How to Be a Techno-Optimist for Animals

This is a crosspost for How to Be a Techno-Optimist for Animals by Robert Yaman, which was published on 15 October 2024. I am not affiliated with Innovate Animal Ag.

How can we build a scalable, abundant agricultural system that also aligns with our ethics?

The industrialization of animal agriculture has created an abundance that would shock our ancestors. Meat, eggs, and dairy—which at various points in history were scarce, expensive, or contaminated—are now common, affordable, and safe. 

However, in our drive towards economic efficiency, we've shifted much of the true cost of production onto the animals themselves. Any accommodation for animal welfare faces immense competitive pressure to be removed, and the result is a husbandry system that stands in stark contrast to our common-sense ethics. We’ve all seen the videos—the gory details need not be provided.

Farm animal welfare is a serious moral problem, yet the solutions most often proposed lack realism. Some think we should all stop eating meat, others want to revert to an earlier way of life with small family farmers selling to local customers. But these solutions run counter to all the trends of modern society, and it's difficult to imagine either becoming the global norm in an increasingly technological and industrial world.

I believe there’s another way: We can use technology to change what is possible in animal husbandry, and build a scalable, abundant agricultural system that aligns with our values. I founded Innovate Animal Ag to champion this neglected mission

How to mitigate externalities while avoiding the degrowth trap

The problem of farm animal welfare has many structural analogues. Fundamentally, it’s a problem of the unintended consequences of industrialization, and of unpriced externalities. In this way, it’s similar to climate change, air pollution, antimicrobial resistance, and many other issues. 

Problems like these have many kinds of solutions, but two broad categories can be called “degrowth” and “techno-optimism.” Degrowth solutions ask us to throw the baby out with the bathwater – to sacrifice the entire system (including its benefits) for the sake of avoiding externalities. Techno-optimism instead says that we should use technology to find ways to preserve abundance while eliminating the externalities. 

In the climate space, degrowth is often the subject of ridicule as a fundamentally unserious response to the climate crisis. A degrowth advocate might claim that in order to fight climate change, we ought to wash our clothes by hand rather than with a washing machine, or that we should take an inconvenient and time-consuming bike route rather than driving a car. This is a nonstarter for those who understand that emissions-producing technologies are an important part of human flourishing in the modern era. The absurdity of degrowth is clearest to those with experience living without modern technology due to poverty or lack of opportunity. 

When it comes to farm animal welfare, the two dominant solutions, veganism and regenerative agriculture, share this degrowth mindset. Vegans say that the challenges of farm animal welfare are unsolvable, and we should give up on the idea of animal farming entirely. Regenerative agriculture advocates say that we should instead rediscover a pre-industrial method of farming, where animals play a role in enhancing soil health and recycling nutrients. To a techno-optimist, both might seem unserious considering how much worthy effort has been devoted to solving the problems of hunger and food insecurity through industrialization. But these degrowth solutions are taken more seriously in agriculture than in the climate space, because there don’t seem to be other options. 

These solutions, however inadequate, are indeed reacting to a serious problem. The moral urgency of farm animal welfare comes from its magnitude: every two years, the world consumes a number of animals equivalent to the number of humans that have ever lived in history (mostly chickens, due to their small size). The conditions in which most of these animals live would shock us if the animals were cats or dogs. One of our fundamental ethical values is care for the powerless, and when we create a new living being, we have an obligation for responsible stewardship. It’s hard to say that we always meet this obligation.

Almost 90% of Americans believe that many standard agriculture practices are “unacceptable,” such as keeping an animal in a cage for its entire life, mutilating it without painkillers, or prematurely killing it if it lacks economic value. A similar number believe that farm animals have the same capacity for pain as humans. This consensus is so broad that perhaps the only idea with even more appeal is this: 96% believe that diet is a personal choice, and nobody has the right to tell someone what to eat. 

Indeed, it often seems like the manifest wrongness within the system is obscured by the unpalatability of solutions like veganism. What other successful social movement is built on such a puritanical, unpopular pillar? You can still be an environmentalist if you personally fly on planes. Asking billions of people to forgo not just convenience, but culture, tradition, and personal choice is a losing battle.

However, it’s clearly possible to make progress fighting negative externalities without primarily relying on individual behavior change. We need only look to the climate movement to see techno-optimism’s biggest triumph.  Activists spent years unsuccessfully trying to tax carbon or shut down fossil fuel companies, but the better solution ended up being technology. Solar panels, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and nuclear power have the potential to mitigate the worst harms of climate change without sacrificing the abundance of industrialization. These technologies have captured the attention of our society, and they have been adopted far faster than any projection, fundamentally changing the trajectory of global energy use. Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels and annual CO2 emissions are falling in the US. 

Techno-optimism and farm animals

Over the last decade, a techno-optimist interested in animal welfare would likely have gravitated towards alternative proteins like plant-based and lab-grown meat. These solutions likewise move the onus away from personal diet choice, and instead seek to give consumers the same product made in a better way. However, these solutions have so far failed to meet their initial promise. Lagging sales numbers for plant-based meat companies like Beyond Meat and concerns over the scalability of cultivated meat have produced significant headwinds. While the long-term future of these technologies is far from certain, a clear-eyed analysis has to acknowledge that animal agriculture will likely be a fixture of human society for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, alternative proteins aren’t the techno-optimist’s only response to farm animal welfare. We can instead shift focus to agricultural technologies that directly improve the lives of the animals in our stewardship, without sacrificing abundance.

In-ovo sexing is a prime example. One of the consequences of industrialization of the poultry sector is that the breeds of chicken we use for meat and eggs are different. “Broiler” chickens are optimized to quickly and efficiently convert feed to meat. “Layer” chickens are optimized to lay eggs as efficiently as possible. This division of labor is why chicken meat and eggs are so affordable today. However, one unintended consequence is that male chicks of the layer breed serve no economic purpose and are therefore killed immediately after hatching. In a practice that’s extremely unpopular among consumers that know about it, 6 billion day-old male chicks are killed each year in the global egg industry, usually via maceration (they are ground up alive).

In-ovo sexing allows egg producers to use advanced biotechnology to identify which eggs will hatch male and which will hatch female. Male eggs can be removed and destroyed before they can feel pain, leaving only females to hatch. This technology is now widely available in Europe, and because of Innovate Animal Ag’s work, will come to the US later this year.

Other technologies being developed include on-farm hatching, machine vision that can give a holistic view of welfare on a farm, and devices that can humanely stun aquatic animals before slaughter. 

The future of farm animal welfare 

Despite the promise of these emerging technologies, I admit that we don’t yet have the ability to build a scalable system where every individual animal is free from hunger, distress and mutilation; has access to proper veterinary care; is free to express natural behaviors; and is killed in a fast, painless manner. And I can’t tell you right now what portfolio of technologies we’ll need to make this a reality. 

What I can say is that we need to begin imagining this future and investing in solutions that can bring it to fruition. Animal agriculture currently receives less than 3% of the VC funding going into the broader ag space. It’s known as a slow-moving backwards-looking industry, unresponsive to changing consumer preferences. In a stunning narrative violation, all of the most innovative companies in animal agriculture are European, and there’s a pervasive and insidious notion in American animal agriculture that we’re always 10-15 years behind Europe. 

Given the state of play, how could we know what’s needed to build a humane scalable husbandry system? We’re in a similar position to the early days of clean technology, when we knew that we needed to transition away from fossil fuels, but we didn’t yet know how. The subsequent history of climate innovation gives hope—after decades of innovation, and volumes of research being devoted to the problem, we now have a clearer idea of how we’ll navigate the climate crisis.

Innovate Animal Ag is a think tank whose goal is to start this process for farm animal welfare, and bring the techno-optimist mindset to an issue where it’s sorely needed. By directing the powers of human ingenuity toward building a humane, scalable agricultural system, many new ideas and solutions are bound to be uncovered.

Farm animal welfare is recognized by diverse thinkers like Noah Smith, Ezra Klein, and Richard Hanania as one of the great moral challenges of our time. We need to start treating it with the seriousness that it deserves, move away from knee-jerk degrowth reactions, and instead learn from other examples of successful externality mitigation in the modern industrial world. The techno-optimist mindset is our best shot at building a scalable husbandry system without needless suffering, one that we’d be proud to show our grandchildren. 

The Optimist’s Barn is a Substack devoted to fleshing out this point of view. How can we use technology to improve animal agriculture while preserving abundance? There will be a mixture of pieces from high-level analysis (e.g. “Is High-Welfare Farming Scalable?”) to nitty-gritty technical analyses of technologies like in-ovo sexing and high-expansion nitrogen foam. 

Every article will be free for now, although there may be paid articles in the future. That said, if you want to support this work financially, all funds will go to Innovate Animal Ag, a nonprofit think tank that does a lot of the research that informs this blog, and that works with agricultural producers to implement some of the technologies we discuss here. (You can also give to Innovate Animal Ag in a tax deductible way by donating through the website).

Don’t hesitate to reach out to let us know what you’re interested in. What questions do you have about animal agriculture, or farm animal welfare? What topics would you like to see covered in the future?