Longer description of your proposed project

Polling consistently shows that farmed animal welfare is one of the most popular, least controversial issues in our culture. (E.g. here: https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2022/8/2/voters-demand-farm-animal-protections-from-both-politicians-and-companies)

This fact may come as a surprise, especially given that most omnivores find a range of common agricultural practices unacceptable. How can we explain such a large discrepancy between our individual preferences and the current state of animal agriculture?

Comparison to climate change can be illustrative. No one actively wants the climate to change, yet it happens anyway. Similarly, no one actively wants farmed animals to experience pain, yet it happens anyway. The underlying reason is that both carbon emissions and animal welfare are unpriced externalities - costs that are not paid by the producer or consumer, meaning they are not inherently incentivized to be mitigated.

The climate space has shown us that one of the most powerful ways to address unpriced externalities is through technology. Solar panels, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and even hydraulic fracking, are commonly considered to be some of our most powerful tools to fight climate change.

Technology is powerful because it eliminates tradeoffs. Instead of relying on consumers to choose to not fly on planes, or relying on businesses to sacrifice their profitability, technology expands what’s possible and allows industry to move to better local optima.

Yet technology is a relatively under-discussed and under-resourced approach to helping animals. Information on cutting-edge technologies is often difficult to impossible to find, and few champions actively push solutions forward. Our goal is to change that.

Innovate Animal Ag’s work consists of:

• Promoting technology as a practical solution to animal welfare problems, and creating an ecosystem of businesses, entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, and policymakers who share our vision

• Conducting research to identify the most impactful, tractable, and neglected technologies

• Creating high-quality resources on the most promising technologies to help educate businesses, policymakers, and the media

• Directly alleviating the bottlenecks to adoption of the promising technologies, when possible

When it comes to animal welfare, technology can allow us to maintain the abundance and food security that industrialization in animal agriculture has provided, while bringing practices more in line with our values.

Our first focus has been on in-ovo sexing technology. Industrialization in the poultry sector has led to a bifurcation of the breeds we use for meat and eggs. “Broiler” chickens used for meat are optimized to grow quickly and efficiently convert feed to meat. “Layer” chickens used for eggs are optimized to lay eggs as quickly and efficiently as possible. This division of labor is why chicken meat and eggs are so affordable today. However, one unintended consequence is that male chicks of the layer breed serve no economic purpose, and are killed immediately after hatching. In a practice that’s extremely unpopular among consumers that know about it, 6 billion day-old male chicks are killed each year in the global egg industry, usually via live maceration.

In-ovo sexing allows egg producers to use advanced biotechnology to identify which eggs will hatch male and which will hatch females. Male eggs can be removed and destroyed before they can feel pain, and only females hatch. This technology, which is now widely available in Europe, is more expensive right now (1–3 cents per supermarket egg), but as the technology improves and economies of scale are reached, costs will fall. In the long term, the economics of automation imply it will be cheaper than the status quo of paying humans to sex every chick by hand.

At Innovate Animal Ag, we’ve become the go-to expert in the US on in-ovo sexing, and publish regularly in poultry industry trade press. We work directly with egg producers to help them understand the current state of technology and how it might affect their business. Directly because of our work, multiple top US egg producers are actively evaluating bringing in-ovo sexing to the US.

In-ovo sexing is just the beginning - we have a list of 45 other potentially impactful technologies that we would like to support, including on-farm hatching, high-expansion nitrogen foam, aquatic animal stunning machines, and fertility-based pest controls. We aim to inspire a new techno-optimism for animal welfare to bring our husbandry practices in line with our values.

How much money do you need?

Our current funding gap for 2024 is $108K. While I understand ACX grants will be smaller this round than last, any help towards filling this gap will be extremely helpful. To add some more details: We expect to have around $191,000 at the end of 2023 with an average monthly burn rate of $20K. Our current headcount is two full-time staff and one part-time communications and PR consultant. Both full time staff are being paid below sustainable levels while the organization gets off the ground. In order to sustainably operate at our current capacity, we would need to raise an additional $108K for 2024, such that our total 2024 budget is $300K. A rough breakdown of this is as follows: $192K for salary, benefits, and taxes for full-time staff, $48K for communications and PR consulting, $20K for conferences, travel and admin, $40K for contingency. At this funding level, we would continue to focus on our core program areas of in-ovo sexing and animal welfare technology ecosystem work. We would explore additional technologies and the further directions as a lower priority (as we do now). Ideally, however, we would like to add one additional full-time staff member which would cost around $113K for salary, benefits, admin, and contingency. This would bring the total funding needed for 2024 to $413K ($222K more than we currently expect to have by the end of 2023). An additional headcount would allow us to actively explore new technologies and further direction. We’re optimistic that we could identify at least one more core technology that we can make a huge impact on, like we have for in-ovo sexing.

Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for

Given our success so far with in-ovo sexing, I feel confident that we can continue to have a large impact. I think there’s an 80% chance that in-ovo sexing will come to the US within 24 months. If that happens, I think there will have been a 80% chance that we sped that process up by at least 3 months, a 60% chance that we sped it up by at least 6 months, and a 40% chance that we sped it up by over 12 months. Each month in the US, around 27 million male chicks are needlessly killed in the egg industry, so our impact can be calculated accordingly.

Outside of in-ovo sexing, our impact is more speculative. While our work with in-ovo sexing is meant to serve as a proof of concept, each technology is different, and our activities in one area won’t necessarily translate to another area. Our goal with each technology we support is to identify the bottlenecks to development and adoption, and then address those bottlenecks, whatever they may be. In the case of in-ovo sexing, the bottlenecks were primarily around business development and communications, and we were able to have a large impact. However, if a technology is bottlenecked on, for example, further research and development, it may be more difficult to have a clear impact.

That said, it’s become evident through our preliminary work in other areas, that there’s often low-hanging fruit to be harvested. I believe this is a function of this type of work being so neglected - animal advocates generally lack the technical knowledge, or the practical mindset to focus on technological solutions to animal welfare challenges.

To give an example, one of the top candidates for a technology we focus on in the future is on-farm hatching. Traditionally at a hatchery, chicks used for meat are hatched in a dark and noisy environment with high levels of dust. A batch of new chicks may take up to 2 days to hatch, during which time they might not have access to food or water, instead subsisting on their remaining yolk sac. Hatching is then followed by a series of stressful processing steps such as sexing, sorting, vaccination, and debeaking. Chicks are then loaded onto a truck and transported to their rearing facility, which can be many miles from the hatchery. The chicks which hatch earliest may go without food and water for up to 4 days. Tens of billions of chicks go through this process each year.

On-farm hatching allows producers to bypass this process, instead hatching chicks directly in the environment where they’ll spend their lives. The exciting part about this technology is that, in addition to the substantial benefits to animal welfare, there’s a strong value proposition for the producer. Chicks that begin to feed right away put on weight faster, and are overall more efficient and healthier. Additionally, because chicks aren’t exposed to pathogens at the hatchery and during transport, the need for antibiotics is substantially decreased, something which all poultry producers care strongly about.

We learned about this technology from poultry trade journals. Outside of some poultry companies in Europe, few people had heard of this technology. No one we could find had a strong opinion on it, and no one was planning to support its adoption. Companies developing this technology are therefore in a position where they might go uncompensated for the positive externalities they generate. We’re currently trying to understand the bottlenecks to this technology’s adoption, to assess how much to work on it in the future.

Overall, I think there’s a 65% chance we can find a technology where our impact potential is as high as in-ovo sexing, and a 90% chance that we can find an area where our impact potential is at least half as large.