Lewis Bollard

I think that the end of factory farming is far from inevitable.

Every year, we're factory farming about 2% more animals globally.

I think there are two possible trajectories we could go down.

One is the trajectory that we have been on for the last century, which is technology has made factory farming ever more efficient, resulted in ever more animals being abused in ever more intensive ways.

Yeah.

there is a trajectory where we reduce the number of animals on factory farms, where we reduce the suffering of each of those animals.

So even if we get AGI, I am really optimistic that that will accelerate forms of technological progress.

It will bring us better alternative proteins.

It will improve the humane technology.

But there are still huge cultural and political obstacles to alternatives.

So the cultural obstacles are that most people want real meat.

I mean, most people have the option already of plant-based meat that tastes about as good as real meat.

That's it.

I don't know.

So this is the debate.

That's fair.

This is a debate.

But I don't think that's just the obstacle that people have.

I think there are a lot of people who say, I'm just not interested in the alternative.

I want the real thing.

And then there's also the political obstacle.

So let's say that AGI solves cultivated meat for us.

Well, co-domain meat's already illegal in seven US states.

It might soon be illegal in the entire European Union.

So by the time we get AGI, will they even be able to sell it anywhere?

So again, I think there's a huge amount of good that technology can do in this space, and I'm optimistic that AGI can accelerate that hugely.

But at the same time, I think we should prepare for the significant possibility that AGI does not end factory farming, that actually this is an incredibly efficient system that has persisted through all kinds of technological changes and that could persist through this technological change.

What is it that makes it so efficient?

So the basic efficiency is that the animal and the chicken in particular has evolved over...

a very long time to be a being that can take in a relatively small amount of grain and convert it very efficiently into a form of protein that people like to eat.

So the feed conversion ratio for chickens, the amount of grain you put in to get meat out is like 2x.

And that grain is incredibly cheap.

And the rest of the production process is incredibly cheap because they've removed everything that costs money around treating the animals well and providing comfort and all that stuff.

They've just gotten rid of it all.

So they've gotten it down to this point where it's insanely cheap.

So you're trying to beat the price of grain times two plus a few extra costs.

And that is actually a really hard target to meet.

And that's why factory farmed chicken is so insanely cheap today.

I think it completely depends on what we do from here.

Okay.

And it also depends on what you mean by cultivated meat.

I mean, there are companies right now that are selling cultivated meat in very small volumes at very high price points, which is incredible.

The challenge from here is how do you scale that and bring the price point down to compete with the incredibly low price point of factory farm chicken?

Yeah.

And I think how long it takes to get there and indeed whether we get there really depends on what happens from here.

We are not on a path right now when it comes to the amount of venture capital funding available, when it comes to the current startups available.

We're not on a path to reach cultivated meat that is cheaper than factory farmed chicken.

I think we could get on that path.

Sorry, ever?

Well, I mean, it depends.

Contingent on AGI and contingent on what happens with AGI, right?

Like I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't think it's the default path.

I don't think it's the most likely outcome.

Well, you would think like nanotech and bringing robotics and all these things.

But like, unless the cost of all those things goes down to close to zero, chickens are just going to be so insanely cheap.

And so, yeah, maybe.

Like, I think it is totally possible that these AGI technologies introduce incredible new proteins that help solve this problem for us.

But I don't think we should rely on it.

First, because they might not be able to solve some of these problems to the point that it is as cheap as a chicken.

But second, because you still have these cultural and political barriers.

Yeah, there's a huge difference.

So, I mean, it's probably the venture capital on the humane technology is probably less than $10 million a year.

$10 million?

That would be my guess.

Whereas the venture capital on the alternative proteins has been in the billions over the last few years.

I think both of these are important.

I think that I can see why alternative proteins have a more promising allure to investors.

First, there could be higher margins.

But second, it feels more like the electric vehicle or the solar that just totally replaces the old practice.

It's something totally new that replaces it.

And I think it has that potential for some portion of the market.

But what I don't see happening anytime soon is the entire market switching over to these alternative proteins.

And so I think we need alternative proteins to meet the world's growing demand for proteins so that we don't just have ever more factory farming.

And we need humane technology to reduce the suffering within the factory farming that does exist.

I think we made a mistake as a movement making this about personal diet.

I think it's great when folks want to make a personal diet decision, whether that is eating less meat or meat for more humane sources.

But the focus should not be on the individual.

This is not how large scale social change occurs.

I think we need government reform.

I think we need corporate reform.

And people can be a part of that regardless of what they eat, regardless of what their diet is.

I think that we need people to be advocates and funders and supporters of this cause.

Yeah, I think it's a puzzle.

I mean, it seems so obvious that you can have far larger scale change at the level of governmental change and corporate change.

And instead, we get fixated about whether someone is completely vegan or vegetarian or like.

And I think what happened is when people started learning about this issue initially, it was just a few people and they felt totally powerless to achieve larger scale change.

And so they understandably focused on themselves.

And then it started to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It started to become an end in itself, where it was about personal purity as much as about the impact you're having on the issue.

And it's much easier to measure your own personal purity than it is to measure your total impact on reforming factory farming.

And so I think it just became this kind of inward focus.

And the good news is I think that has changed tremendously in the last decade.

I think the movement has gone from being one that was obsessed with personal purity, obsessed with dietary choices, to one that is much more obsessed with impact.

Yeah, I think there have been three large scale drivers of progress so far.

So the first has been government policy.

So advocates got the European Union to set basic animal welfare standards.

That is billions of animals every year, billions every year.

Then there's corporate reforms.

And we see the same thing, that there's this incredible scale across these corporate supply chains.

I mean, McDonald's just implemented its pledge to go cage-free in the US.

That alone is 7 million hens every year out of cages just in the McDonald's supply chain.

And then the third lever is technology.

One example would be Innovo sexing as a new technology that can get rid of the need to kill male chicks in the egg industry.

The unwanted chicks are killed at birth.

And Inovo Sexing has already spared about 200 million chicks from that fate.

So there are these giant drivers, and the good news is we're just getting started with them.

There is the potential, I think, to help tens of billions of animals through these drivers.

Sure.

Yes.

I mean, the historical basis is

is a story of technology doing harm, which was we initially, the egg industry and the meat chicken industry separated because they realized they could grow meat chickens to be optimized for weight gain and laying hens to be optimized for laying eggs.

That meant that the laying egg industry had no need of the male chicks because they couldn't lay eggs and they couldn't grow fast enough to be meat chickens.

And so what they decided was to just kill them on the day they were born.

And so the standard practice, and this is about 8 billion chicks globally every year, are just thrown in a giant meat grinder or suffocated in bags the day they're born.

Crazy.

This new technology is basically the application of existing technologies to scan the eggs in advance and work out whether they're going to be male or female.

And then you can just get rid of the male eggs very early in the incubation phase.

And this technology went from 10 years ago just being a vague idea to today, it's already a third of the European egg industry.

It just got introduced to the United States.

We've got the first eggs coming out in the United States now.

So this is a technology that is growing rapidly, and I'm really optimistic can ultimately end this problem globally.

I think it was both.

So first, there was some policy upfront, which was because advocates had drawn attention to this practice of killing male chicks, there was real impetus by governments and philanthropists to support kickstarting this technology.

And my estimate is it was about $10 million, very little amount of public and philanthropic money that kickstarted this technology, got it to a point where startups could start to implement the technology.

Yeah, I think there's huge potential for technologists here.

I mean, there is a lot of low hanging fruit because this is primarily a commodity business that has only done things that reduce the price or increase production levels.

It has not invested in animal welfare.

And as a result, you find these things it's doing that just seem archaic.

Like the way that it is castrating piglets is with a blunt knife and like no pain relief.

And so in that case, there was a new technology of immunocastration, an injection that achieved the same effects.

And it was very easy to develop.

And so I think there are a whole lot of other practices like that out there.

There are a whole lot of these archaic practices being done where someone could come in and with a little bit of smart work around this and an actual focus on animal welfare, bring in solutions that could potentially help billions of animals.

I mean, think of what we've done to pigs.

So when we took pigs inside from outdoors and we selected them to grow faster and to have this inadvertent greater aggression,

The first thing they started doing was getting bored and biting each other's tails.

And that was a problem.

So then we said, we'll cut the tails off.

Well, that didn't work.

So then we had to start clipping the teeth and cutting part of their teeth off.

And then that still wasn't enough when it came to the sows.

So then we had to put them in crates to protect them from any other animal.

And that wasn't enough.

So then we gave them antibiotics and other drugs.

At each step, there is a new solution that can't solve the fundamental underlying parts of the problem.

And sometimes it just makes it worse.

I think you're right.

The suffering is uneconomical at the level of an individual animal.

So the animals that we have selected for and the way we have treated them result in more of those animals dying, more of them having all kinds of welfare problems.

The problem is that it is collectively more efficient.

So if you can cram twice as many animals into a barn, it doesn't matter if 10% more of them die.

And so that's been the underlying model of this industry is that the reason welfare gets neglected is, yeah, it has like a slight cost, but the efficiency gains are so much greater.

So I agree we should try and find things to reverse that.

I mean, I am personally more optimistic about these kind of incremental reforms.

Like I think the average person listening to this is not thinking like, oh, yeah, I'm really pumped for like the brainless chickens to come along and like just persuade me.

But they're not pumped about the cultivated media, right?

No, sure.

But this is why you need a whole bunch of different approaches, right?

This is why, because there's no one solution that is going to satisfy everyone.

And what I would say on genetics is what feels way more achievable to me in the near term is to get rid of the genetic physical problems that ail these animals.

So for instance, we've bred these chickens to be mutants that collapse under their own weight.

We know that we can breed for far higher welfare birds that are still commercially viable,

And indeed, there are companies and there are places like Denmark where the industry has already moved entirely toward these higher welfare birds.

They have way better welfare outcomes.

They suffer way less.

What's different about them?

So the first thing about them is they are more balanced overall.

So where the industry has just selected for rapid breast meat growth and for really efficient feed conversion.

these birds have been bred to have robustness.

So they have broader legs, so their legs don't collapse.

They have better cardio systems, so they don't develop all these cardio problems.

And in general, they've just been bred for welfare outcomes.

We're just like, let's just breed a bunch of birds and find the ones that die less and generally seem- And are they less economical?

They're slightly less economical.

I mean, this is why, because they haven't been ruthlessly selected for those two variables of breast meat yield and feed conversion.

So they cost a little bit more.

And this is why you need advocacy to get people to adopt them, right?

And so there has been huge advocacy in France, in Germany, in Denmark to get this.

And in fact, just last month, the largest French chicken producer, the LDC Group, committed to moving its two main brands to these higher welfare genetics.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right.

This is the story of a lot of the industry's efforts to improve welfare.

So for example, there was a study back in the 90s where they taught chickens how to select pain relief laced feed.

And they found the broiler chickens were all selecting the pain relief laced feed, suggesting they were all in chronic pain.

And the industry said like, don't worry, we'll address it.

We'll strengthen their legs.

So they went away and they strengthened their legs for a bit.

And then they were like, wow, it's great.

The chickens have stronger legs now.

They can go and eat more stuff and we can put more weight on those legs.

And so then they made them bigger and essentially undid those gains.

And in recent years, we've seen the mortality rate in the industry rising again and getting worse.

So presumably they have just pushed so far again in that direction.

So I think that's a major risk.

I think this is why you need government or corporations involved.

This is why you need government setting down a baseline standard saying, you can't go below this welfare floor.

For instance, in Denmark, the government is strongly encouraging the move toward these high welfare breeds and looking to ban low welfare outcome breeds entirely.

And you need to maintain those higher welfare outcomes.

And I think this is what you need in corporate supply chains too.

So this is also what you see with the French retailers moving away from these low welfare breeds.

You need them to maintain those standards because you're right, the industry left on its own will always find a race to the bottom.

I think it probably tilts toward more suffering.

Hmm.

This is what you see with the history of breeding these chickens to be the kind of mutants they are today, where they've achieved a 4x gain in growth rates since the 1950s.

That has led to a 2x drop in price, and that has led to a 3x increase in consumption.

And because consumption has gone up so dramatically, and the suffering per bird has gone up so dramatically, that has outweighed the benefits of these birds being bigger.

No, no.

So I think there is an in-between ground solution now, which is the higher welfare breeds that we are advocating for producers to adopt are

are not 1950s growth levels.

They grow almost at 2025 growth levels, scaled back slightly in a way that enables much larger welfare improvements.

And so I think you don't have to go backwards to the level of these incredibly slow-growing animals.

Some people will want that.

I mean, there'll be a market for heritage chickens and people who are willing to pay for these extremely slow-growing animals.

But the more realistic thing at scale is going to be these ones who still grow fast and still get big, but do so in a way that doesn't totally destroy their bodies and cause them to suffer so much.

I agree.

I mean, this is the story of the chicken meat industry is they have just bred and bred.

So these animals suffer more and more.

And I'll give you another example of that, which is the breeding birds.

So the birds that they have have that are raised for meat are optimized to only survive until about seven or eight weeks of age.

And even by that age, a lot of them are keeling over, getting lame, collapsing.

But they're not at puberty yet.

So they need to raise some of these birds past puberty to raise the next generation of birds.

For those birds to not totally collapse under their genetics, they have to starve them.

And so what they do is they give the breeding birds about 30% of the feed that the birds would eat on their own.

So they're like starving them 70%.

Because that is the only way to stop these birds from completely collapsing under the genetics that they've inflicted on them.

Yeah, I mean, I've visited factory farms, and I will say it is every bit as bad as it looks on the videos you can find online.

It is every bit.

I mean, the addition you see is, well, first you hear the noise, the distress yelps from these animals.

It smells awful.

But the other thing I noticed, I visited one egg factory farm, and it's impossible for farmers to provide individual care to each of these birds.

This was a relatively well-run farm.

And yet I still found a whole lot of hens stuck in the wire.

And those hens are just going to slowly starve.

And indeed, many had.

There were a lot of dead birds in with the live birds and other cages.

And that's just because of the scale.

It's like one farmer is trying to look after 200,000 hens.

The only thing they can actually do is check the feed lines and check the water lines and remove some of the dead birds.

Yeah.

And in fact, that is the work of a factory farmer is largely removing dead animals.

And so it is just this dystopian thing where like the industry presents this picture of like, oh, we have like individual care for our animals.

And it's like the scale at which you were doing it has totally prohibited having any kind of individual care.

And you see this total confusion in the laws we pass.

So for instance, dog fighting, which is a real evil.

It's horrific.

But we're talking about thousands of animals.

And Congress has passed multiple laws.

Every state's made it a felony.

It is being regulated correctly out of existence.

Right.

Meanwhile, the factory farming of pigs occurs on this far greater scale.

I mean, we've even done the same thing with cockfighting, which is literally chickens.

And it's literally, again, thousands of chickens.

And we have rightly banned it.

We've rightly made it felony animal cruelty.

And yet, when factory farmers do far worse to a far larger number of chickens, we call that commerce.

Yeah, so we think less than $300 million is being devoted to all work globally around every possible solution to factory farming across every country.

And less than $200 million of that is what you would probably consider smart money going to evidence-based effective interventions.

So to put that into perspective,

Philanthropic climate advocacy alone is 50 times bigger than that.

The work of cat and dog shelters and rescue groups in the US alone, 25 times bigger than that.

There are individual conservation and poverty charities that are five to 10x bigger than that.

So this is a tiny amount of money for the purpose of social reform, and yet it has achieved a huge amount impacting hundreds of millions, billions of animals.

I think additional funding would be transformative.

I mean, we have a playbook that works on a number of these issues.

So one of the first things would be holding companies to account for animal welfare policies they've already made.

We've got huge numbers of companies that made commitments to getting rid of battery cages and are now trying to back out of them or ignore them.

With additional campaign funding, we could hold them to those and as a result, immediately improve the conditions of millions of animals.

For years, the industry used these battery cages that are these microwave oven-sized cages.

They cram as many hens in as they can, and they leave them there for years.

And we know consumers don't think this is acceptable, but the industry doesn't disclose their use of them.

It's not like when you pick up a pack of eggs, it has a big thing saying, from cage tens, or an image of where they came from.

And so advocates went to the largest retailers, the largest fast food chains, and said, you need to move away from this because your consumers already expect this of you.

This is what your consumers clearly want and clearly don't accept this practice.

And they got pledges from almost all of the largest food companies, not just in the US, but globally, to move away from these practices.

And we're already seeing that this transition has already spared over 200 million hens a year from these battery cages.

So the U.S.

has gone from less than 10% cage free to 47% cage free.

The European Union is now 62% cage free.

This is a huge transition.

How do they do this?

So, I mean, they captured this basic divide between what consumers expected was already happening and what was actually happening.

Well, I think that one great way to support them is to support a diversified portfolio of groups.

So there's a group, FarmKind, that allows people to donate to a variety of groups.

And two of those groups that you can donate to through that platform, the Humane League and Synergy or Animal, are both working on exactly this.

Sure.

So the work to get hens out of cages has already spared over 200 million hens from cages.

The work to improve the lives of broiler chickens has already benefited over a billion animals.

That's just every year.

And so- Wait, sorry, it's 200 million a year?

200 million a year.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I missed that.

I thought it was a cumulative across.

No, no, no.

So the cumulative number, we're already well north of 500 million hands.

We're into the billions of broiler chickens.

And if you assume these things weren't just around the corner, they weren't just going to happen anyway.

If you think you probably sped up progress by years, decades, maybe it would never have happened.

Right.

then that's cumulative impact over those years and decades is giant.

I mean, we're talking billions, we're talking tens of billions.

Now, the amount of money spent just on those corporate reforms, that was less than $100 million a year over a couple of years.

And so we're talking about a ratio that is far less than 1 to 10 of $1 per year of animal well-being improved.

I think it's very unique.

And I think the reason this philanthropic opportunity exists is because this area has been systematically neglected, which is to say that most people, when they think of philanthropy, do not think of farmed animals.

You know, it's most people pile into the popular areas like education and healthcare and climate.

And as a result, you end up with these outsized opportunities that no one has taken advantage of.

Like, it's like if the space had billions of dollars in it, as other philanthropic areas do, you would not see opportunities like this.

Yeah.

In that case, we'd love to hear from you.

So people can message me on X or they can reach out to my colleague, Andreas.

That is, Andreas was 1A.

So it is A-N-D-R-E-S at openphilanthropy.org.

And he would love to work with you and I'd love to work with you to help you spend that money as effectively as possible.

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things.

So the first is countries where their protein consumption is rapidly growing and there is not yet a deeply entrenched animal agricultural industry have the ability to do things differently.

And in particular, they have the ability to support alternative protein work without that being politically toxic.

And so, for example, we see China investing very heavily in cultivated meat research.

The majority of patents coming out globally on cultivated meat now are coming out from public universities in China.

So this is a case where just like the US is being overtaken because we have this entrenched industry that is ferociously lobbying.

I also think there's the potential to extend animal welfare policies globally.

So we're seeing multinationals like Unilever and Nestle and even Burger King saying, we shouldn't have cages in our supply chain globally.

And this creates the potential to spread best practices just in the same way that factory farming spread from the United States globally.

So we had, essentially, the economic efficiency spread factory farming.

And in some cases, that can spread higher welfare tech.

So for example, in OVO sexing technology, once that has been de-risked enough, once it has been scaled up in Europe and the US, I'm optimistic it will become cheaper.

And then it will just be scaled out globally for economic reasons.

But there's also, we can spread moral progress.

So, I mean, we know that people in these countries also care about animal welfare.

And I had a fascinating conversation.

I went to a trade show and I talked with a company that manufactures crates, manufactures gestation crates.

And I was

like, you know, what do you think about the future sales of these crates?

And they're like, well, we already have stopped selling them in Europe and the US.

And I was like, yeah, do you think you'll be able to sell them in Asia forever?

And they're like, no way.

Like, as Asia gets, like, richer and is, like, on social media and sees the images and things, like, they're not going to be cool with this either.

Like, we know there is a limit to how long we're going to be able to sell these things for.

And I think that gives me some optimism, that I think as countries get richer, they generally get more concerned about this issue.

And that then enables them to adopt animal welfare reforms as we've seen in the West.

Yeah, it's mixed.

So, so far globally, wealth has heavily correlated with more suffering.

I mean, the drive of people getting richer has led to them eating far more meat and far more of that coming from factory farming.

And we have overwhelmingly seen that trend across all countries.

In a few European countries, we are starting to see the dynamic where once countries have reached a certain degree of wealth,

they are able to bring about reforms that actually reduce the total amount of suffering.

I think it is quite likely that Germany has passed the top of that curve and is now on the other side of diminishing total animal suffering.

Critical thing to bear in mind is this does not happen on its own.

In Germany, this happened because there are very talented advocates who harnessed that public opinion and concern to drive corporate reforms with the retailers and to drive government policy reforms.

And I think we need to do that.

I don't think you can just count that people are going to get to a certain degree of wealth and this is going to happen.

I think it only happens if there is advocacy to mobilize that public opinion.

Yeah, it's a huge problem.

So advocates in the US passed ballot measures in Florida and Arizona to ban gestation crates.

And then the pork industry just imported crated pork from other states into those states.

Mm-hmm.

So advocates then went to California and Massachusetts and passed ballot measures that extended the same standards to the sale of pork within the states, that you can't sell pork from crated pigs anywhere.

I think that is a critical move.

And we're seeing the European Union now considering doing the same thing, imposing animal welfare standards equally on imports.

I think that policy is critical.

to not just ensuring that you're not getting these laws undercut, but also to changing the political dynamic.

Because domestic farmers, local farmers are going to be very opposed to any law if they realize they're just going to get undercut by, how to say, a competition.

Rightly so.

And so I think this is a chance to also change that political dynamic so they can actually support the law, knowing that they are not at a relative disadvantage.

An upcoming bill, right?

This is right.

So the pork industry, unfortunately, has looked at these laws in California and Massachusetts and wants to do everything it can to undermine them.

I mean, it knows this is the only way it can be effectively regulated, given it has an absolute hold on the legislature in Iowa and North Carolina, which are the main states for pork production.

It knows that it needs to stop any other state from setting production standards or sales standards.

And so it first went to the Supreme Court.

It first said, this is unconstitutional.

The states can't do this.

And the Supreme Court disagreed.

We won at the Supreme Court.

And so now it has gone to Congress.

And it's saying to Congress, you need to wipe out these state laws.

You need to stop them from doing this.

And the unfortunate thing is the Senate and the House are both on track to do that.

So in the upcoming Farm Bill, there is language that would ban states from passing laws that

on the sales standard, on animal welfare sales standards on goods.

And right now, the default path is that that will pass as part of the farm bill in the next few months.

the first problem is structural.

So at the state level, they've had to use ballot measures to get around entrenched lobbies.

In this case, things start out in the House and Senate ag committees, which are heavily dominated by agricultural interests.

The majority of House members, I think, signed a letter against this in the last Congress, but the vast majority of them are not on the ag committee.

And so the ag committee gets to decide what's in this bill.

And if you're on the ag committee, I mean, the House ag committee just hosted a hearing on this.

They only invited lobbyists

for the industry.

They didn't bother to provide a single opposing witness to their hearing.

We're also seeing that the industry is much better organized and funded on this effort than advocates are.

So the industry is constantly flying out a bunch of big industrial pork farmers claiming they speak for the entire industry, telling the legislators this is their number one priority and absolutely has to be done.

By contrast, animal welfare groups are not getting the same hearing.

So legislators are not taking them as seriously as they take these agro.

There is a large constituency of family farmers who support these laws because it has created a new market opportunity for them where they can sell their already higher welfare meat and not be undercut by the industrial stuff.

The problem they have is that they are far less wealthy and organized than the industrial pork interests.

And so they don't have the money to just fly themselves to D.C.

They can't stop farming.

The people who are actually doing family farming can't just go to D.C.

and hang out for a week because they need to be farming and looking after the pigs on their farm.

I mean, there are people who are funding some of these family farmers to go to Washington, D.C., but we could see a far bigger effort.

I think that that voice is being hugely neglected in the debate.

The other thing I'll say on the money the pork industry has is, yes, it's a commodity business, but it's also an oligopoly.

And so you've got a very small number of firms that process the vast majority of pigs, and they do seem to make outsized profits.

So they don't make the kind of profits you would expect.

And across these industries, we constantly see price-fixing scandals and other antitrust scandals because it's a very small number of companies, and it only requires minimal coordination for them to make greater profits than you would think they could.

I mean, this is the absurdity of this, is that the egg industry has been saying, we can't possibly afford this transition to cage-free eggs.

They, over the last few years of high egg prices, they've made insane profits.

How much?

Well, so like Kelmain, which is the biggest egg producer, I think its share price has doubled over the last few years.

And it's because the price elasticity for eggs, it's very inelastic.

So you can just keep cranking up the price on even a very small reduction in supply, and you can then take all that surplus.

And so they've been doing that.

And as a result, you see a whole lot of these industries, they are actually flush with cash.

The problem is,

Depends on the company, right?

So a lot of the egg producers are actually relatively small.

It's the Tyson Foods and things that are on the billions.

But no, they have the money to do these reforms.

I mean, that is not the constraint.

The constraint is the willingness to do the reforms.

Well, the problem is, so this bill stopping states from regulating farm and welfare meaningfully, this bill could not pass on its own.

So if it was put on the floor of the House and the Senate, it would lose.

This is why they're putting it in the farm bill.

So, the Farm Bill is this huge piece of legislation that includes all the farm subsidies, it includes all the food stamp assistance.

And so, this is a bill that is considered a must-pass piece of legislation and is decided based on issues that most politicians consider far bigger than the issue of where the state laws are wiped out.

And so, what the industry is banking on is that once they've got this in the text of the bill, people aren't going to sink the bill over this one provision and it will sail through even though it's a deeply unpopular policy.

I mean, I think the good news here is we have public opinion overwhelmingly on our side.

We don't need to be corrupt, right?

It's like the industry needs to be corrupt because they are trying to get politicians to do something that their voters strongly disapprove of.

And so I think what we need to do is mobilize that base of support and show how real it is.

And so I think we need, for instance, to mobilize animal welfare advocates.

We need to mobilize farmers who benefit from higher welfare standards.

And we need to provide them with an equal footing to the footing that the industry has provided to the very small number of factory farmers who have a stake in the system.

And that requires the same things the industry are doing.

So, I mean, it requires flying people to DC.

It requires getting people to go and talk to their politicians in their local district.

And yes, it also requires money because the industry is putting up so much money.

Politicians need to see that there is also money on the other side of this issue.

My sense of what the industry does is they get a whole bunch of their executives to max out on donations to politicians.

the politicians then give them meetings.

And I wish this wasn't the way the system worked.

Like I wish instead that politicians were actually just responsive to what the voters want.

But given this is how the system works, I think that what people need to do is to bind together with a couple of other friends who care about this issue, max out on your donations to a politician, and then meet with the politician and say, I really care about this.

And I'm watching what you do on this issue.

And I think that if enough people did that, and frankly, you don't even need to just start donating.

A lot of people listening to this

who probably already donate significant amounts to politicians.

And if they started saying to those politicians, by the way, this is something I really care about, and I'm watching what you do on this issue, I think you would start to see the political dynamic change.

Yeah, it's a real puzzle.

I mean, this is an industry that accounts for less than 1% of Americans.

It's trying to defend wildly unpopular practices.

And doesn't even get that much money.

And yet somehow they have this total lock on the legislative process where they can stop any animal welfare legislation from passing.

I think there are a couple of things going on.

So I think the first thing is it's not just them.

They are fighting alongside of the entire agriculture industry.

There are allied industries like the insurance industry, the pharma industry that have a big stake in factory farming.

They also, it's not just the money.

So they appeal to this mythos of the American farmer.

People think the American farmer is the good, hardworking, salt of the earth person.

They sell the image of this person out in the fields, tending to their chickens and their pigs.

They don't realize these are factory farmers.

And they're extremely well organized.

I mean, they have a very formidable lobbying presence in Washington, D.C.

and across state capitals.

And they have effectively used that to block any kind of regulation.

You know, there's this children's kids book rule of politics, which is you should never mess with a character in a children's book.

And, you know, that's the police, that's the doctors, that's the farmers.

And I don't think there are any tech bros in the kids books yet.

Yeah, this is a great point.

I think most people don't realize that the way these factory farms are structured is you have these giant corporations like Tyson Foods or Smithfield.

They mostly don't own their own farms.

Instead, they have these contract farmers who are essentially indentured laborers.

I mean, they have a huge loan hanging over their head and they're farming.

So why would those people support this?

The answer is they often don't.

And I think the agribusiness lobbying associations have done a very good job of pretending they do.

So they present themselves as representing the farmers.

But if you look at their boards, if you look at the people who are actually leading these organizations, it's made up of people from the giant agribusinesses and the very largest industrial farmers.

They do not have small contract farmers on the boards of these organizations.

And so I think it really is a bit of a bait and switch where they claim to be representing those family farmers, but they're not.

Yeah, so it depends.

I mean, for some people, it is just the least bad option they have, right?

And especially if someone just has a little wee bit of land and they want to preserve that land and they don't have other skills they can use.

But, you know, I mean, I was chatting with this guy, Craig Watts, who was a chicken contract farmer for Purdue.

And he told me that when he got into the business...

they made all these exorbitant claims to him.

I mean, they said, you're going to be making over $100,000 within years.

They said, just get out this loan and it's going to be incredible to them, all the things that could go right.

And then he got into the business and they slowly started eroding the payments to him.

So they slowly started paying him less and less.

They slowly got to a point where he was making less and less money and he wanted out.

But by that point, he couldn't get out because he had this giant loan hanging over his head.

And so I do think you've got a bunch of people who are stuck in the situation and there aren't easy alternatives because normally in one area, there will only be one processor that has a slaughterhouse in that area.

So there's not effective competition going on.

Also, often you're locked in these long-term contracts as well.

So there is an element of people being locked in this, and then there's an element of people just not having better choices.

I mean, I think ideally we would see pasture-based farming in those places.

And, you know, it doesn't require that much land, for instance, to have a pasture-based chicken farm.

The problem is you would need to find a processor that you could work with.

And normally that just doesn't exist.

So normally you've only got the giant players in an area and they say...

we just want commodity production.

We don't want to fund you to do this pasture-raised stuff.

And so you get logged into that contract.

And so oftentimes people who are doing pasture-raised production have to create their entire supply chain by themselves.

Like they literally have to build their own slaughterhouse and create their entire supply chain around that, which drives up costs massively.

So there are people who are trying.

So Nyman Ranch, for instance, has done this with independent pork farmers.

There was a big effort to do this by Cook's Ventures with pasture-raised chicken.

Mm-hmm.

And unfortunately, they just went out of business.

And I think the reason they went out of business is because there is such huge mislabeling across the industry that it's very hard to separate out what's actually better.

So for instance, much factory farmed chicken in the US is sold with the label all natural.

And we know from surveys that people think all natural means the chickens were outside.

It actually means nothing.

But if you're trying to sell your product as like pasture raised next to a product that says all natural, and people think it means the same thing, and your product costs $2 more,

you're not going to get very far, right?

And so I think so long as we have this rampant mislabeling, it's very hard for the other players to get ahead.

Yes.

So, I mean, I think you actually see that in the egg sector in the US.

So, within eggs, there is clearer labeling.

K3 actually means something.

Pasteurized actually means something.

You can't put the all-natural label on.

And what we see is that the pasteurized egg sector is growing rapidly.

And even then, it is still handicapped by the fact that supermarkets use this as a price differentiation tool.

So, they know that wealthier consumers prefer

pasture-based eggs and are also less price sensitive.

And so they mark them up heavily.

So the price you see is way inflated beyond the actual cost difference.

And yet still, that is a rapidly growing sector.

I think this is the non-commodity part of the industry.

But I mean, the broader context on those retailers is US retailers, almost all the top US retailers have made pledges to stop selling eggs from cage tents.

What they are now saying, a lot of them were meant to do that by this year, and a lot of them have not done it.

Walmart, Kroger have not followed through.

And what they say is, well, our consumers don't want the K3 eggs because they're way more expensive.

And it's true, they're way more expensive.

They're selling them for like $1 to $2 more per dozen.

Right.

When you look at the underlying production costs, it's only 19 cents difference.

And so what we see is these retailers are using this as an opportunity to get a big markup with less price-sensitive consumers and are in the process massively hampering their ability to fulfill their commitments.

By contrast, Costco went 100% cage-free.

They followed through on their promise.

And what we see is they are now selling cage-free eggs for the same price as Walmart sells its caged eggs.

So there is that competitive pressure.

Once cage-free becomes the new baseline, it does become the commodity market.

And you do see those margins competed away.

Same thing in states where they've banned the sale of caged eggs.

Cage-free eggs now cost the same thing as the caged eggs cost next door.

So you do see that competed away.

Once it becomes the commodity, it's until it reaches that point that you're seeing these crazy margins.

Like Vital Farms or Nest Fresh Eggs, like they are out front focusing on the animal welfare benefits because they're pasture raised and it looks amazing.

The fundamental problem for the large-scale companies is they have just made things less bad.

And it's still really good what they're doing.

Moving from caged to cage-free is incredible.

But I think there are two problems.

So one is their consumers already thought they weren't using caged eggs.

So if they advertise like, hey, we're cage-free now, everyone's like, what?

What were you doing all this time?

You didn't tell us you were using caged eggs.

And people still might think that even the new reality is not as good as what they thought things should be.

They still would rather the animals were going outside, which they're not.

And in a lot of cases, there are these phasins over time.

So McDonald's is like, in 10 years' time, we're going to get rid of the caged eggs.

It's like, well, you don't want to advertise that too loudly, because for the next 10 years, I'm eating caged eggs, and I didn't know that previously.

So I think that is just the unfortunate dynamic is because this dissonance is so great between current practices and the reality.

that merely getting rid of the worst practices is not enough to create an advertising claim.

I think it has been.

I think it's been phenomenally successful with these consumer-facing brands, like the retailers, the fast food chains.

Advocates have been able to secure over 3,000 corporate animal welfare pledges now globally, including from all the biggest retailers, all the biggest fast food chains, affecting hundreds of millions of animals.

Yeah.

And I think the reason for that is twofold.

The first is there's a totally different structure from the structure in place on the legislative side.

On the legislative side, if you want to pass an animal welfare reform in Congress or in any state legislature, it goes to the Agriculture Committee.

The Agriculture Committee is dominated by a bunch of people who are in the pocket of big ag, and they kill the bill.

It never even gets out of that committee, let alone getting to the whole legislature.

If you go to a company, you go to someone who is a decision maker who is not being lobbied by industry, or if they are being lobbied, is far less susceptible to that lobbying than they are.

I also think companies have just proven more responsive to consumers than politicians are to their voters.

I think politicians have decided...

that they need to be responsive on like the 10 issues their voters care most about.

Maybe it's fewer than that.

But that on low salience issues like this, they can just ignore what their voters want and do what their donors are telling them what to do or what's easier to do.

Whereas I think what corporations are finding is actually if consumers are really outraged about this, then we need to act.

And maybe this is higher on the list of salience for consumers

at a retailer, because they're not worried about what's their taxation policy.

It's like, for a retailer, actually, what is the quality of the goods you are selling?

That is a pretty critical factor.

One other thing I'll say is, we know from surveys that when it comes to sustainability, animal welfare is the top thing people care about.

So for all this talk we see from companies about climate change and prioritizing climate change, both the McDonald's and the Tysons and so on, they've all said this is the thing that consumers actually care about.

Yeah, I mean, there's been this weird conflating, and there's even been this very cynical exploitation of the climate issue by producers

to not do animal welfare reforms.

So something that Tyson Foods will say is, we can't move to these higher welfare breeds because they would have a slightly bigger carbon footprint because they eat a little bit more.

And also, if you let the animals move around a lot, they expend more calories.

And so that's got a bigger carbon footprint, right?

It's this total absurdity.

I had a conversation with the SVP for sustainability at one of the largest meat companies.

And what they told me was, yes, we know from internal surveys that animal welfare is actually more important to consumers, but we are far more responsive to what the fast food companies and the investors are telling us.

And the fast food companies and the investors are obsessed with climate.

Like ESG stuff?

I think ESG stuff, I think they've all made these targets that they need to implement, and those targets are getting much higher priority than the targets they made on animal welfare.

I think a lot of people care about multiple things, right?

They care about animal welfare and they care about sustainability.

And it is true that in certain cases, these things go hand in hand.

So alternative proteins are both better for animal welfare and have a smaller environmental footprint.

So they are more sustainable.

This is not always the case.

And I think, for instance, one thing that is wild to me is where you have people out there telling people to switch from beef to chicken because it's better for the climate.

Like literally that switch is 23 more animals per year you'll be consuming, costing several years worth of suffering in these factory farms for a pretty marginal climate impact.

And so I do think there is often this tendency that climate just gets total presence.

It's just seen as like, well, obviously that's more important than like any number of animals suffering.

And I actually think that that is more of like an elite narrative than it is what regular people think.

Like I actually think regular people are just pretty horrified by animal suffering and do prioritize that.

Thank you very much.

And thank you for both being willing to take on this tough topic on your podcast and for making such a generous donation match.

I'm really excited about the impact you can have there.

Awesome.

Today, I want to talk with you about one of the most important moral issues we never talk about, and that's factory farming.

But first, I want to share with you the story of how I came to be here.

I grew up in New Zealand, and yes, we had a sheep farm.

It was small, 100 acres of rolling hills, and the sheep would graze the hillsides by day and then retreat to the hilltops to circle up and fall asleep at night.

The sheep ultimately went to slaughter.

But I always felt like at least they'd lived good lives and had quick deaths.

Frankly, if I'm ever reincarnated as a sheep, which, as a New Zealander, is not unlikely, I'd like to live their life.

When I was a teenager, we traveled to Vietnam.

And in the back streets of Hanoi, I stumbled into a live animal market.

I still remember seeing the site, stacks upon stacks of cages crammed full of animals of every species, trembling in fear, staring out at me in distress.

I was shaken.

But when I returned to New Zealand, I figured things were different.

I mean, you can see the cows and the sheep in the fields.

Still, I started to wonder how we treated the animals that you couldn't see.

How, in particular, did we treat the pigs and the chickens?

So I did what you did back then.

I picked up a phone book, and I looked up some pig and chicken farms.

And one by one, I called, and I naively asked if I could just come visit.

And one by one, they told me no.

They don't let anyone just visit.

Finally, I got hold of a major slaughterhouse and connected with a farm boy.

Let's call him Liam.

Now, this slaughterhouse didn't do visitors either, but Liam and I bonded over sheep, and he agreed to get me in.

Honestly, the slaughterhouse wasn't as bad as I'd expected.

It was the state of the animals arriving there that shook me.

I remember seeing pigs coming down off a transport truck.

some shaking, some squealing, some limping in pain.

Liam, I said, why are those pigs limping?

Not my problem, he replied.

So I looked into it.

Before I tell you what I learned, let me say I'm not here to tell you what to eat.

In fact, I don't think this should be on you as an individual consumer at all.

You never chose factory farming.

When the factory farms came in and replaced the old family farms, they didn't tell you they were doing it.

They didn't relabel the meat as now for miserable animals.

They labeled it as all natural and farm fresh.

In fact, the industry has created an entire system to stop you from seeing how your meat is produced.

They've even passed ag-gag laws in U.S.

states to make it a crime to record conditions in factory farms, which makes it all the more important that we see what they're trying to hide from us.

I want to share with you three common factory farming practices.

I deliberately didn't choose the most gruesome or out-there practices I could find.

These are everyday realities involved in the production of most pork and eggs globally.

Here we go, the gestation crate.

This is why the pigs at the slaughterhouse were limping.