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Criteria for inclusion

The criteria that farms must meet before being included in the Flagship Farm programme include the following:

  1. The farms must operate good agricultural practices generally and the farmers must be comfortable sharing these good practices and also striving for continuous improvement.

  2. The farms selected will show industry/ local market leading practices under some of the following areas.
    • Ethical: human welfare and labour rights, animal health and welfare.
    • Environmental: climate change, biodiversity, natural resources, agro-technology.
    • Economic: local economies, affordable food.

  3. The farms will demonstrate practices that are underpinned by the best science available and endorsed by NGOs/ academia and other experts.

Suppliers and McDonalds will nominate farms on the basis of the objectives laid out in the project overview, with particular emphasis on ethics, environment and economics.

The following are prerequisites of selection:

  • High compliance with the standards of McDonald’s Agricultural Assurance Programme (MAAP) where applicable. For raw materials where there are no MAAP standards there must be compliance with a recognised and acceptable industry standard.
  • The farms must have supplied raw material to McDonald’s during the last crop year or production cycle.
  • The practices are reproducible and scalable.
  • The enterprises are commercially viable.
  • Farms must be tidy, well-presented, and medium- to large-scale (although small-scale operations with novel concepts and philosophies will be considered).
  • All farming activities will be considered (poor practices on any of the three E’s or another farming enterprise are not acceptable).
  • The farm must have no involvement in activities detrimental to the McDonald’s brand.
  • Farmers must have good communication skills and be willing to share ideas and information.