Legal Guide for Using Food Scraps as Animal Feed

The use of food scraps as animal feed has been a common practice worldwide for centuries.  The vision of a classic agrarian homestead often features the farmer’s children bringing dinner scraps out to “slop the pigs” and feed the chickens. Yet the practice of feeding food scraps to animals has declined precipitously since the 1980s, when several disease outbreaks were linked to animal feed (specifically, animal products in livestock feed), including foot-and-mouth disease in swine and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly referred to as mad cow disease, in cattle. In an attempt to prevent the spread of such diseases, federal and state laws and regulations that restricted what is often pejoratively referred to as “garbage feeding” were enacted. Some of these policies were overly restrictive, and many of them impose conflicting requirements among neighboring states. Thus, they contributed to a decline in the amount of leftover food being used in animal feed. Indeed, by 2007, just three percent of U.S. hog farms fed food scraps to their livestock.