Why AGI won't be a silver bullet for factory farming

Lewis Bollard argues that the end of factory farming is far from inevitable, despite potential technological advancements like AGI. The industry is currently growing by about 2% globally each year. He outlines two possible futures: one where technology continues to make factory farming more efficient and abusive, and another where animal suffering is actively reduced. While AGI could accelerate progress in alternative proteins and humane technology, it faces significant cultural and political obstacles. Many consumers still prefer traditional meat, and cultivated meat is already illegal in seven US states and may face a ban in the EU.

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

The core of factory farming's efficiency lies in the chicken itself. It has been bred to convert a small amount of cheap grain into protein with a feed conversion ratio of about 2.2 to 1. The production process has been stripped of all costs related to animal welfare, making it incredibly cheap. To compete, new technologies must beat this extremely low price point. The host likens this challenge to replicating human intelligence; just as evolution spent millions of years optimizing intelligence, it has spent billions of years optimizing the conversion of calories into meat, making it a difficult biological system to replicate cheaply.

Regarding cultivated meat, Lewis believes its success depends entirely on future actions. While some companies are selling it in small volumes at high prices, the path to making it cheaper than factory-farmed chicken is not the current default. There's a massive disparity in investment, with billions in venture capital going to alternative proteins, while humane technology for existing farms receives less than $10 million annually. Investors are drawn to alternative proteins because they seem like a complete replacement for the old system, similar to electric vehicles. Lewis sees potential for them to capture a portion of the market, but does not foresee a complete takeover anytime soon.

Why the animal welfare movement shifted from personal diet to systemic change

Discussions about animal welfare often focus on personal behavior, such as becoming vegetarian. However, the movement's emphasis on individual dietary choices may have been a mistake. The real path to large scale social change is not through individual action but through government and corporate reform. People can be advocates and funders for this cause regardless of their personal diet.

I think we made a mistake as a movement making this about personal diet. It's great when folks wanna make a personal diet decision, whether that is eating less meat or meat from 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.

The movement's initial focus on personal purity arose because early advocates felt powerless to achieve larger scale change and understandably focused on what they could control: themselves. Lewis explains this became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where personal purity became an end in itself. This is partly because it's much easier to measure one's own purity than the total impact of reforming a vast system like factory farming.

It started to become an end in itself where it was about personal purity and 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.

The good news is that this has changed significantly in the last decade. The movement has shifted from being obsessed with personal dietary choices to being much more focused on achieving measurable impact.

Large-scale drivers of progress in animal welfare

There may be highly effective interventions in animal welfare that are often overlooked. An analogy can be drawn from global health: while the Against Malaria Foundation has saved hundreds of thousands of lives, China's economic liberalization lifted a billion people out of poverty, an impact several orders of magnitude greater. Lewis Bollard identifies three similarly large-scale drivers of progress in animal welfare: government policy, corporate reforms, and technology.

Government policy, such as the European Union setting basic welfare standards, affects billions of animals annually. Corporate reforms also have a massive scale. For example, when McDonald's went cage-free in the US, it moved 7 million hens out of cages each year. The third major lever is technology, exemplified by in-ovo sexing. This technology prevents the culling of male chicks in the egg industry, which are otherwise killed at birth. In-ovo sexing has already spared about 200 million chicks from this 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.

The history of the egg industry illustrates how technology can also cause harm. The industry split into meat chickens bred for weight gain and laying hens bred for egg production. This specialization made male chicks from the laying hen breeds commercially useless. The standard practice became killing them on their first day of life, often in a grinder. This affects about 8 billion chicks globally every year. In-ovo sexing provides a technological solution by scanning eggs to determine their sex early in incubation, allowing for the disposal of male eggs before they hatch.

The development of this technology was driven by both policy and technological maturity. Advocacy raised awareness, prompting about $10 million in public and philanthropic funding to kickstart the technology. This initial investment helped it reach a point where startups could commercialize it. The rapid adoption—from an idea a decade ago to covering a third of the European egg industry today—suggests there is low-hanging fruit for technological innovation in this space. Because the industry has historically focused only on reducing price and increasing production, it often uses archaic methods. Lewis points to the castration of piglets with a blunt knife and no pain relief as another example where a simple technology, immunocastration, offers a more humane and effective alternative.

How optimizing for efficiency in farming leads to more cruelty

When animal agriculture ruthlessly optimizes for efficiency, it often creates new problems that are solved with even more cruelty. With pigs, for instance, moving them indoors led to boredom and tail-biting. The industry's solution was not to improve conditions, but to cut off their tails. When that failed, they clipped their teeth. For sows, this escalated to placing them in restrictive crates. Each solution fails to address the underlying problem and can make things worse.

At each step there is a new solution that can't solve the fundamental underlying parts of the problem and sometimes just makes it worse.

This raises a provocative question: could we engineer brainless animals? If suffering is the main concern, then creating animals that are essentially just bioreactors for converting grain into meat could be seen as the ultimate optimization. Suffering is economically inefficient at the individual animal level, causing issues that farmers would rather avoid. However, the system as a whole profits from cruelty.

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.

Lewis Bollard expresses more optimism for incremental reforms. He believes a more achievable goal is breeding animals without the genetic problems caused by selective breeding. For example, we have bred chickens to be mutants that collapse under their own weight. In contrast, higher-welfare birds are bred for robustness with stronger legs and better cardiovascular systems. These birds are slightly less economical, so advocacy is needed to encourage their adoption, as seen in countries like France and Denmark. However, there's a risk that the industry will simply erode these gains over time. In the past, after a study showed chickens were in chronic pain, the industry strengthened their legs, only to then put more weight on them, undoing the progress. This suggests that without external oversight, the industry will always revert to a "race to the bottom." The solution requires government and corporate intervention to set and maintain a minimum welfare floor that cannot be compromised.

Modern factory farming manufactures creatures optimized for suffering

Breeding chickens for faster growth has led to a drop in price and a massive increase in consumption. While this provides more meat per animal, the resulting increase in overall consumption and individual animal suffering has created a net negative outcome. A more realistic solution than reverting to 1950s-era breeds is to use higher welfare breeds. These animals still grow quickly but not in a way that destroys their bodies.

This practice has been described as manufacturing creatures that are optimized for suffering. It's not just about caging an existing animal; it's about genetically altering it to maximize output, often at the cost of its well-being.

We have designed this chicken to basically suffer as much as possible. We have literally genetically changed it as much as we can plausibly change it, given the technology available to us today in this Frankensteinian way, to suffer as much as possible.

A stark example is the treatment of breeding birds. These chickens are genetically designed to grow so large, so quickly, that they would collapse before reaching puberty. To prevent this and allow them to reproduce, they are systematically starved, receiving only about 30% of the food they would naturally eat.

Visiting these farms reveals a grim reality that matches or exceeds what is seen in videos. Lewis describes the overwhelming sounds of distress and the awful smell. He recalls seeing many hens stuck in the wires of their cages, left to slowly starve because individual care is impossible at such a massive scale. The primary job of a factory farmer often becomes the removal of dead animals.

I visited one egg factory farm and it's impossible for farmers to provide individual care to each of these birds... I still found a whole lot of hens stuck in the wire. And those hens are just going to slowly starve.

There is a significant inconsistency in how society treats animal cruelty. Dogfighting and cockfighting, which affect thousands of animals, are rightly outlawed as felonies. However, factory farming, which inflicts arguably worse suffering on billions of animals, is legally considered commerce.

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

The scale of this problem is stupendous. If a single farm with 100,000 suffering chickens is a moral emergency, the reality of billions of animals in these conditions is difficult to comprehend. However, the positive perspective is that because the problem is so large and neglected, even one person has the potential to make a significant impact.

A small amount of funding creates massive change for farmed animals

There is a surprisingly small amount of money dedicated to solving the problem of factory farming. Lewis Bollard estimates less than $300 million is devoted globally to all potential solutions, with under $200 million considered "smart money" for effective, evidence-based interventions.

To put this into perspective, philanthropic climate advocacy is 50 times larger. The work of cat and dog rescue groups in the U.S. alone is 25 times bigger. Even individual conservation and poverty charities can be five to ten times larger. Despite this tiny amount of funding, the social reform efforts in this space have already impacted hundreds of millions of animals.

Lewis believes additional funding would be transformative because there is a proven playbook for success. One of the most immediate opportunities is to hold companies accountable for animal welfare policies they have already promised to enact. Many corporations have made commitments to eliminate battery cages but are now attempting to ignore or back out of 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 microwave-oven-sized battery cages, cramming in as many hens as possible for their entire lives. Advocates recognized that consumers find this practice unacceptable, yet companies do not disclose it on their packaging. They approached the largest retailers and fast-food chains, arguing that they needed to align their practices with what their customers already expected. This led to pledges from most major food companies globally to move away from these cages.

This strategy has been incredibly successful. The transition has already spared over 200 million hens a year from battery cages. The U.S. has gone from less than 10% cage-free to 47%, and the European Union is now 62% cage-free. To support this work, Lewis suggests donating to a diversified portfolio of groups through a platform called Farm Kind. Two organizations working specifically on these corporate campaigns are The Humane League and Sinergia Animal.

A single dollar can avert ten years of animal suffering

The ratio of dollars to suffering averted in farmed animal welfare is astounding. Efforts to get hens out of cages have spared over 200 million hens annually, while work to improve the lives of broiler chickens has benefited over a billion animals each year. The cumulative impact over the years numbers in the tens of billions of animals. These corporate reforms were achieved with less than $100 million a year over a couple of years.

This results in a ratio where a single dollar can fund more than ten years of improved animal well-being. The host expressed his shock at this figure:

$1 you're saying can do more than 10 years of a better, a more humane life? That is stupendous.

Lewis explains that this unique philanthropic opportunity exists because the area has been systematically neglected. Most people don't think of farmed animals when they consider philanthropy, instead focusing on popular areas like education, healthcare, and climate. This leaves outsized opportunities for impact that have not yet been taken advantage of.

Motivated by this, the host announced his own donation of $250,000 to FarmKind Giving, which he describes as an index fund for the most effective animal welfare charities. He also created a donation match, aiming to allocate a total of $500,000 with listeners' help. He emphasized how neglected the area is, meaning even small donations can have an enormous impact. For those in a position to contribute $50,000 or more, Lewis can be reached on X or his colleague Andreas can be emailed at andreas@openphilanthropy.org. Other listeners can contribute to the donation match at farmkindgiving.org/dwarkash.

The political battle to uphold state animal welfare laws

As countries become wealthier, they tend to consume more meat, increasing animal suffering globally. However, there are promising interventions. Countries where protein consumption is growing but industrial agriculture is not yet entrenched have an opportunity to support alternative proteins. China, for example, is heavily investing in cultivated meat research and now leads in related patents, overtaking the U.S. where an entrenched industry lobbies against such progress.

There is also potential to spread higher animal welfare standards globally. Multinational corporations are beginning to adopt global cage-free policies. While factory farming spread due to economic efficiency, moral progress can also be exported. Lewis Bollard shared a conversation with a manufacturer of gestation crates who acknowledged that their product has a limited future even in Asia. As Asian countries get richer and more exposed to animal welfare issues via social media, public opinion will shift.

As Asia gets richer and is like on social media and sees the images and things, 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.

So far, increasing wealth has mostly correlated with more suffering. However, some wealthy European nations like Germany may be past the peak, with total animal suffering beginning to decline. This change is not automatic; it is driven by advocates who translate public concern into corporate and government policy.

A significant challenge is that when one state or country outlaws a practice, cheaper products made with that practice are simply imported. To counter this, advocates in California and Massachusetts passed laws banning the sale of products like pork from crated pigs, regardless of where they were produced. This is a critical policy that levels the playing field for local farmers and is now being considered by the European Union for imports.

However, this progress is under threat in the U.S. The industrial pork industry, after losing a Supreme Court case, is now lobbying Congress to include language in the upcoming Farm Bill that would nullify these state-level sales standards. This effort is likely to succeed. At the federal level, the fight is more difficult because congressional agriculture committees are heavily influenced by industry interests. These committees have held hearings on the issue where only industry lobbyists were invited to speak. While many family farmers support the higher welfare standards, they lack the organization and financial resources to compete with the powerful industrial lobby in Washington D.C.

The industry strategy for blocking animal welfare reform

Although the meat industry is a commodity business, it functions as an oligopoly. A small number of firms process the vast majority of pigs, allowing them to make outsized profits through minimal coordination. Price-fixing and antitrust scandals are common. This profitability means companies have the financial capacity to invest in animal welfare, but they lack the willingness to do so.

Lewis Bollard points to the egg industry as a clear example. Companies claimed they could not afford to transition to cage-free eggs, yet they have been making huge profits.

The absurdity of this is that the egg industry has been saying we can't possibly afford this transition to cage-free eggs. Over the last few years of high egg prices, they've made insane profits... Cal-Maine, which is the biggest egg producer, I think its share price is like doubled over the last few years. And it's because the price elasticity for eggs is very inelastic.

These industries are flush with cash, so money is not the constraint on reform. The real issue is a political one. A bill to prevent states from regulating farm animal welfare would not pass on its own. To get around this, the industry is putting it into the farm bill, a massive, must-pass piece of legislation that includes crucial items like farm subsidies and food stamps. The strategy is to bury the unpopular provision within the larger bill, betting that politicians will not risk sinking the entire package for this one issue. This allows a deeply unpopular policy to sail through.

The surprising political effectiveness of the meat lobby

To counter the political influence of the meat industry, advocates have the advantage of public opinion being overwhelmingly on their side. Lewis Bollard explains that the industry must resort to corrupt-seeming practices because they are trying to persuade politicians to do something their voters strongly disapprove of. The key for advocates is to mobilize this base of support and demonstrate its reality to politicians. This involves organizing advocates and farmers who benefit from higher welfare standards to match the industry's efforts. Actions include flying people to D.C., arranging meetings with local politicians, and contributing financially. Lewis suggests that money often buys access, noting that industry executives frequently max out donations to secure meetings. He advises that individuals who care about this issue could band together, max out their donations to a politician, and then meet with them to emphasize the importance of the issue. Even existing donors can make a difference by simply communicating to politicians that they are watching their actions on animal welfare.

The meat lobby's effectiveness presents a puzzle. Despite spending a relatively modest $45 million per election cycle and representing less than 1% of Americans, the industry maintains a powerful hold on the legislative process, successfully blocking animal welfare legislation. This influence seems to surpass that of wealthier industries like tech. Lewis suggests several factors contribute to this success. The meat industry fights alongside the entire agriculture sector and allied industries like insurance and pharmaceuticals. More importantly, they appeal to the powerful "mythos of the American farmer," a sympathetic, salt-of-the-earth figure. This imagery obscures the reality of factory farming. This taps into what one speaker calls the "children's book rule of politics.":

You should never mess with a character in a children's book. And that's the police, that's the doctors, that's the farmers. And I don't think there are any tech pros in the kids books yet.

A final question remains: given that many farmers have an adversarial relationship with large corporations like Tyson and Purdue, it's unclear why they form such an effective political coalition with them.

The economic reality for contract farmers in the factory farm system

Most factory farms are not owned by the giant corporations they supply, like Tyson Foods or Smithfield. Instead, they rely on contract farmers who are often in a situation resembling indentured servitude. These farmers take on huge loans to operate, and agribusiness lobbying groups, while claiming to represent them, are actually controlled by executives from the large corporations. It's a bit of a bait and switch, presenting a facade of supporting family farmers while serving corporate interests.

Farmers often enter these contracts because it seems like the least bad option available, especially for those with a small amount of land and limited alternative skills. Lewis Bollard shared the story of Craig Watts, a contract chicken farmer for Purdue, to illustrate this predicament. Purdue initially made grand promises of high earnings.

When he got into the business they made all these exorbitant claims to him. 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... And then he got into the business and they slowly started eroding the payments to him... he wanted out. But by that point he couldn't get out because he had this giant loan hanging over his head.

This situation is compounded by a lack of competition. Typically, only one processor with a slaughterhouse operates in an area, leaving farmers locked into long-term contracts with no alternatives.

The primary alternative, pasture-based farming, is difficult to establish because farmers often need to build an entire supply chain themselves, including their own slaughterhouse, which dramatically increases costs. This hurdle exists largely due to widespread, deceptive product labeling. For example, much factory-farmed chicken is sold as "all natural," a term consumers often mistake for meaning the chickens were raised outdoors. In reality, the label is meaningless.

If you're trying to sell your product as 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.

The US egg sector demonstrates that clearer labeling can make a difference. Terms like "cage-free" and "pasture-raised" have specific meanings for eggs, and as a result, the pasture-raised egg market is growing rapidly. This growth occurs even though supermarkets heavily mark up these products, using them as a price differentiation tool for wealthier, less price-sensitive consumers.

Why corporate campaigns are a powerful lever for animal welfare

Meat and agriculture is largely a commodity business, where margins are competed away. However, retailers often charge significantly more for products like cage-free eggs, even when the production cost increase is minimal. For instance, a dozen cage-free eggs might cost only 19 cents more to produce, but sell for $1.70 more. Lewis Bollard explains this happens because cage-free is not yet the standard commodity. Retailers use the higher price to get a large markup from less price-sensitive consumers. This high price also becomes an excuse for retailers like Walmart and Kroger to delay their cage-free commitments, claiming a lack of consumer demand. In contrast, once cage-free becomes the baseline, competition drives prices down. Costco, which fulfilled its 100% cage-free promise, now sells cage-free eggs at the same price as Walmart's caged eggs.

Despite making these animal welfare commitments, large companies like McDonald's rarely advertise them. Lewis suggests this is because they have only made things “less bad,” not necessarily good. There are two primary problems with advertising these improvements. First, consumers may not have been aware of the previous, poor conditions. Advertising a switch to cage-free could backfire when consumers realize what was happening before. Second, these changes are often phased in over long periods, sometimes up to ten years. Advertising a future improvement highlights that for the next decade, they are still using the practices customers find objectionable.

So if they advertise like, 'Hey, we're cage-free now,' everyone's like, 'What? What were you doing all this time?'

Corporate campaigns have proven to be a phenomenally successful lever for change, far more so than legislative policy. Over 3,000 corporate animal welfare pledges have been secured globally. Lewis attributes this success to two factors. First, legislative efforts often die in agriculture committees that are heavily influenced by industry lobbyists. Corporate campaigns, on the other hand, can appeal directly to company decision-makers. Second, corporations seem more responsive to consumer outrage on these issues than politicians are to voters. While a politician may focus on a few key voting issues, a retailer's business is directly tied to the quality of its products, and surveys show animal welfare is a top sustainability concern for consumers.

A strange dynamic has emerged where animal welfare is often conflated with sustainability and climate change. Meat producers have cynically used this, arguing against welfare improvements by citing a slightly larger carbon footprint. Lewis shared a conversation with a sustainability executive at a major meat company who confirmed this priority shift.

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.

Even animal charities sometimes emphasize sustainability, which can seem confusing. Lewis explains that many people care about both issues, and sometimes they align, as with alternative proteins. However, the issues are not always linked, and the focus on climate can sometimes undermine direct animal welfare improvements.

Why switching from beef to chicken increases animal suffering

A common recommendation to help the climate is to switch from eating beef to chicken. However, this switch creates a significant animal welfare problem for a relatively minor climate benefit. This is because it leads to a much higher number of animals being consumed and suffering in factory farms.

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.

The tendency to automatically prioritize climate impact over any amount of animal suffering may be an "elite narrative." Lewis Bollard suggests that most people are horrified by animal suffering and would prioritize it if they understood the trade-offs.