Come work with me at Innovate Animal Ag
I have more conviction around the work we do at Innovate Animal Ag than anything else I’ve done in my life.
I’m proud of the impact we’ve already been able to achieve with in-ovo sexing, but my true conviction comes from what I believe we can do long term for our society’s attitudes towards animal welfare in general. This theory of change can be obscure from the outside, so I wanted to explain it here.
When I started Innovate Animal Ag, my starting point was investigating an anomaly that I couldn’t yet explain: In polling, animal welfare seems to be a massively winning issue, yet progress for farmed animals has been slow or nonexistent. Polling consistently shows a bipartisan consensus that certain common practices on farms are morally unacceptable. The ASPCA and the HSUS are two of the biggest nonprofits in the entire country across any cause area. They focus primarily on companion animals, but their size illustrates the depth of concern Americans feel about animal welfare. I saw this as a paradox - how can there be such a wide gulf between how we as a society believe animals should be treated, and what is actually happening in practice?
I came to believe there were two things massively holding back animal welfare as a broader social and political movement. The first is the extreme focus on personal diet choice. There is a broad cultural sense that those that deeply care about the welfare of farm animals don’t eat them. This turns the issue into an exclusive club, only allowing in the morally pure. I could list many influential people that are sympathetic to the cause, but who I believe keep it at an arm's length because of the perceived tension with their own personal diet.
The second is an emphasis on “stick” approaches at the expense of “carrot” approaches. It’s easy to enumerate the problems with animal agriculture, but harder to put forth practical solutions. Public policy work for farm animal welfare focuses almost exclusively on telling companies what they can’t do rather than identifying and incentivizing beneficial practices.
Taking a step back and looking at other successful social movements, these limitations become clearer. What other successful social movement relies only on individual action? You can still be an environmentalist if you don’t drive an electric vehicle, or if you fly on planes regularly. What other successful social movement relies only on punishing perceived wrongdoers? The biggest strides in sustainability have come from massive incentives for green technology and infrastructure.
I believe that to achieve change, both positive and negative incentives are needed. Especially in a highly commoditized industry like animal agriculture, companies need access to capital in order to take risks and make the long-term investments necessary for improving animal welfare. Indeed, I’ve heard from those within animal agriculture that consumers actually care more about animal welfare than sustainability when it comes to the products they buy. Yet sustainability receives substantially more attention because that is what governments and institutions incentivize financially.
How, then, can we channel the broader cultural concern that exists around farm animal welfare in a way that’s productive, inclusive, and collaborative? My answer is to lean into technological solutions to animal welfare challenges. Doing so moves the focus from personal diet choice to directly changing common practices on farms, and it provides a common vision that companies, governments, and other important institutions can all rally around. Technology expands the space of what’s possible, allowing us to sidestep tradeoffs between price and welfare. Looking at the climate space, technological solutions like solar panels, EVs, and batteries are often seen as our most powerful tools to combat climate change, I think for very similar reasons.
Right now, Innovate Animal Ag’s day-to-day work focuses on pushing forward a few important technologies in the poultry industry, like in-ovo sexing. To some, working on these technologies may seem like we’re just nibbling around the edges of a much bigger problem. But the field of animal welfare technology is still in its infancy, and much basic research remains to be done. The technologies that exist now were developed in an environment with little available funding, and little attention from important institutions and the general public.
The broadest ambition of IAA is to use the technological approach to unlock the massive untapped potential of animal welfare as a social and political movement in the US. I truly believe that animal welfare technology can be a lever to elevate animal welfare as a top societal priority, and make a huge difference for billions of farm animals under our husbandry.
Recently, a few extremely generous individuals have allowed us to expand our team. With this new bandwidth, our goals are to expand the portfolio of technologies we support, and to also begin working in public policy, focused on unlocking incentives for companies to research and adopt technologies that improve animal welfare. If this mission sounds exciting to you, please check out some of the open roles. Our current full-time openings are a Head of Marketing and Communications, and a Program Manager, the latter of which could be suitable for applicants from a wide variety of backgrounds.