determine how the rules that farmers had to adhere to in order to receive our label should look like. For this we looked at publications about animal friendly farming published in cooperation with the Deutscher Tierschutzbund e.V., one of the biggest animal welfare-organizations in Germany. Besides that we also gather information from content published by those who work directly with animals and consider their needs in their work (farmers, stable-constructors).
From this we came up with a set of general rules for all animals like the prohibition of antibiotics being fed to animals without medical indications. In addition to that we created rules for each different species in regards to their farming conditions. These rules are publicly available for everyone on our website. https://okjalabel.wixsite.com/website
As we wanted to do something new in this segment we took a look at how some other labels worked and what they certified, specifically those in France. The four biggest competitors we were able to find are “Label Rouge”, “AB”, “Viandes de France” and “Bien-être animal”. Out of these 4 only “Bien-être animal” has criteria similar to ours while the other three are mostly concerned with quality, origin and slaughter-conditions. however “Bien-être animal” does not have criteria for as many different species as we do.
Another big part of our research was finding out how a label such as this can actually be established and maintained. It needed to be attractive to farmers and consumers while being financially self-sufficient.
This in the end resulted in us seeing the benefit of buying meat with a clear conscience for customers. The benefit to the farmers is the positive publicity of being certified for animal friendly farming conditions.
For the financial aspect we decided on collecting a 5%-share of what is earned through the product certified by us. For one to cover the cost of inspecting farms as well as for general administration. Any excess could be used for future expansion from meat into other sectors of products involving animals, such as milk-production.
Thank you for your attention! If you want to learn more please visit our website and look at the other articles on the project published in the “Dare to Challenge”-publication.
Writer: Justus Stieler (4120E024)
Co-writers: Oksana Monteiro Peixoto (4120E004), Amane Brand (4120E003), Clara Noblet (4120E024)
