PRODUCER DIRECTORY RESEARCH SERIES | RESEARCH PAPER
Prepared for publication by Farm Animal Transparency | May 2026
A Greener World — the nonprofit certifier behind Animal Welfare Approved (AWA), Certified Grassfed, and Certified Non-GMO — runs a public directory at agreenerworld.org/directory/. It is one of the most-cited consumer resources for finding humanely-raised meat in the United States. This is especially true for consumers seeking options that are A Greener World Animal Welfare Approved. We applied the FAT Stream B 16-Category transparency rubric to a stratified sample of 21 producers from that directory in May 2026. This post reports the cohort-level findings and reflects on what the work suggests about the broader question of whether building a comprehensive transparency catalog of small farms and ranches is a useful direction for FAT to head.
What “Animal Welfare Approved” Actually Verifies: Findings from a 21-Producer Audit
A Greener World — the nonprofit certifier behind Animal Welfare Approved (AWA), Certified Grassfed, and Certified Non-GMO — runs a public directory at agreenerworld.org/directory/. It is one of the most-cited consumer resources for finding humanely-raised meat in the United States. We applied the FAT Stream B 16-Category transparency rubric to a stratified sample of 21 producers from that directory in May 2026. This post reports the cohort-level findings and reflects on what the work suggests about the broader question of whether building a comprehensive transparency catalog of small farms and ranches is a useful direction for FAT to head.
The first surprise: most of AGW’s directory isn’t farms
AGW’s directory contains 1,536 entries, sitemap-confirmed. Before we could score anything, we had to figure out what kind of entry each one was. The directory does not visually distinguish a farm listing from a retail listing — the same map pin and category icons are used for both. Categorizing each entry by the listing’s “Outlet Type” field produced this picture:
- Stores (~140 entries) — grocers, food co-ops, butcher shops carrying AGW-certified products.
- Restaurants (~100 entries) — restaurants serving AGW-certified meat.
- Farmers markets (~70 entries) — markets where AGW-certified products are sold.
- Online distributors (~30 entries) — meal-kit and food-hub services that resell another farm’s certified meat.
- Direct-from-farm producers — what we were looking for.
The producer count, after that filtering, narrowed the meat-and-poultry universe to 88 farms in the United States. That’s the part of the directory that matters if a consumer wants to know who actually raises the animals that AGW certifies. The remaining ~1,450 entries are downstream of the farm. They are, in effect, a “where to buy AGW products near you” map — useful, but a different question than “who raises this.”
This isn’t a criticism of AGW. The directory does what it’s designed to do. It is, however, a real finding for a consumer who reads “1,536 farms in our directory” and pictures a roster of independent ranches. The number that’s actually a roster of ranches is 88.
The cohort scoring
After narrowing to 88 producers — cattle, hogs, and poultry only, U.S. sites only (dairy, sheep, goats, and bison were out of scope for this pilot) — we drew a 21-producer stratified sample with proportional region weighting and a floor of one per non-empty cell. Each producer was scored against all 15 Stream B categories using their AGW listing description, their own website where one was listed and reachable, and the public methodology of any certifications they hold.
Cohort scoring distribution (n = 21):
| Category | Known | Partial | Missing | N/A |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Species | 21 | 0 | 0 | — |
| Farm/Ranch identity | 21 | 0 | 0 | — |
| Animal welfare | 21 | 0 | 0 | — |
| Antibiotics | 21 | 0 | 0 | — |
| Certifications | 21 | 0 | 0 | — |
| Hormones (cattle only) | 12 | 0 | 0 | 9 |
| Feed | 6 | 5 | 10 | — |
| Sales channels | 3 | 18 | 0 | — |
| Breed | 3 | 0 | 18 | — |
| Origin (4 life-stages) | 0 | 21 | 0 | — |
| Corporate ownership | 0 | 21 | 0 | — |
| Recall / enforcement | 0 | 1 | 20 | — |
| Processor identity | 0 | 1 | 20 | — |
| Environmental practices | 0 | 1 | 20 | — |
Read top to bottom, the table tells a clean story.
The top of the table is what AGW certification audits. Welfare, antibiotic use, certifications themselves, the AWA hormone prohibition for cattle — these are the categories AGW reaches. A producer in the AGW directory is, by virtue of being there, third-party-certified on those categories. That’s a real signal. It is not equivalent to, say, the “humanely raised” claim on a supermarket package, which carries no audit at all.
The middle of the table is producer narrative. Feed, sales channels, breed: these depend on what the producer chose to write about themselves. Six producers in the sample disclosed feed specifics that earned a Known (typically because they hold AGW Certified Grassfed or USDA Organic, both of which audit the feed standard); five gave marketing-level pasture claims; ten said nothing meaningful. Breed was disclosed by three out of 21. Sales channels were named at the category level (Farm Stores, CSAs, Online Shopping) for almost everyone, but only three producers gave the specifics — addresses, schedules, shipping geography — that the rubric requires for a full Known.
The bottom of the table is the blind spot. Origin (full life-stage), processor identity, environmental verification beyond pasture access, corporate ownership, enforcement history — these are categories that would let a researcher or a journalist trace the supply chain. They are essentially undisclosed across the cohort. Zero producers in the sample published their processor’s FSIS establishment number. Zero met the four-life-stage origin standard (born, raised, slaughtered, processed locations all disclosed). Zero produced regenerative or land-use certifications above and beyond AGW’s welfare floor.
A finding for the certification’s own framing: AGW raises the floor on animal welfare and antibiotic policy in a measurable, rubric-confirmable way. It does not — and, on the evidence of this sample, does not claim to — reach into supply-chain transparency. That’s not a contradiction. It’s the scope of what the seal verifies, made legible.
Three smaller findings worth surfacing
Hogs are essentially absent from the Northeast. The full universe of in-scope cattle, hog, and poultry producers in the AGW directory contains exactly one hog farm in the Northeast (Archway Farm, New Hampshire). For consumers in the densely-populated Northeast corridor looking specifically for AWA-certified pork, the directory is a near-empty result. Whether that reflects regional pig farming patterns, regional uptake of AGW certification, or both, the absence itself is the finding.
Listing freshness is poor. Approximately 70% of in-scope listings have a “last modified” date in 2021 or earlier. The pilot scores reflect AGW’s published descriptions as of those listing dates, not necessarily current producer practice. This is a signal worth weighing for any reader who treats the directory as a current source. It’s also a signal for AGW operationally: a directory that updates 30% of its records over a four-year window is going to drift out of step with what’s actually on those farms.
Certification mix. Of the 88 in-scope producers, 52% hold Animal Welfare only, 45% hold Animal Welfare plus Certified Grassfed, and ~2% include Certified Non-GMO. The Grassfed pairing is heavily concentrated in cattle producers, as expected; the Non-GMO pairing is rare across the board. Anyone reading the directory should treat the AGW seal as primarily a welfare claim with a feed overlay only when the Grassfed badge is also present.
What we couldn’t finish, and why
The scoring above relied on producer self-disclosure (the AGW listing plus the producer’s own website) and the verifiable status of any third-party seal. Two parts of the rubric are deferred to a v2 pass.
Regulator enforcement lookups (Category 13). The four-regulator pass — FSIS recalls, FDA warning letters, EPA ECHO, state ag department enforcement — was queued but encountered reliability issues against .gov endpoints in the pilot’s scraping infrastructure. This is a tooling problem, not a research problem. A subsequent pass on a more reliable lookup pipeline will close that gap.
Corporate-ownership cross-check (Category 14). AGW’s certification standard implicitly excludes integrator-supplied operations, so on its face every AGW-certified producer is independent. Per Stream B’s research-grade methodology, that scores as Partial until cross-checked against state corporate registries and USDA Packers and Stockyards data. The lookup is queued.
The per-producer scoring table — name-by-name — is also held back. Stream B’s protocol gives any producer scored Partial or Missing on a category a 14-day notification window with right of reply before per-producer findings are published. That window is currently open for the 21 producers in this sample. The cohort-level numbers above do not name individuals, so they are publishable now; the producer-by-producer detail will follow.
The bigger question: is there a business in cataloging small producers?
Building this pilot raised an obvious next question: AGW gave us 88 in-scope producers. The four other directories already in scope — Abundant Montana, Minnesota Grown, Kentucky Proud, Georgia Grown — will give us hundreds more. Extending across the rest of the U.S. state ag programs and the regional networks would put a real catalog of audited producers within reach. Should FAT actually try to build one?
The honest answer is that comprehensive coverage is the wrong target for FAT, but the methodology has real value, and there are at least three ways the work could compound.
Coverage is somebody else’s problem, well-occupied. LocalHarvest has been at this for over twenty years and has tens of thousands of producer records. Eat Wild covers the grass-fed network. The state ag programs cover their own states with a regulator’s authority that no third party can substitute for. Trying to compete with any of these on coverage is an unwinnable race, and worse — as the AGW staleness finding shows — coverage without maintenance is the standard failure mode of producer directories. The 70%-not-updated-in-four-years problem is real and it is universal.
The methodology, however, is genuinely scarce. No public catalog applies a published 16-Category transparency rubric with a verification-ceiling annotation to producer disclosures. Stream B’s rubric, applied consistently across directories, produces something that none of the existing platforms produce: comparative transparency scoring, with citations. That is rare enough to be worth distributing.
Three plausible paths for getting value out of the methodology, in order of effort:
The audit-overlay path. FAT publishes Stream B evaluations of existing directories, building up to a small corpus that covers most of the directories a consumer or buyer might encounter. The audience is researchers, journalists, foundation-funded food policy work, and institutional buyers (school systems, hospitals, restaurant groups with sourcing standards). Revenue is foundation/grant-funded research, with some data licensing to journalism partners. This is the path the current pilot is already on.
The buyer due-diligence path. Institutional buyers with sourcing standards — independent grocery groups, restaurant chains, school districts running farm-to-table programs — pay third parties for due-diligence reports today. Stream B’s rubric produces something close to what those buyers need. The product would be a paid per-producer or per-cohort report, written to a buyer’s standards (more granular on processor and origin than a consumer-facing version needs to be). This is a real B2B SaaS opportunity if the maintenance problem can be solved.
The catalog-builder path. FAT builds and maintains its own producer directory at scale. This is the high-effort, high-risk path. It would require either substantial editorial staff to keep entries current, or a self-service producer onboarding flow with audit fees — and the moment producers pay to be listed, the audit’s independence becomes harder to defend. This is the path most likely to generate revenue and least likely to preserve FAT’s research-grade positioning. We do not recommend it as a primary direction.
The middle path — audit-overlay leading into buyer due-diligence — is the one we’d argue is worth pursuing. It plays to FAT’s existing strength (rigorous research, public-good framing), it doesn’t require chasing coverage that other organizations already have, and it has a credible monetization path through institutional buyers without compromising the editorial line.
Whether to pursue any of those is a strategic question, not a research one. What this pilot has demonstrated, at minimum, is that the methodology produces real, citable findings at low marginal cost — under a dollar of scraping spend for a 1,536-listing directory enumeration plus a 21-producer audit. The unit economics are favorable. The bigger question is whether the audience exists at the scale needed to make any of the three paths self-sustaining.
What’s queued next
- The four other seeded directories (Abundant Montana, Minnesota Grown, Kentucky Proud, Georgia Grown) get their own pilots, on the same methodology. Operator notifications are drafted; the 14-day right-of-reply windows for those directories will run in parallel.
- The deferred regulator enforcement pass and the corporate-ownership cross-check fold into a v2 of the AGW findings as soon as the .gov lookup tooling is reliable.
- A cross-directory comparison post — once two or three directory evaluations are public — will be the first place where the methodology’s comparative payoff becomes visible.
The 21-producer scoring matrix, per-category evidence, and supporting cohort data are recorded in the pilot workbook. The full live directory page is at farmanimaltransparency.com/stream-b/directories/a-greener-world-certified-farms/. For methodology, see the companion post — Reading the Directory: How Stream B Differs from a Label Audit.
Sources
Working paper. Figures are as reported by the sources cited. Corrections welcome: dirkadams@farmanimaltransparency.com.