Is The Farmer’s Dog Actually Good? (Unsponsored)

The Farmer’s Dog makes more than $1 billion a year selling fresh dog food.

I fed it to my own dogs for months. I dug through their website, their marketing, their studies, and even snuck into their vet-only portal.

And after all of that, I landed somewhere I didn’t expect.

Because The Farmer’s Dog is genuinely doing some really cool things. But they’re also doing some things that honestly piss me off.

Let me break it down. 



You Can’t See Anything Without Taking a Quiz

This is the part that got me right away.

The Farmer’s Dog built their entire brand around ingredient transparency.

Their whole website is about how bad kibble ingredients are, how labels are misleading, how you should care about what’s in your dog’s food.

And then they won’t show you a single ingredient, guaranteed analysis, or calorie count without making you take a quiz and hand over your personal information first.

You can walk into any pet store, pick up a bag of kibble, flip it over, and read every single ingredient right there on the shelf.

No quiz. No email. No signup.

The billion-dollar company that built their brand on being “more transparent” is somehow less transparent than most other pet food companies.

That felt weird to me.

What They’re Doing Right

Ok, here’s where I have to give credit.

When I looked into what The Farmer’s Dog actually does behind the scenes, there’s a lot to like:

• Their facilities claim to hold a USDA Grant of Inspection with inspectors on-site

• They test every batch for harmful pathogens and bacteria

• They have board-certified veterinary nutritionists on staff

• They’re doing feeding trials that go way beyond what’s required

They also have a real, peer-reviewed study. Published in an actual scientific journal. Conducted at Cornell University over a full year.

They took 22 older sled dogs and split them into two groups. One stayed on kibble, the other switched to The Farmer’s Dog.

The group on TFD showed lower levels of compounds linked to aging and higher levels of protective antioxidants.

Was the study funded by TFD? Yes.
Do 3 of the 4 authors work for TFD? Yes.
Does that automatically make it bad science? No.

I’m not going to dismiss peer-reviewed research just because of who funded it.

The study has its limitations, but it exists. You can read it yourself.

And compared to what I’ve seen from other brands (looking at you, Spot & Tango, using a 20-year-old Belgian contest entry to claim your food adds years to a dog’s life), this is a massive step in the right direction.

The food itself is cool too:

• Every pouch is one day’s worth of food for your specific dog, based on the info you put in the quiz

• Your dog’s name is on each pouch

• You don’t have to measure anything at mealtime

For fresh food, that’s actually a really nice experience.

Where They Start to Lose Me

I wish I would have never found their “Why Fresh” page.

This is where The Farmer’s Dog goes full fear mode.

They put the stat “over 80% of dogs will get some form of dental disease in their lifetime” right next to “roughly the same percentage who eat dry food.”

Hoping you’ll connect the dots that kibble causes dental disease.

You know what else lines up? 100% of people drink water and 100% of people die. Doesn’t mean water is killing us.

Two things happening at the same time doesn’t mean one is causing the other.

And they conveniently leave out the rate of dental disease in dogs eating fresh food compared to dry food.

Probably because it tells the same story. That dental disease is very common in dogs, regardless of what you feed them

They also bring up “4D meat,” which stands for meat from dead, dying, diseased, or disabled animals.

And yeah, that sounds terrifying.

But here’s what they’re not telling you.

The FDA pulled the old compliance guides that allowed that back in 2019.

They replaced them with way stricter requirements where any company using those ingredients now has to do a full hazard analysis, testing for:

• Salmonella

• E. coli

• Heavy metals

• Drug residues like pentobarbital (the euthanasia drug everyone worries about)

So the scary thing TFD is warning you about was largely addressed seven years ago.

I don’t see that anywhere on their page.

And just a few weeks ago, their co-founders jumped on that Clean Label Project heavy metals study, posting “concerning, but not surprising” to their half a million followers.

What they didn’t mention?

• Every single sample in that study was below established safety limits. Not close. Well below.

• Seven of the dry food samples had fish as a main protein (naturally higher in mercury) while zero of the fresh samples did.

But they just let the fear do the selling.

The Price

For a 50-lb dog, The Farmer’s Dog costs about $209 every single month.

That’s real money. And for a lot of people, that’s just not sustainable long-term, no matter how good the food is.

Where I Landed

The Farmer’s Dog sits in this weird grey area for me.

On one hand, they’re genuinely pioneering fresh food from a science-first perspective.

• They have real nutritionists.

• They’re funding real research.

• And the product itself is thoughtfully made.

But then you look at the marketing, and it’s just bashing kibble.

Over and over and over.

Using correlation as causation.

Using outdated scare tactics.

Jumping on studies they clearly didn’t run by their own science team before posting.

All to make you feel like if you’re not feeding fresh, you’re failing your dog.

And that’s the part I can’t get past.

Because you don’t need to tear down every other option to prove yours is good. Especially when yours actually IS good.

You made a cool product. Stand by it!

Overall, I’d give The Farmer’s Dog a final grade of B.

One More Thing

If you’re reading this and thinking “I like the idea of fresh food formulated by a real nutritionist, but I can’t spend $209 a month”... I get it.

That’s actually one of the reasons we built our Single-Protein Recipe Bundles with Dr. Danielle Conway, a board-eligible veterinary nutritionist.

• Five recipes per bundle

• Grain-free and grain-inclusive options

• Every recipe formulated to be complete and balanced for adult dogs (not all life stages)

And depending on your dog’s size, you’re looking at roughly $50 to $150 less per month than what The Farmer’s Dog charges. For food that’s still formulated by a veterinary nutritionist!

The difference is you’re making it yourself, so you know exactly what’s in it.

And you didn’t have to take a quiz to find out, lol.

🚫 Get the Grain-Free Recipe Bundle here

🌾 Get the Grain-Inclusive Recipe Bundle here

Talk soon

Bryce