A deep dive with Lewis Bollard, who leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for Farmed Animal Welfare, on the surprising economics of the meat industry.Why is factory farming so efficient? How can we make the lives of the 23+ billion animals living on factory farms more bearable? How far off are the moonshots (e.g., brainless chickens, cultivated meats, etc.) to end this mass suffering? And why does the meat industry have such a surprising amount of political influence?For decades, innovation in the meat industry has actually made the conditions for animals worse. Can the next few decades of tech reverse this pattern?Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Donation match fundraiserThe welfare of animals on factory farms is so systemically neglected that just $1 can help avert 10 years of animal suffering.After learning more about the outsized opportunities to help, I decided to give $250,000 as a donation match to farmkind.giving/dwarkesh. FarmKind directs your contributions to the most effective charities in this area.Please consider contributing, even if it’s a small amount. Together, we can double each other's impact and give a total of $500,000.Bluntly, there are some listeners who are in a position to give much more. Given how neglected this topic is, one such person could singlehandedly change the game for 10s of billions of animals. If you’re considering donating $50k or more, please reach out directly to Lewis and his team by emailing [email protected](00:00:00) – The astonishing efficiency of factory farming(00:07:18) – It was a mistake making this about diet(00:09:54) – Tech that’s sparing 100s of millions of animals/year(00:16:16) – Brainless chickens and higher welfare breeds(00:28:21) – $1 can prevent 10 years of animal suffering(00:37:26) – Situation in China and the developing world(00:41:41) – How the meat lobby got a lock on Congress(00:53:23) – Business structure of the meat industry(00:57:42) – Corporate campaigns are underrated Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today, I'm chatting with Louis Ballard, who is Farm Animal Welfare Program Director at Open Philanthropy. And Open Philanthropy is the biggest charity in this animal welfare space. So, Louis, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me on. Okay, first question. At some point, we'll have AGI. How do you just think about the problem you're trying to solve?
Are you trying to make conditions more tolerable for the next 10 years until AI solves this problem for us? Or is there some reason to think that... the interventions we're making in terms of improvements like inovosexing or cage-free eggs, et cetera, will have an impact beyond this transformative moment.
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.
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