Josherich's Blog

#40 - Lewis Bollard - How to End Factory Farming

You know there are so many problems on earth that are vying for our attention. But if I had to pick one where in say a hundred years time we look back and be like “Damn, we really screwed up. That one sucked,” it would be factory farming. As you’ll learn from today’s conversation, it is one of the most lose-lose things currently happening. My guest today, Louis Bollard, is a leading expert.

The only way that they get contaminants down to acceptable levels in US chicken is by bathing the chicken in chlorine. In a lot of these cases, there is no appetite to study the human health consequences. When the government tries to fund this, they very quickly get a call from the senators on the agriculture committee asking them what the heck they’re doing and telling them they’re going to defund the effort.

He’s a researcher and philanthropist who has dedicated practically his entire life to fixing this issue. Thank God he is because there are some really meaningful levers of change that we can all be doing to actually improve this. So I am so excited to share this conversation with you. Here is my chat with Louis Bollard.

Louis, thank you so much for joining. You know, as you know, and certainly I think most of the Win Win viewers, this particular topic of factory farming is about as close to my heart as any topic there is. I wanted to talk to you because I think you have one of the clearest pictures of the entire landscape of this topic.

To start us off, maybe you can explain what your background is, how you got interested in this topic, and then also just explain to people what really factory farming is.

Sure. Well, thanks for having me on the show. So I think like many of your viewers, I grew up liking animals, wanting to do good in the world, and not having strong views beyond that. It was when I learned about factory farming when I was a teenager that I was just shocked. I couldn’t believe that we would treat animals in the way that factory farms do, and I couldn’t believe that no one was really doing anything about it.

It struck me when I looked at other social problems in the world. So many of them are complex; they have tough solutions. It’s really hard to solve poverty. But the reason we’re torturing animals is that it is marginally cheaper to do so. The solution is very simple, which is just to stop doing it.

I kind of went on this path of first learning about this issue, going to law school to try and litigate on this issue, which I did for a year. Unfortunately, there are no real laws on factory farming in the US, so it’s hard to litigate because there’s nothing to litigate, no laws to litigate under. Instead, I ended up at this philanthropy, Open Philanthropy, which funds advocacy globally to reform the worst conditions of factory farming.

You grew up in New Zealand, in a sort of farming community. Is that correct?

Yeah. We grew up with a sheep farm. At the time, I had no compunctions whatsoever. I thought these animals lived a pretty good life. They would just graze across the hills all day and had a good time. In some ways, I think that actually blinded me to factory farming because in New Zealand, you see sheep; you see cows out on the pasture all the time.

It was only when I visited Southeast Asia, particularly Southern China or Vietnam, and started to see live animal markets, that I began to see some of the ways that animals were being mistreated out in front of me on the streets. I think that kind of planted the seed. From there, I started trying to do my own research. I reached out to farms in New Zealand and particularly noticed that you don’t see any chickens or pigs on pasture in New Zealand.

That was kind of the first time I realized that, you know, we eat a ton of chicken and pork, but there are no pigs or chickens outside. I reached out to the chicken and pig farms and said, “Can I come visit?” and they all said no. I then reached out to the industry associations and said, “Could you hook me up with a visitor?” and they said no.

It was really weird to me because as a kid, you could visit any sheep or cow farm you wanted. They’d love to have a visitor. I think it made me realize that there was something nefarious going on. The more that I researched this, the more I learned that this really is the entire system of producing chicken, pigs, eggs, and increasingly fish, relying on this factory farming model.

Explain what the difference is. What actually defines a factory farm? Is it a certain size? Is it a certain technique? What are the actual ingredients that make something a factory versus a conventional farm?

I think you know it when you see it. Typically, a factory farm is an entirely indoor environment. Traditional farms let the animals outside, at least when the weather is decent. Factory farms do not; they do not have any outdoor space where the animals could even be let outside. Within those indoor environments, there are a lot of features common to factory farms.

One, if they’re in the egg or the pork business, they typically use cages and crates. That’s kind of a hallmark of factory farming. If they’re in the chicken growing business, they typically use these hyper-optimized breeding lines for birds that have been bred to grow incredibly fast in a way that their body does not support, resulting in major health issues.

I’ve seen images of what a chicken looked like in 1940. They were quite small and athletic-looking. Modern chickens now look as different as a Pomeranian to a Great Dane. More accurately, they resemble a French Bulldog that is grossly overweight and whose legs are barely supporting it.

These modern broiler hens are almost obese. When we first got into factory farming, the industry split in two. It used to be that chickens were raised in backyards of small farms where they would eat food scraps and lay eggs to be used for meat. When the industry started to factory farm and industrialize, they developed hens hyper-optimized for laying eggs. They’re very scrawny; they just produce eggs and don’t eat very much.

The problem on that side was it left a whole bunch of male chicks who could no longer be raised for their meat because they were far too scrawny. Those male chicks get killed on the first day of their life. About eight billion chicks a year get thrown into macerators or killed in some other way on their first day because the egg industry no longer has any need for them.

On the other side, the broiler chicken industry, which is the meat chicken industry, developed these birds that grow incredibly fast. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that if they had developed them in a balanced way. But in reality, the only parts of the chicken they wanted to grow fast were the highest value parts. So they grew the breast meat incredibly fast, while the legs and internal organs, which are not very valuable, did not grow fast.

You get these birds that grow rapidly, but their legs start to collapse underneath them, and their internal organs, like their lungs, start to no longer support their body. So by five to six weeks of age, they are struggling just to stay alive. These birds are then slaughtered at about six or seven weeks of age, which is how the industry manages to keep them alive for long enough.

Because those birds have not yet passed puberty, for the breeding birds, they need to grow them longer. The only way they can keep them alive longer is by starving them. Breeding birds are fed about 30% of the feed that they want to eat. They’re chronically starved because if they didn’t, these birds would just collapse.

Mother Nature is like, “Nope, this should not be breeding.” Essentially, this is an abomination—it needs to die before it passes on its genes. But we’re finding ways around it.

I can see the economic reasons. To be clear, I can see the financial reasons why companies would want to do this. Explain to me what goes on in pig farms because that was the one that really woke me up. I’ve spent time with pigs, and I know they are even smarter than dogs.

Dogs are very smart, but pigs are a whole other level. They are incredibly intelligent and emotionally intelligent; they can read vibes and know what’s going on. They can solve problems. Please explain what pig farming could be like and what the reality is for over 99% of pigs, particularly in America.

Absolutely. Pig farming could be done the way it was for centuries, which is to have a small backyard herd that would eat food scraps from other animals or from the kitchen. They’d be happy to eat anything, and they’d live these decent lives where they get to hang out outside and roll around in the mud.

What the factory farming industry figured out was that they could cram all of these pigs inside. They could put them on concrete slatted floors so that their manure would fall down into a pit beneath them. They are constantly living on these uncomfortable floors and can’t lie down on top of their own manure.

The worst part is that for breeding pigs, they could breed them to optimize for larger piglet numbers. In pursuit of that purpose, they inadvertently bred them to be really aggressive. Because they are bred to be really aggressive, these sows could no longer hang out in a crowded indoor building with other sows. If they did, they would get into horrible fights.

So the industry had another solution: they said, “We can put them into crates.” They put them in individual crates, making it physically impossible for them to fight any other pigs. It was also physically impossible for them to even turn around. That turns out to be another positive because they will expend less energy, which means they will eat less feed relative to their weight gain.

It’s just a case study in how this industry operates, where every time they create a new problem, they create an even worse problem as a solution. They don’t care about the quality of life and the animals at all; the only thing they care about is bottom line efficiency.

Starting with the raw numbers of animals living in these conditions, it’s huge. For every human on Earth, there is about one laying hen confined in a cage. So around 8 billion laying hens are confined in cages globally. For every human on Earth, there’s roughly three broiler chickens being raised on factory farms. If you’re in a country like the US, it’s a lot more than that because we eat a disproportionate share of the world’s chicken.

When it comes to pigs, there is about one pig in a factory farm for every eight people globally. Again, in a place like the US, it’s higher than that because we eat more pork. Overwhelmingly, those animals are in factory farms. The best estimate is that 90% of the hens globally are in battery cages. When it comes to pork, 99% of US pigs are in farms of a size that are almost certainly indoors.

The industry doesn’t collect data on how many are indoors versus outdoors, but we have data from the USDA on the size of those farms. We know that if you’re running a farm with 100,000 pigs, you’re not giving those pigs outdoors; they aren’t wallowing around in the sun.

No, they’re in tiny little cages. Just rows and rows and rows. And the overwhelming reality now, unfortunately, even in emerging markets, in places like India, China, and Indonesia, is that factory farming has become the norm globally. Unfortunately, it all started in the US, and now we’ve exported that system to the world.

You mentioned China. In some ways, I think they’re now the largest consumer of pork, and somehow their animal welfare laws are even worse than a lot of the worst things in America. I saw a tweet recently that showed an image of a factory farm in China, and it’s almost like a multi-story car park. It’s seven stories high, this windowless, hellish-looking concrete block, and it’s just rows and rows of these pigs living in these tiny, tiny crates.

What gets me so much about this is that if someone did that to a dog, cat, or any kind of pet that they spend time with, put it in a cage so small that it can’t move backwards and forwards for more than like an hour, people would freak. Maybe you could put it in for a second, but even in crates when you transport an animal, they can usually turn around.

For just an hour, people would freak out because of the claustrophobia. These pigs, who are smarter than your pet, spend a minimum of four months in this condition and then get let out just to get put into another cage. Their whole lives are like this—it’s quite mind-blowing.

We’ve talked about the animal welfare side of things, which is fairly obvious to most people, but what people don’t appreciate is that there are so many other costs to human health and well-being that come from this industry as well.

Perhaps the first one we can talk about is, from a selfish perspective, I had a family member who had an antibiotic-resistant infection after a minor, fairly routine operation. They got a bad infection that nearly killed them. Part of that was because of a superbug that has been bred by antibiotic resistance from the pork industry.

A statistic that blew my mind recently is that the pork industry accounts for the highest percentage of medically important antibiotic usage within America. They use about 44% of the antibiotics, but they use the equivalent amount of antibiotics in their industry as the entire US hospital system combined. This must contribute to antibiotic resistance, right?

Absolutely. I think this is very clear. For decades, the industry denied there was any connection. They put out scientific studies saying there was no connection, but there is no doubt now. The UK government has commissioned independent scientific panels which have stated this, and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States has commissioned independent reports saying the same.

The new FDA commissioner, Martin Macri, has written about this, stating that the contribution of animal agriculture to antibiotic resistance is a huge crisis. Yet, still nothing happens because of the political power of this industry.

Another topic I was researching is hormone use. Of course, milk is one example where, for the cows to grow bigger udders and produce more milk, they use synthetic hormones. Studies have shown that various synthetic hormones fed to cows to make them grow faster might accumulate in humans. There’s evidence suggesting that after eating processed meat, men’s testosterone levels drop.

Again, there seems to be a real lack of scientific study into this because what we eat is so important. Why do you think that is?

The interesting thing with hormones is that it is actually one of the few things that has been regulated. Because things got so bad, it did get banned in the U.S. and in Europe in chicken feed and pig feed. Now it’s just beef cattle and possibly dairy cows who can be fed hormones.

But they’ve replaced them with all kinds of other substances. You’ve got growth-promoting antibiotics. You’ve got these beta-agonist drugs like ractopamine that they feed to pigs which make them grow incredibly fast, and we don’t really understand the human health consequences of these drugs.

In a lot of these cases, there is no appetite to study the human health consequences. When the government tries to fund this, they very quickly get a call from the senators on the agriculture committee asking them what the heck they’re doing and telling them they’re going to defund the effort. There has been no openness—it’s similar to studies on tobacco’s health impact decades ago.

Right. We can’t study it because the lobbies are too powerful.

I can’t imagine that eating an animal that has lived such an unnatural, cortisol-fueled life of constant stress is good for us. There are huge differences between gentle slaughter and the very worst methods.

Some of the worst methods aren’t just in the U.S.; in China, there are reports of boiling pigs alive because that’s the most efficient way they can do it. Other horrific methods include suffocating them to death.

I can’t imagine that the cortisol and adrenaline flooding that meat, as they live under such harsh conditions for such a long time, can be good for you compared to eating an animal that’s lived a natural life.

It’s interesting that people often claim eating meat is natural, while they’re not consuming bison roaming on the plains. Hunting is as natural as it gets, but this is the furthest thing from it. It seems intuitive to me that the impacts of that meat accumulating in your body as you grow aren’t ideal—personally, I wouldn’t want it.

On that note, I always find it funny when people say they’re following the paleo diet while eating factory-farmed chicken. This is not something our ancestors were eating. Beyond the additives and all the issues, one thing that’s crazy about U.S. chicken production is that the only way they ensure contaminants are down to acceptable levels is by bathing the chicken in chlorine once it’s been slaughtered.

You can’t export U.S. chicken to the U.K. or Europe because they have higher food safety standards prohibiting this practice. Even after bathing the chicken in chlorine, a significant portion still has salmonella—still has antibiotic-resistant salmonella. In fact, there are U.S. regulatory tolerances for this.

Depending on the cut of chicken, you’re allowed up to 25-33% of the chicken to have salmonella. Meanwhile, plant-based foods often have tolerances of 0%. So there’s this crazy system where we’ve just decided that as long as we bathe it in chlorine on the back end, we do all these things to try and kill everything, then it’s acceptable.

People think they’re eating healthy, lean, pure protein, but they have no clue about the process by which it’s produced. What are the standards for labeling where your meat comes from in the U.S.? I know in Europe and the U.K., they have strict rules about the conditions in which animals are raised.

There are only very minimal labels that mean anything in the U.S. The USDA does regulate the term organic, which means something since it has a real certification process. Typically, “free-range,” “pasture-raised,” and “cage-free” mean that the animals at least had access to the outdoors and were not kept in cages.

Basically, every other term you see means nothing. One of the most popular brands of factory-farm chicken in the country has a huge label that says “all natural.” If you look at the tiny fine print, what they interpret that to mean is that the chicken didn’t have any artificial additives added to it after it was slaughtered.

The USDA states that as long as you define the term, you can decide what it means. So again, they say, “Well, there’s full disclosure.” There’s a tiny detail at the bottom of the package on what “all natural” means, but it’s hard to interpret. People won’t know what it means; that’s the kind of labeling craziness they get away with.

Congress tried to crack down on this a few years ago. They went to the USDA and said, “You need to change this whole process for labels. You need to actually make it mean something.” The USDA spent years consulting with consumers and industries, then came back with essentially the same approach and said, “No, it’s actually fine. We’ll leave it to the industry to define these labels.”

So why is the USDA so hands-off on this?

It’s been captured by industry. It’s a straightforward process of industry capture. These are people who are deeply afraid of what the industry will say if they try to meaningfully regulate anything. This has happened again and again.

For instance, in the early 1970s, the FDA tried to regulate antibiotic use in animal feed. The chicken industry immediately went to Congress, and powerful senators threatened the FDA saying, “We’re going to defund you—if you try to move forward with these regulations, you’re done.”

It’s not just this issue; the revolving door at the USDA is also a problem. Oftentimes, the people regulating the industry previously worked in it and plan to go back. This phenomenon happens under every administration.

The last agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, was governor of Iowa, the largest factory farming state in America. That was the credential that got him nominated by Obama. After serving, he lobbied for the dairy industry and got re-nominated under Biden as Agriculture Secretary. Now we’re just waiting to see which industry he goes to work for next.

It’s a crazy revolving door that has been accepted because it’s seen as the only purpose of the Department of Agriculture is to serve the agriculture industry instead of protecting consumers.

Surely the purpose of government is usually to prevent the worst excesses of corporations. We have countless data points demonstrating that corporations prioritize themselves over consumers and the environment. It’s absurd that the one thing meant to protect us from these excesses is helping them.

It’s really crazy. The USDA was founded by President Lincoln. He said it would be the people’s department because food and agriculture concern everyone. Over the years, as agriculture became a narrower industry, the Department of Agriculture started serving big corporations instead of family farmers.

If the public is not watching and politicians think no voter will care about regulatory capture of the USDA, they are often right. Consequently, the industry can get away with whatever they want, and that’s exactly what has happened at the Department of Agriculture.

Pandemics are another growing concern. In 2009, there was the H1N1 influenza outbreak from an industrial pig farm in North Carolina. Recently, about 50% of farms in America have had some kind of outbreak. This is not just limited to chickens; it seems to be spreading in cattle as well, which I thought was unusual since bird flu is typically not supposed to spread easily in mammals. What’s going on there?

The bird flu is a tragic case of what occurs when we allow factory farms to operate without accountability. When H5N1 started in earnest around 2023, the question was whether we would vaccinate the birds. Many countries around the world do this and do not suffer outbreaks like we do.

In the U.S., we have the capability to produce and supply those vaccines. There was a factory in Kansas in 2023 that had 400 million doses ready, sufficient to cover the entire egg industry in the U.S. The only question was whether the USDA would allow farmers to vaccinate or ideally require them to do so.

The chicken industry said absolutely not. They argued that vaccination would prevent them from exporting chicken to other countries. Other countries would find an excuse to close their borders to U.S. chicken, which is worth billions of dollars annually.

The USDA agreed with the industry. They decided not only would they not require vaccination, but they wouldn’t even allow it, despite other countries containing the virus by vaccinating. Then the policy became that every time the virus popped up, we would kill all the birds to suppress it.

USDA kills birds using very inhumane methods. For instance, they often turn off the ventilation system and pump in heat, a method referred to as ventilation shutdown plus. It suffocates the birds slowly. Studies indicate that it takes hours for this to occur, and it’s not always effective.

In many cases, the USDA has to return the next day to kill all the birds that survived the previous day’s attempt. They’ve also used these methods to kill pigs. It’s unfathomable that we accept this on today’s farms, justified under the cruel argument of necessity because we have no other options.

In reality, we have no other options due to lack of preparation. They have killed over 150 million birds—almost all using this method—in the last year or two since this current outbreak.

That’s right. That’s roughly equivalent to half the population of the U.S., slowly baked to death. And perhaps half of them would survive anyway, resulting in a round two kill the next day.

To me, this should be a national outrage. Unfortunately, the media isn’t covering it. They don’t know what’s going on or maybe they don’t think it’s a story they can convey.

I think there’s a cognitive dissonance with how people react when discussing this topic. They acknowledge the issues but don’t want to confront them because they like meat and don’t want to change. It’s okay to acknowledge cognitive dissonance and still aim to make a difference.

On that note, I believe the animal rights movement bears some blame for framing this issue around individual behavior and guilt. They’d say, “If you still eat meat, you are part of the problem. You should feel terrible and the only solution is to stop eating meat.”

Unsurprisingly, most people resist this, which leads them to block it out. In reality, similar to any major societal issue, we need government, corporations, and technology to step up. Focusing solely on individual diets misses the bigger picture.

I’ve read some things about the environmental impacts of factory farming, particularly in the local areas where these farms are situated. People living nearby suffer from air pollution problems and waterway contamination. Can you elaborate on that?

The basic problem of factory farms environmentally is that they concentrate all the environmental harms in one small space. In pasture-based farming, manure is spread over a large area, which the land can absorb. In tiny factory farms, there’s a huge amount of manure and no land to put it on. Also, there’s a significant buildup of ammonia and other toxins in the barn, but no regulations prevent polluting air and waterways.

The industry has effectively lobbied to exempt themselves from environmental regulation under the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. They are effectively the only industry exempt from such regulation. As a result, there are no standards. If they want to release ammonia and other toxins into the local air, they can do so without repercussions.

Being a neighbor of one of these factory farms is horrific; you wake up every morning to the smell of feces in the air, nasty flies, and a horrible environment. Thankfully, there are some local regulations against water pollution, but there are often not enough. For example, the city of Des Moines, Iowa, is suing the Department of Agriculture because their water supply is polluted with manure from factory farms upstream.

How is that not more reported in the media? The Flint water crisis received significant attention when industry polluted the local water supply. In this case, it seems just as egregious.

People have this bizarre notion that manure is natural. Because manure is natural, it’s not the same as lead. However, it contains antibiotics and drug runoff, which can have severe implications for public health. There’s all kinds of other crazy shit that is going into the waterways along with the literal shit. But it’s also the sheer volume of this is completely unnatural. Birds will poop in a river; that’s normal. But having a million pigs run off going into one small river, stream, yeah, stream is not normal at all.

I mean, one thing I say, too, is the time when it’s truly horrific is whenever a natural disaster strikes. So, for example, in North Carolina, what they eventually did to try and stop the runoff into the waterways was they said, okay, every pig factory farm needs to have a giant pool, which all the manure goes into. They call them manure lagoons. They said it’ll be totally fine because it’ll be contained to this pool and it’ll dehydrate over time and it’ll be good.

What happens in reality is these are incredibly flood-prone areas where the factory farms are, right, because they’re on flat land, near the coast. And so every time a hurricane comes in, pretty often, these manure lagoons flood. The local water gets horrendously polluted. We get not just all the manure, but, in fact, when that happens, also, the factory farmers always flee and don’t take their animals with them because they have nowhere to take their animals to.

So you also end up with a whole bunch of dead pigs that have just drowned floating around in the local waterways. This is just treated as something that is a necessity. It’s treated as something where there’s no alternative. I mean, how else could we possibly handle this? And so it’s just accepted as a fact of life.

Any other environmental things that people might not be aware of? I mean, I think that the whole way you go along the chain, right? You start off with the feed that’s needed in this industry. A huge amount of that feed is coming from soy and corn being monocropped. Some of it is coming from the Amazon. I mean, the fastest driver of deforestation in the Amazon is these crops for the use of factory farming. That’s why they’re cutting down the trees.

If you’re concerned about climate, animal agriculture is 15% of global climate emissions. But, you know, at every level, you look at some environmental harm and you see there is some way a factory farm is contributing to this. It’s air pollution, it’s water pollution, it’s the toxins in the food we eat. Everything about it is piling in.

Another area that I think people don’t consider until they research this is the mental health impacts on the people who work on these farms. I was reading some of the most horrific stuff. The people who often end up working in these things are arguably some of the more vulnerable members of society in the first place.

You know, they’re either migrants, they don’t have a lot of other job opportunities and so on. One particular person was writing, personally, I didn’t suffer any physical injuries working on this farm, but the place really affected my mind. As I spent day after day in that large windowless box, I felt like a gray fog descending over me. At night, my mind would be filled with literal nightmares replaying over and over some of the horrors I’ve witnessed throughout the day.

I mean, I can’t, if you are doing something where you are just day in, day out, either slaughtering thousands and thousands of animals by your hand or pushing them into a slaughter machine, I mean, ultimately, we’re not, no, again, this is not like on the plains where we evolved to shoot something with a bow and arrow. This is just on a mass scale and every single animal fights for its life. People don’t think that they’re just calmly walking in; especially with pigs.

Can you describe what you saw in some of these slaughterhouses? Sure. Years ago, I visited a slaughterhouse that slaughtered cows and sheep and pigs. It was, it was one of the better run places. This was in New Zealand where there were actually regulations. This is like a nice slaughterhouse, the biggest slaughterhouse in New Zealand. It was well regulated and they had worked out the least bad process for slaughtering sheep and cattle.

But when it came to pigs, there was no good process. The pigs know exactly what is coming. They had tried to do everything to stop it, but the pigs knew exactly what was coming. The moment they were let out into the kill room, they would start squealing and screaming and trying to run up the walls. They were doing anything they could to escape. They knew what was coming.

The other particularly horrendous part that I didn’t mention is these slaughterhouses have an incredibly fast throughput rate. They have to; it’s an assembly, a disassembly line. It’s always moving at the same speed. In this case, I think they had four or five seconds per pig to kill them. Ideally, they get a good stun, and then the pig gets killed with an automatic knife and it’s dead.

But if they don’t, the pig continues the whole way down the disassembly line alive. The next step, after it is meant to have been stuck with a knife and killed, is it is dipped into a vat of boiling water so that its skin will be easier to come off. I said to the guy, do the animals ever survive there? Do they ever make it past there? He was like, oh no, don’t worry about it. He was like, you know, when they do make it past, they’re alive, the workers down the line get really pissed off. He’s like, it’s really hard to take apart a live animal, you know? So like, don’t worry, there’s a natural check on this system.

Again, this is the best slaughterhouse. This is as good as it gets for pigs. When it comes to something like chickens, it can be even worse because they’re worth so little. When it comes to chickens, you’re not talking about getting four or five seconds per animal; you get less than one second per animal. They’re just hoisting these chickens up upside down, throwing their legs into shackles. Legs often break, wings often break; they don’t care.

They move on to the next step. They’re meant to get stunned by being dipped upside down into an electrical water bath. But the stun setting, that’s just another crazy fact. In the European Union, they have regulated stun settings to ensure that these chickens actually get knocked out by this. In the US, there are no regulations. The industry worked out that rather than optimizing for actually knocking them out, we’ll optimize for meat quality, which requires a much lower stun. Many of them are not knocked out and just continue on the process.

Ideally, they get killed by the automatic blade that’s meant to cut their neck. If they duck, they keep on going. There’s just this insane reality around these factory farms. If you have no regulations, if you truly don’t care what happens to the animals, this is what you end up with.

Coming back to the human impact on the workers, there was a guy, Virgil Butler, who worked at Tyson Foods poultry plant, who became a whistleblower for this. He said, again, you don’t understand; I was turned into a robot zombie machine because that was the only way either I had emotions about what I was doing, or I just turned myself into a zombie.

There was one of his co-workers who ended up in a mental hospital because he kept having endless nightmares of chickens coming after him. That’s one aspect of the human suffering. There’s also this other factor, which is there seems to be always a percent of human beings who tend to have psychopathic tendencies. It attracts those types of people.

Some of the things I was reading about the games that these farmworkers play as a way to pass the time… One of them was called the shit game where they grab a live chicken each and squeeze it as hard as they can so that its insides and shit fly at each other. That was a game they played. Another one they’d do is who could rip off the head of a live chicken with their bare hands and then stick the heads on their fingers. This is the hell that we have created for our food system that most people don’t even know is going on as we speak all the time.

What is that doing to humanity’s soul, if such a thing exists? Even if you’re not religious, this will abhor, I imagine, every single person listening. The karma is mounting up, and we’re just not doing anything to address it. For decades now, some animal advocates have been going undercover in these factory farms to film and expose the conditions going on. You’d expect they would see the same cages and the same routine standard abuses.

One of the wild things is these investigators choose these farms at random. They don’t get reports; they don’t learn that this farm is uniquely bad. They just go around and see where they can get a job. Almost without fail, they film sadistic abuse. They’re often only at these places for like three months, and in that period of time, they almost always find some kind of crazy sadistic abuse.

Whether that’s because the workers started out as psychopaths or whether it’s just because when your job requires you to do these horrific things, you know, and maybe for instance, you have to package up a million chickens over the course of several days, some of them start to flap their wings and try to get away, and you get frustrated. You find it easier to throw the chickens into the crate rather than to put them in gently. It encourages a crazy level of personal abuse that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

These investigations have captured less than 1% of these farms, and still we have a huge litany of these abuses caught on camera. One thing I will do is in the show notes of this, I’m going to provide a bunch of resources for those of you who want to actually go down this rabbit hole. It’s not a fun rabbit hole, but we need more people going down it to understand this.

Since I started tweeting about this more actively, the topic upsets people across the political spectrum. I was expecting, it doesn’t surprise me that people who are more into social justice would be upset by this. But I noticed there were a bunch of what I would consider almost far-right accounts retweeting or commenting saying, this is the worst thing ever. Religious people, non-religious people, everyone seems to agree that this is bad for everyone and everything in so many ways.

There was a study in 2022 where 84% of Democrats said they would support a law in their state completely banning farmed animal confinement, and 76% of Republicans said the same. This is truly a bipartisan issue. So why is it so entrenched? We’ve partially covered this talking about regulatory capture, but I want to understand the incentives that have us stuck.

It’s Moloch, right? There’s the Moloch trap, this game-theoretic trap that we’re stuck in. Is it just because the meat is so cheap, or what is the reason? First, I completely agree that what gives me hope is that almost everyone thinks this is wrong. Very few people are excited about factory farming. There was a survey the European Union did where it found that 89% of Europeans think they should ban the individual caging of animals.

That’s across the board; that’s crazy. The European Union did that survey and then didn’t move forward with their plans to ban the caging. I think the reason is the same as we always say, which is just this incredible capture of the political process by industry, coupled with complete public ignorance. If every night on the news or every day on social media, people were confronted with the realities of factory farming, I don’t think we’d have it for that much longer.

If people had to see it and kept realizing where it came from, I don’t think people would buy it if they had to see a photo of the crate the pig had been in like on the pork product. It relies on this total lack of transparency, which is reinforced by things like ag-gag laws that ban people from providing transparency.

It’s also reinforced by the political capture where again, the calculus of politicians is that no one’s voting based on this. Yeah, everyone hates it, but they’re instead going to vote on a cultural war issue or inflation or the economy or whatever. I can give a stop to the lobbyists; I can give a stop to this very narrow constituency that really cares about keeping animals in crates, and that’s how it continues.

The way it will change is when people start saying to their politicians, I am actually going to vote on this issue. I am actually going to hold you accountable on this issue. This is across the board; Democrats have been just as bad as Republicans on this. Plenty of Democratic senators basically serve as stooges for the factory farming industry. They think they can get away with it because they assume that no one is watching, that no one’s paying attention.

The combination of lack of transparency and capture of the political process is the trap we’re in, but hopefully, it’s also the way out of it. Are they literally being paid by the big corporations like Tyson or Smithfield? How do they incentivize them specifically? Some of it’s money. Certainly in the US system, there’s a lot of money in politics, and these are major campaign contributors. The largest campaign contributors in the agriculture sector are the big agribusinesses. By contrast, small farmers trying to do things the right way are contributing nothing, as they don’t have money to contribute.

It’s the very profitable factory farming corporations giving all the money, and it’s not just the money. The factory farm lobby has been effective at positioning itself as the voice of farmers. There’s this mythology in our society where we think of the hardworking farmer, the salt of the earth. Politicians are really afraid of them, not just because they’re held in popular esteem but also because they’re very good at organizing.

The European Union was proposing a few regulations that farm lobby groups didn’t like. They sent flotillas of tractors into Brussels and clogged up all the streets. The European Union then backed off. They’ve long had this kind of agricultural exceptionalism where it’s basically understood by politicians that you can’t touch these guys.

I remember Bob Dole, who was the Republican Senate majority leader, who was a huge advocate for humane reforms. He passed a number of landmark pieces of legislation. Yet he still said that the one group he won’t mess with are the farmers. I’m still deeply afraid of them.

From what I understand, it’s not the small farmers that are doing these worst practices; it’s the big corporations. When you describe this protest in Brussels, that’s mostly small farmers doing that. Are they being misinformed that these laws are against them when they’re actually meant to hurt them? It’s a mixture. I should say that the protests in Brussels were not specifically over farming and welfare reforms; they were other kinds of regulations.

Regulators interpret that as we can’t regulate anything at all. I think it’s the case that a lot of small farmers don’t want environmental regulations, but they’d be fine with animal welfare regulations. They get thrown into that as being against big government regulations.

There are a lot of industries that depend on factory farming. If you’re growing soy or corn, it’s probably going to factory farms. It would be bad for you if the factory farms went away because they wouldn’t need your soy and corn anymore. If you’re selling agricultural equipment, it might be going to them. If you’re a small-town bank, you’re probably lending to factory farming operations.

This whole economy has developed around it. To me, it’s still kind of crazy because that economy wouldn’t have to go away. If we had higher welfare farming, they would still need loans, they would still need some feed, maybe not as much monocrop soy and wheat, and they would still need an economy around it.

It would be a change and different people would benefit, and some people would not benefit. A lot of it is the resistance to change, the idea that the status quo is working quite nicely for a small group of people. There is a degree of lobbies not representing the people they purport to represent. An example is the American Farm Bureau, which claims to represent something like 10 million farmers. There aren’t 10 million farmers in America. Most of the people it represents are people who bought insurance policies through the Farm Bureau who presumably do not care about farm animal welfare regulation.

When the Farm Bureau goes up to Congress, they don’t say that. They say we’ve got 10 million members who are mad about this. The European farm lobby claims to represent something like 20 million farmers. Again, they’re not actually members of the organization; that’s just roughly how many farmers there are in Europe.

There’s almost no lobby at all for small farmers. A few small grassroots groups try to represent their interests, and they support reforms. Because small, hardworking farmers have either been driven out of business entirely, or are just hanging on by a thread, they don’t have the money or time to go to Washington, D.C., and lobby their politicians.

By contrast, the Farm Bureau is very good at finding those 1,000 factory farmers who stand to lose a lot and sending all of them to Washington, D.C. at the same time. The senator thinks, oh my God, there are 1,000 farmers here who are mad at me, not realizing these are just the factory farmers. They don’t represent the entire constituency, but they’re the ones who are really worked up about it.

One of the most egregious examples I’ve seen of this misleading of people—bucketting small farmers and big factory farmers into the same category—is the EATS Act. Can you explain what that is? It might be one of the worst steps backward for American farming that I’ve ever seen.

Absolutely right. As people started to realize the conditions on factory farms, particularly with gestation crates, they first went to their politicians and tried to get reforms. State politicians had no interest; they said they were captured by the industry. A number of states in the U.S. allow for ballot measures—issues to go directly to the voters. Advocates took this issue directly to voters, first in a number of red states; first it was in Florida, then in Arizona.

Each time they went overwhelmingly; even in these red states, people overwhelmingly said, yeah, ban the crates. The problem with those laws was that they only banned crates within the states. The first thing that happened was the Arizona pork producers using crates said, no worries, we’ll just move over to Nevada. We’ll cross the border and sell our pork back into Arizona.

Because of that, advocates said, okay, the next step we need is to actually ban the sale of this cruelly produced meat in the state as well. They passed laws like that first in Massachusetts, then in California, and since then in a few other places, elements of those laws in Michigan. The industry got really threatened by this. They realized someone finally worked out a way to harness the popular will to not have these crates.

The first thing they did was file a ton of lawsuits. They probably filed six or seven lawsuits so far. One of them made its way to the Supreme Court. To show you the power of this industry, the pork producers not only got on board every industry group in D.C., they had the American Chamber of Commerce and the Petroleum Institute—all of them said, we’re with you in solidarity against these regulations.

They managed to get the Biden administration on their side. The Solicitor General of the United States appeared before the Supreme Court arguing on behalf of the pork industry on their right to knock down state laws stopping the crating of pigs. The surreal nature of this is something almost no one has any idea about. No one who voted for Biden was voting for this, but they don’t know what even happened.

Despite all that, the industry lost. The Supreme Court, a majority—both conservative and liberal justices—said, yeah, states absolutely have a right to do this. It’s well within their power. It’s something they can do. Voters, it’s a very democratic process. Just because it costs your industry a little bit doesn’t make it unconstitutional.

The moment that happened, pork producers went across the street to Congress and said, you need to undo this. You need to effectively overturn the Supreme Court ruling. They need to preempt all these state laws and knock them out. Normally, when Congress preempts state laws, it introduces its own standards. In this case, Congress is proposing to not create their own standard but to create no standard.

They are knocking out these state laws and not putting anything in their place. The really wild thing about this is they’ve gotten both Democrats and Republicans on board, but they’ve got support from states’ rights Republicans to sign on to this idea of knocking out state laws they don’t like with federal preemption power, which is about as un-Republican an idea as you can find.

At this point, they set this thing of the EATS Act. They knew that wouldn’t pass on its own in Congress. Every five years, the Farm Bill comes up. The Farm Bill is considered a must-pass piece of legislation because it has enormous billions in subsidies for the agriculture industry and billions in food aid. Republicans love the farm subsidies; Democrats love the food aid. It always passes. They said, we’ll just slip it into there.

We’ll put this provision in the Farm Bill. If you can’t get it out of the Farm Bill, no one’s going to veto the bill based on this, and it’ll pass through the Farm Bill. That’s exactly what they’re trying to do right now.

I was watching a hearing with Brooke Rawlins, Trump’s new agriculture appointee. She claimed that the EATS Act is here to support small farmers. She’s lying through her teeth because it’s literally the small farmers who are being squashed out and steamrolled by factory farms. They’re suffering. If the EATS Act passes, it’ll give factory farms even more market share, which will crush small farmers further.

It’s a complete moral inversion, just a straight-up lie. Why aren’t the small farmers seeing this? Well, some of them are. Some of the strongest lobbyists against this have been small pork farmers. There have been whole bunches going to Congress saying please, this is a market for our value-added product. We can make more money by selling into California and Massachusetts with these standards. This puts us on more of a level playing field.

They don’t have to sink to the depths of factory farming to sell onto the commodity market. In fact, the House Agriculture Chairperson, who is one of the chief people fighting this, is the biggest pork producer in his own district and is a small farm producer. They are against this. But he has repeatedly said the National Pork Producers Council wants it; the national industry wants it.

These politicians just don’t care what these small farmers think. They’ve realized small farmers aren’t politically organized. They don’t represent any real threat. They’re never going to fund a primary challenge against them. By contrast, they’ve heard loud and clear from the Farm Bureau and the National Pork Producers Council that if you don’t back us on this, we’re going to fund a primary challenge against you.

If they’re thinking about their own selfish interests, it’s to do this. A great case in point was Brooke Rawlins at that hearing. She said, you know, I hadn’t heard about this issue until a couple of weeks ago. She only heard about it because she went around the senators’ offices, and they all said, you need to back this.

So she just towed the line and said, oh yeah, sure, you guys want it? Absolutely. We’ll knock these out. It’s this crazy reality where, as you say, they say it’s for small farmers. There’s no definition of what a small farmer is. If they think 100,000 pigs are small, then yeah, it helps those farmers.

I also want to double-click on ag-gag laws, which prevent transparency in what’s going on. In the early 2010s, the argument was protecting farms from competition. They came up with these laws that made it illegal for anyone to take photographs or videos of agricultural facilities without the owner’s consent. It also made it illegal to gain access to agricultural facilities under false pretenses.

This is an example of twisting government, which is meant to be the safeguard for consumers from corporate evils. They use law to help the big guys do even more evil. Some of those laws have been overturned. What happened so that they were overturned?

The first incarnation of these laws had the factory farming industry saying, you can’t criticize us. Some laws specifically said, if you want to come on a farm and film us to make us look good, that’s totally fine, but if you make us look bad, that’s illegal. Thankfully, that is very clearly unconstitutional under the First Amendment; it’s viewpoint discrimination and illegal.

What’s happened is a crazy game of cat and mouse where every time a court strikes down these laws as unconstitutional, the legislature is motivated to stop transparency and comes back with a new one. Iowa is now on its fourth ag-gag law, having had the previous three struck down. Each time they look at court ruling and say, how do we stop any exposure of factory farms in Iowa, narrowly and in a way where, you know, the first time around, legislators said, our purpose here is to stop the exposure of factory farms.

Recently, they’ve been cleverer. Now they don’t say why they’re doing it; they say this is just a general protection law, citing some privacy concerns or other baloney. Intellectual property, exactly, some crazy reason. They’ve worked out how to take a lot of that.

They’ve also created legal liability. If you want to work at a farm that contracts with Tyson Foods or any other big ones now, you’ll be presented with a contract that says, I certify I’m not going to film in here. No matter what I see, I will not expose it publicly. If I do, I acknowledge that I’ll be sued for a lot of money.

They’ve created something that makes it impossible to expose what they’re doing publicly. That’s exactly the system they have intentionally created.

Hopefully, we’ve sufficiently painted a picture of how bad this situation is. There are solutions, and an incredible amount of progress has been made, particularly in Europe. The UK itself is making some headway. Can you talk about the different methods that have been used to improve welfare standards?

There is hope for change. People often get despondent thinking about the scale of factory farming suffering and their inability to do anything about it. People have managed to do things about it. As much as the system looks strong, it is deeply vulnerable because it’s using practices that are almost universally unacceptable; almost universally people disapprove of what they’re doing.

Some of the more exciting reforms we’ve seen first, at the legislative level, were a number of European countries moving away from the worst factory farming practices. The UK long ago banned gestation crates. Germany is now phasing them out, and a number of other European countries are doing so. The European Union is considering doing so.

We’ve seen the practice of chick-culling—killing all male chicks when they’re born—being phased out. France and Germany have banned that, and it’s being phased out across Europe. At the corporate level, we’ve seen a huge amount of progress with major corporations being pressured by their customers and investors into adopting new animal welfare standards.

For example, McDonald’s recently announced that it is 100% cage-free in its egg supply in the US, Canada, and Europe. That’s over 7 million hens out of cages just thanks to McDonald’s. Costco, one of the largest retailers in the US, is almost 100% cage-free. So are a host of other businesses.

How verifiable are those? It’s verifiable in the sense that they are publicly proclaiming it to their investors. The good thing is that these big companies have a general counsel’s office, and if they want to commit fraud, the public and their investors will probably stop them.

Normally, the sort of half-truths you get around factory farming is we don’t say anything about the conditions. We just know you’ll assume they’re not on factory farms. But they know when they put on their website or on their packaging that it’s 100% cage-free. That’s a real claim that could expose them to legal liability.

Does McDonald’s own its chicken farms? No. Part of how these factory farms have escaped any kind of pressure in the past is that they’re not selling directly to consumers. There’s this complicated process where you have an integrator, like Tyson Foods, that owns parts of the process, not the whole process. They don’t even own the farms.

What’s happened more recently is these consumer-facing brands, like fast food chains, have said, we’re going to adopt standards. The funny thing is that for years these producers would say, we couldn’t possibly do anything differently; it’s completely impossible. The moment McDonald’s said, we want to do things differently, they immediately fell in line.

At every point, particularly in the U.S. where the legislative process has not worked for farmed animals, we’ve consistently seen that when corporations make a move and require it from their suppliers, they can do it overnight. They can tell these guys they have to do it. These suppliers are completely dependent on them. They’re the ones who have the power in the food supply chain, and they’re the ones who ultimately need to take that responsibility.

So in the case of eggs, my understanding is McDonald’s is primarily working with Cargill. Cargill is either producing the eggs itself or working with other egg producers, ensuring that you have these cage-free eggs available in these markets by this time.

There’s a logistical challenge, but it’s not that challenging. If there’s no transparency in what’s actually going on inside the farms, how do they know? Again, I think this is where I feel good about the companies making these proclamations public. There is real liability for them. If they came out and said it’s verified at the home of the cage-free, and someone went and did an investigation and found otherwise, that would create real issues for them.

For what it’s worth, having talked to a lot of people in the industry, this real transformation is underway in terms of cages. I’ve been to industry trade shows where I’ve talked to cage suppliers who sell cages, and they said they’re not selling cages in the US anymore. They haven’t sold them in years in the US. Instead, they’re only selling cage-free systems. That’s the only thing egg producers are interested in now—cage-free systems.

That’s not out of the goodness of their hearts; it’s because the retailers and the fast food chains have told them that’s the only thing they’ll have. Local news reports show they’re building huge new cage-free farms, converting cage facilities into cage-free facilities. These are big construction projects.

Yes, it’s possible that in certain cases, there will be fraud. People need to be careful around ambiguous labels; all natural means nothing. But if they’re making a specific commitment, particularly if that’s being verified by a big company standing behind it, then we can feel better about it.

It’s interesting because it’s like working within the system. There’s a divest movement where people often say everyone should divest their funds, but there’s another approach to working within the system where you can invest in one of these companies and then apply shareholder pressure. There are tighter laws where companies can’t ignore what their shareholders request.

Can you talk a bit more about that? Absolutely. I think divestment is a silly idea in this space because that’s what these companies want. They want all the investors who care to go away. One great case study of investors exerting pressure was Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor who personally cares about pigs.

When he learned about the horrors of gestation crates about a decade ago, he went to McDonald’s. He told them, you’ve gotten rid of crates in Europe. You’re saying to everyone that it’s impossible in the US. He said, I’m going to put someone on your board. He initiated a proxy battle to put someone on your board who will care about this issue. Within days, the CEO of McDonald’s called up Carl Icahn and said, we’ll do it; we’ll do exactly what you want on this issue.

It took just one person who had power over the company. McDonald’s then slow-tracked implementing that pledge. A few years later, Carl Icahn went back to McDonald’s and said, hey, I see you haven’t followed through on that. I’m now going to put some people on your board, and again, McDonald’s freaked out, and now they’re actually following through on it. We’re about to see McDonald’s very soon have a crate-free supply chain.

There is a huge role for investors here in catalyzing the interests of consumers and other investors who often don’t have the power individually to move corporate decisions in the way that some investors do. Are there any clever sort of legal pressure campaigns or techniques that investors can do?

Yeah, I mean, I think that we’ve seen, for instance, a number of SEC complaints or Security Exchange Commission complaints over the years looking at what companies are telling their investors versus what they’re actually doing.

And so, for example, one thing that companies will routinely say is when we’ve done our materiality analysis, when we’ve looked at what is actually material to the risks to the company, we have found that consumers are really worried about our animal welfare status.

So, I mean, a crazy thing like this was even Tyson Foods; a senior executive there told me they had done internal surveys of when it comes to sustainability, what do consumers care about?

And you might assume it’s climate, number one. It’s not. It’s animal welfare. It comes ahead of all the environmental concerns.

And so that’s really a material concern for them. And it’s a risk because if consumers find out how they’re actually treating their animals, they could desert the company in droves.

That could pose a real risk to the company.

And so where actions have sometimes been effective is in going to the SEC and saying, look, this company’s saying this is a risk, but they’re not doing anything about it.

Particularly in cases where the company has actually made a public pledge and said, we’re going to get rid of crates, we’re going to get rid of cages.

Then it’s tried to forget about it, has tried to say, oh, we’ll just stop reporting on how that’s going.

But, you know, that’s also presented a real opportunity for people to go in and say, either through the SEC or just going to investors as a whole and putting forward a resolution at their shareholder meeting, for instance, saying, hey, just update us on how you’re doing on that.

Because that alone, that public exposure is often enough to embarrass the company into action.

What are some of the lessons that can be drawn from successful campaigns to pressure governments into making, for example, improved standards in slaughter methods?

Because, again, some countries are actually, you know, I mean, there’s no especially nice way to slaughter an animal, but there is a huge gap between stunning them prior or making it so they can’t see what’s happening before they get sent.

You described it as like there’s this thing called the stairway to heaven where, you know, the cows sort of go up and the one gets stunned and then drops, and they don’t see until it’s about to happen to them.

Okay, that sounds like ways to go, not too bad.

So, that’s been enacted a lot in Europe.

What, how did that, you know, what were the campaigns that made that happen successfully that can be then copy-pasted into, for example, America?

Yeah, so I mean, when it comes to slaughter, this is actually one of the few areas where regulation goes back a long way.

So even before we had factory farming, we often had humane slaughter regulations. I mean, some of these have religious roots in terms of halal or kosher slaughter. Those were motivated by humane concerns originally.

Really? I thought the whole thing was that you can’t stun them, and you have to let them bleed to death.

Yeah, which now in an industrial setting is a terrible way to kill an animal. But in the original setting, the idea was we had no way to stun them originally at that time, right? There was no electrical stunning around.

Right. And so the idea was to use a really sharp knife, cut them really quickly, and then let them fully bleed out before you do anything else.

Which is the most humane way to kill an animal if you have no future technology and if you’re killing them one at a time.

By hand.

By hand.

By hand.

Right.

With the person who actually cares.

Now, unfortunately, as with all methods of slaughter, when you end up in an industrial setting, it goes horrible.

And that’s when you need to be able to use stunning.

Exactly. That’s when you need to be able to electrically stun the animals or do something else because you have this incredibly fast throughput. You can’t provide that kind of individual care to an animal that is dying.

And so the adoption of these humane standards came with the slaughterhouse industry kind of industrialized first.

So well before we had factory farms, we had industrial slaughterhouses.

And people started to see the horrors of that.

I mean, in the US, we had The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s book on the Chicago slaughterhouses. It was mainly about the abuse of workers and about food safety concerns, but it also talked at length about how horrible the way we were killing the animals was.

And in Europe, similarly, we started to see real humane concerns develop around this.

And so I actually think it was a lot of popular mobilization. I mean, this is a fascinating case.

So in the US, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which is actually a very strong law as far as mammals go. Unfortunately, it has been interpreted by the USDA to not apply to chickens, which are by far the biggest group of animals slaughtered.

But this law was passed in the early 1950s. And when President Eisenhower signed it into law, he said, if I went based on the mail, I would think that people didn’t care about anything other than humane slaughter.

So, I mean, even in the 1950s, there was a huge popular outcry about this. And there was a real motivation to change it.

And I think the other thing that has aided that is the development of better technology.

So you mentioned the stairway to heaven. That was something that Dr. Temple Grandin developed, initially actually developed in the US with McDonald’s.

So the only way she got that implemented originally was McDonald’s told its suppliers to implement it, but it’s now spread globally.

And it doesn’t cost a ton more than inhumanely killing animals.

And so I think that’s a big part of how we’ve managed to get these.

But, you know, I think it was that combination of there needs to be public pressure, but there also needs to be a technocratic solution that is actually viable.

What about the role of government subsidies?

Because, you know, as you mentioned, the farm bill is billions in dollars.

What portion of subsidies are currently spent on improving animal welfare conditions or, again, the actual quality of the meat, you know, such that it’s not full of antibiotics?

Right. Yeah.

I mean, I think our subsidy system is deeply messed up.

I mean, basically in the US, it was a response to the Great Depression. And there was this Dust Bowl crisis where really small family farmers were going bankrupt.

And so as part of the New Deal, FDR said, we’ll give them some money.

And so it was almost a welfare scheme at the time.

Over time, as all those small farmers disappeared, and as you ended up with a whole bunch of big factory farmers, it became a corporate welfare scheme.

And you now have the average recipient of farm subsidies earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

So it’s this subsidy scheme for quite wealthy corporate farmers.

And primarily what they subsidize is the inputs into factory farming.

So primarily they subsidize the really cheap production of corn and soy.

And they’ve encouraged the monocropping of those crops in very large volumes to feed into factory farms.

They also provide a whole host of other subsidies to factory farms.

So, for instance, they get heavily subsidized insurance.

So that if anything ever goes wrong, the government basically picks up the bill.

You see that, for instance, with Abbey and Flu.

There are even deals where if the industry overproduces one year, the USDA will often buy up their surplus. So they do these commodity buyback programs where, you know, we’re sorry, the chicken industry produced too much.

We would hate for them to have to suffer the market outcome that any other industry would suffer.

And so we will just buy that extra chicken and we’ll foist it off on local school districts or something, you know, to force them to eat it.

And so, yeah, this is how this is developed.

As a result, the standard tradition has been there is no money for higher welfare farming.

In fact, the subsidies have had this perverse effect where because they subsidize these huge commodity crops, they’ve dramatically increased the price of farmland.

It’s incredibly valuable to own farmland because you can just get subsidies for owning farmland and planting it with corn or soy.

And so as a result, pasture-based farming is way more expensive.

You don’t get subsidies for pasture-based farming.

And so now if someone wanted to buy a few hundred acres to do pasture-based farming, the farmland price is way higher than they used to be.

They won’t get any subsidies on their feed because their feed is the grass.

They won’t get any other subsidies.

So they’re operating at this huge disadvantage relative to the industrial operators.

And the solution, I think, is, I mean, first, we should probably provide fewer subsidies in the first place.

But the subsidies that do remain should be redirected toward things that are actually good for society as a whole.

In particular, animal welfare is one of those social goods.

And we’re starting to see this in Europe.

So we’re starting to see the European Union and progressive nations like Denmark and Netherlands adopting subsidies for animal welfare improvements.

So saying if you want to get these subsidies, you actually need to do something better than you were doing previously.

And there is enough money out there that we could fund a huge transformation in these industries.

I mean, it’s something like $800 billion a year globally in farm subsidies.

Just a fraction of that could end crates, could end cages, could subsidize a huge transition away from the worst practices.

You say just a fraction.

Give me a ballpark.

Yeah, well, it’s hard to know because the industry inflates the price of any potential reform they don’t want to do.

So, you know, one estimate for getting rid of battery cages in the US is it’s about a $10 billion transition.

For getting rid of gestation crates, it would probably be a bit less than that.

Now, there would be slightly higher operating costs, but really slightly.

I mean, you know, it’s heavily disputed, but the estimate for pork raised without gestation crates is it would be somewhere between 0% and 5% more expensive at the farm level.

Which, when you pass it through to the retail level, could be a pretty tiny increase.

And again, the government could even cover that.

I mean, you know, the government could provide 0% to 5% subsidy at the farm production level for not using crates.

And essentially solve that.

Yeah, because, I mean, I think sort of the argument against all of this is like, yeah, but people are already struggling to buy, you know, to feed themselves.

People have less liquid income.

You know, who are you to say, you know, to pass on this cost to the consumer?

But your point is that it doesn’t actually have to pass on through a smarter allocation of these billions of dollars of funding.

The government is, you know, taxpayer money, essentially, is just being very misallocated.

That’s right.

Because again, like coming back to, like, the EATS Act and so on, part of the new campaign, sorry, the new administration’s push is like, we’re going to bring down the costs of everything.

Right.

Food is going to be cheaper again, and so on.

But by the sounds of things, there’s a better way of doing that by just making the allocation of subsidies be less captured by corporate cronyism, which is what the current situation is, and more effectively spent.

Is that a true statement?

Yeah, I think that’s right.

I mean, I think that’s the simplest solution in many ways to avoid consumers having to bear the burden of this.

I think, I mean, there’s another funny thing that it’s not always the case that factory farming has brought down the price of products.

So in chicken, the chicken industry, this is true, because they just have these crazy efficient birds and has brought down, it has brought down chicken prices.

I was looking the other day at how the price of bacon has changed since the adoption of factory farming in the 1970s.

And it has risen 18% faster than inflation.

Really?

Which is crazy.

And so, you know, I don’t know whether that has been effectively captured by these industries.

One of the reasons why it might be is that it is an oligopoly, the system they have.

There is a very small number of companies with very little competition.

So, you know, the vast majority of pork in this country comes from three or four companies.

And they have huge price-setting power.

And so I think it is, you know, if you combined antitrust action at the same time with these reforms, I think you might see some pretty big changes.

And, you know, an example of this right now, there have been major antitrust lawsuits going on against the biggest chicken companies.

A number of them just settled out of court for hundreds of millions of dollars, effectively acknowledging that they had been price-fixing for years.

So to me, the other crazy thing about this is whenever the industry says, you know, you can’t possibly force these reforms on us, which would cost one cent more per egg or, you know, 5% more on the pork.

And then it turns out they were price-fixing like 10% up, 20% up, you know, whatever.

It’s like, well, we just got rid of the price-fixing; like, we could afford a whole bunch of reforms.

So what about technological solutions to this?

Because, I mean, by and large, I mean, in some ways, technology has made the problem of factory farming what it is.

But, you know, technology can also be an incredible force for good.

So what are the most promising methods to, you know, essentially innovate our way out of this situation?

Yeah, I think there are some really promising methods.

And, you know, I’ll say, like, the industry often says, the only way to reform this is to go backward.

And we’re not going backward.

But I don’t think that’s true.

What do they mean?

What do they mean?

They mean it’s to, you know, get rid of all the technology they’ve developed over the last 50 years and go back to what a farm looked like 50 to 100 years ago.

And, you know, they rightly point out that that was inefficient in many ways and that it didn’t properly control disease and all these other things.

And the point is, we don’t need to go back to that.

I mean, you know, there will always be a market for people who want to do things in the absolutely traditional way.

And that’s great.

But we can do large scale, high tech, high welfare farming.

So one example would be, you know, of a sexing technology.

This is a technology which holds the promise to sex the gender of a chick while it is still in the egg.

So rather than saying we need to wait until the egg hatches and then we need to throw out the males, just work out if this is a male or a female in the egg and get rid of the male eggs well before they’ve developed into anything that we would care about.

And it turns out that as this technology is getting developed, it can be cheaper than the alternative of waiting for the eggs to hatch, using up space in the incubator, and then having to have a whole bunch of people who literally go through and try and sex them based on what they look like.

And so, you know, this is a new technology.

Now that it’s being adopted in Europe, France and Germany have been at a ban in this practice.

About 20% of European hens have now been, are now coming from these sexed eggs.

It’s now just coming into the US.

So this year, the first US egg producers are adopting this technology.

And I’m really optimistic that we will, within a decade or so, see the end of this practice of killing male baby chicks globally.

I expect the reason why it will be adopted so quickly and easily in the US is because it actually aligns with profits.

That’s right.

It actually costs the companies less to do this.

It’s aligned with efficiency.

That’s right.

It’s a more efficient process.

And thus, you know, really, like, yeah, once again, like, if you can align the incentives, it’s easy.

And the key piece there is that you need to get the technology to a scale where that is first possible.

Because this, the industry is a commodity business run by people who are not tech savvy, who are not innovative.

I mean, factory farming leaders have straight up said to my face, like, look, you need to understand the thing we’re good at is doing exactly the same thing again and again and making it slightly cheaper year over year.

And we’re only going to adopt new technology when someone else has proven at scale that it is cheaper.

Otherwise, we don’t take risks in this business.

Like we just keep on doing the same thing because we’re producing a commodity product.

And so what you need and what happened in the case of an obosexing is you need catalytic funding that came from governments, that could come from philanthropies to fund the development of these technologies that the industry has no interest in developing themselves and get them to a point.

And again, government regulation can be really helpful here in subsidizing or mandating that transition to get them to a point where they actually are more efficient.

Another example I’ll give you is in the pork industry. It is common practice to castrate all of the males at birth.

Now, the reason they do this is not actually because they’re worried about them reproducing because they don’t let them get to puberty.

So they don’t actually.

But the reason why they do this is because non-castrated males develop something called boar taint.

Their meat tastes a little bit different because of the hormones in it. People don’t like the taste.

And so they have developed this process of castration.

Now, it would cost minimal amounts to provide pain relief while doing castration.

Anesthetic.

Anesthetic.

But the industry doesn’t want to pay minimal amounts.

They want to pay zero.

So they do this with a scalpel without any pain relief.

And that’s probably not going to. That part is not going to change.

The good news is there is now what’s called immunocastration, which is you can inject the piglet with something which controls the hormones in the same way that physically castrating them would and gets rid of the need to castrate them at all.

And in fact, the entire Brazilian, or almost the entire Brazilian pork industry, which is the third biggest in the world, has now adopted this technology.

And so they’ve basically ended castration in Brazil.

The US pork industry is behind the times.

It hasn’t adopted this technology at all.

But there is the potential for these kinds of technologies to get rid of these trade-offs.

Just to sort of still man the other side a little, I could see people being like, oh, but that’s unnatural, right?

Like, oh, you’re using a sort of medical intervention, like by injecting some kind of hormone to stop them, you know, a puberty blocker essentially.

Is there any evidence that that is bad for health?

There is no evidence.

This has been around for two decades now.

The population of Brazil has been eating this pork for a long time.

And we’re not seeing any of those outcomes.

For what it’s worth though, you’re absolutely right.

A conversation I had with a senior leader in the pork industry, I won’t say who he is to embarrass him.

I explicitly asked why was his company, had his company not adopted this?

And he said that was why.

He said that the marketing folk, he thought it was a good idea.

And the marketing people had vetoed it because they said people are going to think there are some weird hormones in the meat.

And, you know, that’s going to be bad for them in some way.

So that’s exactly what happened.

Even though the meat is already full of…

They’re all full of crazy stuff.

Yeah.

Antibiotics, hormones, that’s the thing.

Right, right.

They don’t talk about that.

It’s already pumped full.

That’s right.

And that’s because that stuff is perceived as necessary.

You know, they can’t imagine pulling that stuff from the system.

But when you’ve got this thing that’s only there for welfare reasons, well, that’s unnecessary.

We don’t need that.

What about cultivated meat?

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think the alternative protein category in general.

So, you know, the idea of can we grow meat and other proteins from plants, from fungi, from animal cells, I think there’s huge potential.

And it doesn’t need to be an either or with meat.

I know there are people out there who are going to say, I want real meat.

I want this.

And if they’re getting that meat from a real natural process, fine.

Great, great.

Where I see cultivated meat or plant-based meat and things competing is with meat that is already coming from a factory.

So, you know, people will say, oh, this is lab-grown meat.

And it’s like, well, you kind of are already eating lab-grown meat.

You’re eating the product of a number of products from a lab that were put into an animal in a factory and sent to another factory in a processing plant and popped out the end.

And so wouldn’t you rather, if it were possible, have that meat that came out the end of that processing process?

And yes, it is processed just as regular factory-farmed meat is.

It came out the end of that processing process, but had fewer of the additives you didn’t want in it.

So it doesn’t have antibiotics.

It doesn’t need to have all these other crazy things along the way.

It doesn’t need to be bathed in chlorine.

It doesn’t need to do, you know, you don’t need to do those things.

Right.

It’s not full of salmonella.

Yeah.

Exactly.

You can vastly reduce salmonella, vastly reduce foodborne contaminants.

And that’s already the case, by the way.

Plant-based meat has vastly fewer foodborne pathogens than regular meat has.

They’re held in part because they’re held to a far higher regulatory standard.

And so the promise of these is the world wants more protein.

I mean, both because people are getting richer, because people are obsessed with getting more and more protein.

The world is going to want more protein.

We need to produce more protein.

And I think, you know, the current default trajectory for doing so is let’s factory farm more animals.

We can…

I think one thing we should do is bring in reforms that improve the welfare of those animals.

But realistically, to provide the protein at the scale that the world needs it, we need other sources of protein.

And this is where I think there’s this huge potential of these alternative proteins to provide at least some of that mix of protein that we need.

Again, though, there’s regulatory capture happening before this technology has even had a chance to be fully explored.

Alabama has banned it.

Florida, you know, Ron DeSantis is proudly saying, I’m banning this cultivated meat thing.

I don’t want people to be buying this.

It’s like, how, whatever happened to, like, freedom of choice for your consumers?

And again, you literally see the poor, you know, the meat lobby standing behind him smiling, like, oh, you know.

Italy has banned it.

Yeah.

And again, like, it’s not like it’s already there.

Like it’s not been, it’s not on the market anyway.

It’s just, it’s in the R&D phase.

Yeah.

And it’s insane to me because it’s like, talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Because nations are going to be increasingly moving into food insecurity.

Yeah.

So we need to be looking into as many different methods of producing proteins as possible and see, you know, see what actually works.

Yeah, I agree.

Like cultivated meat needs long-term studies.

Yeah.

Like, you know.

But at least can we treat it somewhat evenly as like, you know, where are the long-term studies on eating factory-farmed meat that’s like scraped off the bottom, you know, sausages pumped full of like absolute crap, like the bottom of the barrel type slop that we’re feeding humans?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, let’s at least be somewhat balanced with this.

Sure.

What do you think are the most promising things in terms of preventing the regulatory capture machine from also stopping this potential solution?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, as you say, it’s been crazy to see the political roundabouts that people will go on this.

I mean, the idea of banning cultivated meat started with European socialists who said, this is harming our food tradition.

This is harming the farmers.

This is not, you know, we don’t like change, basically.

And then it was picked up somehow by the American right.

And you ended up with these, you know, free market Republicans tying themselves in circles to explain why they wanted to ban a product, you know, and literally coming up with things like, well, you know, the FDA reviews not stringent enough, like as if that was like the thing we really needed, you know?

Like, no one, like half the time they’re saying they don’t like the FDA anyway.

Exactly.

I mean, it’s totally crazy stuff.

Inconsistent.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, look, the good thing is we are seeing a lot of principled conservatives and even ranchers opposing these laws.

So the Institute of Justice, which is a prominent free-market conservative think tank, has been suing, is suing currently the state of Florida and suing other states with these bans.

So we’re seeing a number, like in Wyoming and South Dakota, bills to ban Kota Bermuda have actually just died in the last couple of weeks.

And they were killed off by rancher groups.

They were killed off by ranchers who came and said, like, this is crazy.

And by the way, this kind of sets a precedent for banning meat, you know?

Like, if you’re worried about, like, the things, like, you know, our argument for years has been, don’t you dare ban any of this stuff, leave a free market, let people decide.

And now you’re coming in and doing this.

I mean, the other thing is even where countries and states are not banning this, the other thing the industry has tried to do is pass these onerous labeling regulations where they want there to be some kind of defamatory label on the product.

So, you know, this was made from cells as an imitation product.

It is nothing like real meat, blah, blah, blah.

And, I mean, the irony is, for decades, the meat industry has been opposing accurate labeling, you know, that you can’t even get, literally, you can’t even get them to put on accurate country of origin labeling.

Because the meat industry has said it would be too hard for us to work out if we’re making a sausage, where all the different meat came from.

Some of it might be from an animal in Canada, some might be an animal in the US, some might be from an animal in Mexico.

Like, you know, and we don’t want to have to label on there that it’s made from a mix of animals.

They talk about frankenfood.

Yeah, right, exactly.

Like, people call cultivated meat frankenfood. Meanwhile, a sausage is literally, like, they can’t even track what animal meat, like, it came from and where.

I even saw some crazy thing, someone was telling me about hot dogs.

There were some tests done, and they found human meat.

Oh, God.

Traces of human DNA, at least traces of human DNA within it.

Yeah.

Like, that’s just one example.

Because, like, that’s like when you come to the bottom of the barrel meat, like, it’s just…

Oh, yeah.

So, it’s like labeling, you know, it’s one rule for me, another for thee.

I understand.

When it’s convenient, like, they’re pro-labeling.

Yeah.

And when it’s anti, you know, when it’s not convenient, they’re against it.

Yeah.

And, I mean, you know, I absolutely, like, I think that all of our food should be maximally labeled.

There should be maximum transparency for everyone, whether it’s, you know, ranched meat, factory-farmed meat, cultivated meat, plant-based, you know, pretend meat.

Sure.

So, absolute maximum transparency.

People deserve to know what they’re putting into their bodies.

Yep.

And, you know, it’s hard to sense-make in today’s climate, and I’m sure there will be so much propaganda from each individual industry.

But by denying, like, but at least with labeling, like, that’s a huge step one.

Let people know and see.

Yep.

So, again, yeah, that’s funny that they’re trying to use that technique.

Any other sort of potential levers there to help?

Like, you know, from what I understand, so one of my previous guests I had on was Uma Valeti, who is the CEO of Upside Foods, which is a cultivated meat company.

Yeah.

And I tried their chicken.

Yeah.

I’m still alive, doing fine.

In fact, I’m healthier than ever.

Yeah.

You know, and it tasted basically like, to me, it was indistinguishable from a natural chicken breast.

Yeah.

But at the same time, like, you know, not only are they facing like all these regulatory hurdles before they can even get, like, even join the race.

Yeah.

It’s like preventing them from sitting down and, you know, getting in the starting blocks.

Yeah.

But they also have the disadvantage, of course, of like, it is a new technology.

Yeah.

It is hard to scale.

Yeah.

Any promising areas there that you think, like, what would you, if you had a bucket of, like, you had $100 billion, how would you deploy it?

Well, I mean, yeah, I think alternative proteins have immense promise, and they still have a long way to go.

So, you know, the factory farming industry got a 50 to 100-year head start.

They got all of their R&D funded by the government.

And so, I mean, literally all the processes were funded by land grant universities in the U.S. or otherwise funded by governments.

And so I think there’s a really strong case for philanthropy and government to, as it subsidized the adoption of higher welfare alternatives, also subsidize the development of alternative proteins, also subsidize the development.

And indeed, that’s happening outside the U.S.

So the Chinese government’s doing that.

A number of European governments are doing this.

UAE is doing this.

Singapore is doing this.

So a whole bunch of Israel’s doing this, particularly governments that are concerned about food security.

They’re investing heavily in this.

And, you know, that really gives me hope because I think we will, in the same way that factory-farmed meat is not going to get any better.

I mean, it’s basically they have optimized every last possible thing out of the system.

Cultivated meat will only get better.

It can only get better.

And it may take a while.

It may take a long time.

And it may require a lot of funding.

I mean, this is high risk.

It’s not on the kind of timeline.

High risk in terms of financial.

High risk financially.

And it’s on a long timeline.

And so, you know, the challenge of relying on the private market as we currently are, like venture capitalists, is these very short timelines.

And in reality, you know, this is a decades-long endeavor.

This is something where we need to keep working on.

A lot of that will need to happen in academic labs, whether it’s supported by governments or philanthropies or whoever else.

So, I see a lot of potential on that in the long term.

And again, it’s also not an either or.

You know, I think so many people get in this thing where they get grossed out.

They say, well, I don’t want cultivated meat.

Therefore, we need to shut it down.

And it’s like, look, like, that’s fine if you don’t want it.

Like, you know.

Don’t buy it.

Yeah, don’t buy it.

That’s fine.

No one’s forcing you.

It’s a very easy thing.

What personal biases affect my freedom?

Right, that’s right.

Exactly.

And so I think we need to have on the market, you know, a number of different options.

And people will choose different options based on what they care about.

And that’s great.

And if we have accurate labeling and people actually know what they’re buying, whether that is from an animal, whether it’s from plants or cells or whatever else, that will take us a huge part of the way in terms of getting away from the current system where almost everyone is eating factory-farmed meat, whether they want to or not.

What advice would you give to people watching this episode who now feel inspired to actually go out and try and move the needle on this in some way?

Because from what I gather, there are many different approaches.

You know, whether there’s obviously everyone thinks, oh, I’ll just like tweet about it.

And I mean, that’s my own weakness.

I’m like, I have a big platform.

So that’s enough.

That’s great.

It’s a start, but it’s not.

It’s nowhere near sufficient.

Yeah.

There are, you know, I’m also, fortunately, I came into the money recently and I’m donating a bunch to various philanthropic areas.

But could you sort of like list through the most potential, you know, there was promising approaches for different people, whether it’s like contacting their congressperson or donating money.

What are the most promising things?

Yeah.

Well, look, the first thing I say is if someone’s not convinced, go and do their own research.

The thing about this issue is the more you learn, the more forward you’ll be.

We have, there is nothing to hide on our side.

There’s a lot to hide on the other side.

And so I would definitely encourage people, if you’re skeptical about the things we’ve talked about today, go and research it yourself.

Look online, find the information.

The next thing is get the word out about it because just as you’re doing with tweeting about it and posting about it, this industry thrives in the darkness.

It thrives when no one has any clue what’s going on.

And so if you have a big platform, great, talk about it.

But even if you don’t have a big platform, talk to your friends about it, get this discussion going.

Then we need to let the people in power know this is something we care about and that we’re watching.

And so that starts with politicians, for sure.

So, you know, letting your politicians know, hey, this is something I care about.

I’m watching what you do on this issue.

Letting corporations that you give money to know about that, too.

So whether that’s the supermarket chain, the fast food joint, whoever, letting them know, hey, this is something I really care about.

And again, I’m watching what you do on this issue.

And if you have the means, donating.

I mean, there are some really effective groups out there doing work to end some of the worst practices.

They are funding-starved compared to other causes.

I mean, this is a fraction of one percent of the world’s philanthropy that goes toward this work.

And there is a real dire need for more funding.

So people have the financial means that one of those impactful things you can do is definitely to donate.

Can you mention any or would it be better if we just provide a list?

Well, I’ll mention some and we can provide a list, too.

So, you know, I would check out, for instance, the Humane League.

It’s a group that has been doing campaigning to get companies to adopt better standards.

So harnessing that consumer pressure to push companies to make the kind of changes they claim they’re going to make anyway.

And, you know, then I’d look at other groups like the Good Food Institute.

If you’re excited about alternative proteins, that’s a group that is promoting the alternative protein industry, trying to develop and and trying to push back on some of these state legal efforts.

There are a whole host.

Yeah, we could do a long list of other groups out there.

There’s Mercy for Animals, Animal Equality, a whole bunch of these other groups that are doing really, really effective work in this space.

Are there any lessons to be learned from previous social movements that have either been successful in raising awareness and making change or actually unsuccessful or caused even a backfire effect?

You know, like the… not that I like to make the comparison between slavery and factory farming, but there are clearly lessons to be learned.

Because, like, there was a social movement to stop slavery in America and it took way too long, but it eventually worked.

So like what lessons?

Yeah, like what did those successful movements do right?

And what are the ones that caused backfire effects doing wrong?

Yeah.

Well, you know, the slavery abolitionist movement is a great example because on the one hand, I am deeply inspired by the British abolitionist movement, which is really one of the world’s first modern social movements.

And they took a practice that was deeply ingrained in society, accounted for a significant portion of Britain’s GDP, was integral to its colonies and its global security, and they publicized it.

And once they publicized it and once they started organizing people, and once they started lobbying their members of parliament, they created more and more pressure.

And eventually, in bits and incremental reforms, they got rid of it.

By contrast, the U.S. abolitionist movement was actually a lot more polarizing.

It was a lot less focused on incremental reform, a lot less focused on what was politically possible.

Inadvertently, it helped bring about a civil war that abolished slavery, but that was not what they were trying to do.

I mean, they were out there.

And I think part of the lesson there is the British abolitionists were incredibly focused on this one narrow goal.

They worked across party lines.

So a number of the most prominent abolitionists would be considered conservatives in our modern political parlance.

Whereas the U.S. movement, as is often the case, sort of radicalized and became about 100 different issues, many of which had nothing to do with slavery, and also didn’t find that kind of broad political consensus.

And again, accidentally contributed to the abolition of slavery, but not intentionally.

One thing that both of those movements have in common is they didn’t obsess over individual personal purity.

So there were campaigns to boycott slave-grown sugar, but those never took off, and those did not play a major role.

It was not that, you know, there were people at the time who said, “Oh, well, you know, it’s just an individual consumer choice. You can just choose to not buy sugar or cloth or coffee produced by slaves, and that’s how it all went in.”

And that went nowhere.

By contrast, when they organized for political change, that was what actually did it.

And I think similarly, in more recent times, we’ve seen a number of movements be very effective in mobilizing corporate change.

So I think that’s also focusing on those biggest levels of change, political change, corporate change, and increasingly new technology.

And to me, yeah, the greatest lesson is we need to mobilize at that level.

We need to ignore petty differences.

We need to also appeal to everyone across the political spectrum and not make this into some kind of radical movement that doesn’t appeal to half the country.

So final question.

Tell me why solving factory farming is a win-win in your view.

I mean, this is something that would unlock so many other problems.

We talked about antibiotic resistance.

This helps push back against the antibiotic resistance crisis.

We talked about human health.

This will produce food that is healthier for people to eat.

We talked about clean air and water, and this will provide cleaner food and water.

I mean, at the end of the day, to me, it’s just kind of crazy that this is how we’re producing our food and this is the model for how we’re going to produce our food in the 21st century.

Like, we’re going to have AGI before we abolish gestation crates.

And so the thing that gives me hope, though, is that it is.

It’s such an anachronism.

It doesn’t belong in the present day.

It doesn’t belong with our modern moral attitudes in today’s society.

And so I really think that the fact that almost everyone already disapproves of it, the fact that people are learning more about it over time, the fact that we have better alternatives gives me a lot of hope that we will be able to end this.

And when we do end it, that it will be better for our health, for our environment, and for future generations.

Thank you so much for coming.

I really, really appreciate it.

As I said, like the fact that there are people like you who have dedicated their lives to understanding it and figuring out the best ways to move us past this is just so inspiring.

So thank you so, so much.

Thank you to all of you guys who have managed to make it through to here because I appreciate this was not probably an easy episode to listen to, but man, is it important.

So yeah, thank you for following.

Please give Lewis a follow.

Do read the show notes because there’s going to be a lot of info beneath in this one, particularly with calls to action of what we can do, particularly around pressing ones.

So yeah, thank you for joining Lewis and, yeah, thank you, win winners.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me on the show, and thank you for everything you’re doing on this issue. Thank you.

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This is an experimental rewrite

You know, there are so many problems on Earth that are vying for our attention. But if I had to pick one that, looking back a hundred years from now, we’d say, “Damn, we really screwed up. That one sucked,” it would be factory farming. As you’ll learn from today’s conversation, it’s one of the most lose-lose situations currently happening. My guest today, Louis Bollard, is a leading expert in this field.

Louis explains that the way contaminants are reduced to acceptable levels in U.S. chicken is by bathing the chicken in chlorine. In many cases, there’s no interest in studying the human health consequences of this practice. When the government tries to fund such research, they often receive calls from senators on the agriculture committee asking them what they’re doing, with threats to defund the effort.

He’s a researcher and philanthropist who has dedicated nearly his entire life to addressing this issue. Thank goodness for his efforts, as there are meaningful changes we can all contribute to in order to improve this situation. I’m thrilled to share my conversation with Louis Bollard.

Louis, thank you so much for joining us. As you know, and I think most of the Win Win viewers agree, the issue of factory farming is very close to my heart. I wanted to talk to you because I believe you have one of the clearest understandings of this complex topic.

To kick things off, could you explain your background, how you became interested in this issue, and just clarify for listeners what factory farming truly entails?

Sure! Thanks for having me on the show. I think like many of your viewers, I grew up with a love for animals and a desire to do good in the world, but without specific views on this topic until later. When I learned about factory farming as a teenager, I was utterly shocked. I couldn’t believe we would treat animals in such a manner, and it was unbelievable that no one seemed to be addressing the issue.

It struck me as I compared factory farming to other social problems; many are complex and have difficult solutions, like poverty. However, the reason we’re torturing animals is merely that it’s marginally cheaper. The clear solution here is just to stop.

I initially set out to learn more about this issue, even going to law school with the intent to litigate on it, which I did for a year. Unfortunately, in the U.S., there aren’t any real laws governing factory farming, making litigation difficult due to a lack of applicable laws. Eventually, I joined Open Philanthropy, where we fund advocacy efforts globally to reform the worst conditions associated with factory farming.

Interviewer: So, you grew up in New Zealand in a farming community, right?

Louis: Yes, that’s correct. We had a sheep farm. At the time, I had no qualms about it. I thought those animals lived a pretty good life, grazing on the hills all day. However, in hindsight, I think this perspective blinded me to the realities of factory farming because, in New Zealand, you often see sheep and cows outside in pastures.

It wasn’t until I traveled to Southeast Asia, particularly Southern China or Vietnam, that I started witnessing live animal markets and realized the extent of animal mistreatment occurring around me. That observation really planted the seed for my research. Upon reaching out to farms in New Zealand, I found it curious that you don’t see any chickens or pigs outdoors in the country.

It was a turning point for me when I realized that we eat a lot of chicken and pork, yet there are no pigs or chickens seen outside. I contacted chicken and pig farms to ask if I could visit, but they all said no. I even reached out to industry associations for help, and they also said no.

It baffled me because, as a child, you could visit any sheep or cow farm. They welcomed visitors! This experience led me to understand that something nefarious was happening. The deeper I dug, the more I uncovered about the entire system of producing chicken, pigs, eggs, and increasingly fish, all relying on the factory farming model.

Interviewer: Can you describe what defines a factory farm? Is it a certain size or technique?

Louis: You’ll typically know it when you see it. A factory farm is primarily indoors. Traditional farms allow animals outside, at least when the weather permits, while factory farms bear no outdoor space for the animals. Within these indoor settings, several characteristics are common.

For instance, if they’re in the egg or pork business, they generally use cages and crates—this is a hallmark of factory farming. In growing chicken, they often utilize hyper-optimized breeding lines designed for rapid growth that their bodies can’t naturally support, leading to serious health issues.

I’ve seen images of chickens from the 1940s—small and athletic-looking. Modern chickens are drastically different, resembling a French Bulldog that is overweight and whose legs barely support its body.

These modern broiler hens are nearly obese. Upon the industry’s shift towards factory farming, it diverged into two segments. Chickens were previously raised on small farms where they ate food scraps and laid eggs. Then, as factory farming industrialized, eggs came from hens bred specifically for laying, leading to male chicks being discarded at birth because they were too scrawny. About eight billion male chicks are killed annually on their first day of life, often disposed of in macerators or other gruesome methods.

On the other end, the broiler chicken sector developed birds that grow rapidly without balanced development. They focused on growing breast meat while neglecting the legs and internal organs, which were deemed less valuable. Consequently, the bird’s legs weaken, leading to struggles for survival. By the time they are six to seven weeks old, the birds are slaughtered, as they haven’t hit puberty, which allows for longer growth but results in chronic starvation.

Mother Nature essentially signals that these animals should die before passing on their genes, but the industry just finds workarounds.

Interviewer: I can see the economic reasons for this. Can you tell me more about pig farming? I’ve spent time around pigs and know they are even smarter than dogs.

Louis: Absolutely. Pig farming could resemble the traditional methods of centuries past, with small backyard herds feeding on kitchen scraps. These animals would lead decent lives, roaming outside. However, factory farming figured out how to confine pigs indoors, laying them on concrete floors designed for easy manure removal while denying them proper living conditions.

Breeding pigs were further optimized for larger litter sizes, leading to increased aggression. Since these pigs couldn’t coexist peacefully in crowded indoor spaces, they were crammed into individual crates that prohibited movement, even turning around. This arrangement boosts efficiency, minimizing energy expenditure and feed consumption.

This factory farming system exemplifies how the industry operates—every time they solve one problem, they create an even worse one. They prioritize operational efficiency over the well-being of animals.

Interviewer: The numbers are staggering. For each human, there’s about one laying hen in a cage globally, and the figures for pigs are equally alarming.

Louis: Yes, it’s immense. For every human on Earth, there’s roughly three broiler chickens raised in factory farms. In the U.S., that number rises significantly because we consume a majority of the world’s chicken. For pigs, there’s approximately one pig in a factory farm for every eight global citizens, with even higher ratios in the U.S. Most of those animals are kept indoors. Best estimates suggest that around 90% of laying hens are in battery cages globally, and around 99% of U.S. pigs reside in farms that we assume are entirely indoors.

The industry doesn’t collect data distinguishing indoor from outdoor animals, but USDA data on farm sizes indicates that if a farm is housing 100,000 pigs, those pigs won’t be outside enjoying the sun.

No, they’re all in cramped conditions. Even in emerging markets like India and China, factory farming has become the prevalent model. This system originated in the U.S. and has now been exported worldwide.

You mentioned China. They are now the largest consumer of pork, and their animal welfare laws are often worse than the dire conditions found in the U.S. I recently saw an image of a Chinese factory farm resembling a seven-story parking structure—windowless and stark, it’s just rows upon rows of pigs in tiny crates.

What shocks me is that if someone treated a dog or cat that way—even for a short time—people would be outraged. But pigs, who are more intelligent than household pets, needlessly endure these conditions for months before being slaughtered, another layer to this heartbreaking reality.

We’ve discussed the animal welfare standpoint, which most people can grasp, but what they may not realize are the significant human health risks tied to this industry as well.

For instance, I have a family member who developed an antibiotic-resistant infection after a minor surgery, which nearly became fatal. This was partly due to a superbug that originated from antibiotic overuse in pork production. It’s astounding that the pork industry uses about 44% of medically important antibiotics, equivalent to the entire U.S. hospital system’s antibiotic usage combined. This clearly contributes to antibiotic resistance, right?

Louis: Absolutely. For decades, the industry denied any connection between their practices and health outcomes. They even produced scientific studies claiming no correlation, but independent panels and research have since confirmed the link. Recent statements from the FDA underscore that the role of animal agriculture in antibiotic resistance is a significant crisis, yet change remains stagnant due to the industry’s political power.

Another aspect I was researching is hormone use. In dairy production, synthetic hormones promote larger udders and more milk production. Studies suggest that hormones fed to cows for faster growth can accumulate in humans, potentially impacting testosterone levels in men after consuming processed meat.

This suggests a real lack of scientific inquiry into these issues, despite how crucial our diet is to our health. Why do you think that is?

Louis: Interestingly, hormones have been regulated to some degree. Thanks to past abuses, hormone use in chicken and pig feed has been banned in the U.S. Now, the focus is primarily on beef cattle and possibly dairy cows.

However, they’ve replaced hormones with various growth-promoting antibiotics and beta-agonist drugs like ractopamine for pigs, which leads to rapid growth. We still don’t fully understand the human health ramifications of these drugs. There’s minimal interest in researching these impacts.

When the government attempts to fund such studies, they quickly receive pushback from senators on agriculture committees, who threaten to withdraw funding. The overall atmosphere resembles the reluctance to investigate tobacco’s health effects decades ago.

Interviewer: Right. Those lobbies are just too powerful.

I can’t fathom that consuming meat from animals raised in such unnatural, stressful conditions is beneficial for us. There are vast differences between gentle slaughter methods and the most brutal ones.

Some of the worst methods aren’t confined to the U.S.; in China, reports exist of pigs being boiled alive because it’s deemed a more efficient method. Other inhumane methods include asphyxiating them.

I can’t help but wonder about the cortisol and adrenaline in the meat from animals living such harsh lives. I feel it’s unhealthy when compared to meat from an animal that has lived a natural life.

People often claim that meat consumption is natural, yet few consume bison roaming the plains. Hunting is the most authentic form of sourcing meat, but factory farming is its antithesis. It seems intuitive that consuming such stress-laden meat isn’t ideal—I personally wouldn’t want it.

On a related note, it’s ironic when people claim they’re following a paleo diet while eating factory-farmed chicken. That’s not food our ancestors were eating. Beyond the additives and other issues, consider this: the only way to ensure that U.S. chicken is safe is to bathe it in chlorine post-slaughter.

This process prevents exports to the UK and Europe, which uphold higher food safety standards prohibiting chlorinated chicken. Even after the chlorine bath, a significant portion still tests positive for salmonella—frequently antibiotic-resistant salmonella. The U.S. even allows for salmonella tolerances in chicken cuts, up to 25-33%. Meanwhile, plant-based foods typically allow for 0%. This crazy system implies that as long as we sanitize it afterwards, everything is acceptable.

Many people are oblivious to the production methods behind “healthy” and “lean” protein. What are the labeling standards in the U.S. regarding meat origin? I know Europe and the UK have strict regulations about how animals are raised.

In the U.S., there are only minimal labels worth anything. The USDA regulates “organic” as it involves a legitimate certification process. Typically, terms like “free-range,” “pasture-raised,” and “cage-free” imply that the animals had outdoor access.

Beyond that, most labels are meaningless. A well-known factory-farm chicken brand boasts “all natural,” but fine print reveals this means only that no artificial additives were applied post-slaughter.

The USDA permits entities to define the terms they use. There’s little chance the average consumer knows what that means, allowing manufacturers to exploit these labeling ambiguities effectively.

A few years ago, Congress sought to modify this labeling process, urging the USDA to ensure that terms held real meaning. After years of consulting with consumers and industry representatives, the USDA essentially returned with the same approach, concluding that it was fine to leave definitions to the industry.

Interviewer: So why doesn’t the USDA take a firmer stance?

Louis: It’s a classic case of regulatory capture. The USDA is heavily influenced by industry pressures. There exists a significant fear among regulators about how the industry will respond if they attempt to enforce stricter regulations.

This pattern plays out repeatedly. For example, in the early 1970s, when the FDA attempted to regulate antibiotic use in feed, the poultry industry pressured Congress, with powerful senators threatening to defund the FDA if they pursued those regulations.

This issue is pervasive; the revolving door at the USDA also plays a role. Individuals in regulatory positions commonly have backgrounds in the industries they oversee, and many plan to return to the industry post-government service.

Take the last Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa, the leading factory farming state in the U.S. His credentials secured his nomination from Obama. After his term, he lobbied for the dairy industry and then was re-nominated by Biden. It’s a revolving door accepted as the norm, driven by the belief that the USDA serves the interests of the agricultural industry rather than the consumers it ought to protect.

Interviewer: Shouldn’t the goal of government typically involve preventing corporate excesses? We have abundant evidence showing that corporations often prioritize their interests over consumers and the environment. It’s absurd that the agency intended to shield us from these excesses collaborates with them instead.

Louis: Absolutely. The USDA’s foundation traces back to President Lincoln. He envisioned it as a department for the people because food and agriculture matter to everyone. However, over time, as agriculture evolved into a more concentrated industry, the USDA shifted its focus to serve large corporations rather than family farmers.

When the public fails to remain vigilant, politicians often believe voters won’t care about regulatory capture at the USDA. Unfortunately, they’re often correct. Consequently, the industry has exploited this ignorance—something that has gradually occurred at the Department of Agriculture.

Pandemics also remain a growing concern. In 2009, the H1N1 influenza outbreak traced back to an industrial pig farm in North Carolina. Recently, reports indicate that around 50% of U.S. farms have encountered some type of outbreak. This issue isn’t limited to chickens; it appears to spread in cattle, which surprised me since avian flu typically doesn’t easily transmit among warm-blooded animals. What’s happening here?

The bird flu situation exemplifies the consequences of unaccountable factory farming. When H5N1 became a pressing concern around 2023, a crucial question arose: would we vaccinate the birds? Many countries vaccinate their birds and avoid outbreaks.

In the U.S., we have the infrastructure to produce vaccines. A Kansas factory had 400 million doses prepared in 2023, more than enough for our egg industry. However, the decision about whether to vaccinate hinged on the USDA requiring or allowing it.

The chicken industry said absolutely not, claiming that vaccination could hinder their export capabilities. Other nations could easily justify closing their borders to U.S. chicken, which is worth billions annually.

Ultimately, the USDA sided with the industry. They not only declined to require vaccination but also prohibited it, despite evidence from other countries effectively containing the virus through vaccination. Consequently, when the virus re-emerges, the protocol is to kill all infected birds to suppress its spread.

The USDA employs inhumane methods for this, like turning off ventilation systems and raising temperatures, a technique known as ventilation shutdown plus. It suffocates birds slowly—a process that studies indicate can take hours and is often ineffective. The following day, they may need to return to eliminate birds that survived the previous slaughter attempt.

Interviewer: That’s incomprehensible.

To me, this should incite national outrage, yet the media scarcely covers it. Many may not grasp the magnitude of what’s taking place.

Louis: I believe there’s a cognitive dissonance when discussing these issues. People acknowledge the problems but may resist confronting them because they enjoy meat and dread change. It’s alright to recognize that contradiction while also striving to make a difference.

Moreover, the animal rights movement, in part, has contributed by framing this issue around individual behavior and guilt. They often say, “If you still eat meat, you contribute to the problem. You should feel awful, and the only solution is to stop eating meat.”

It’s unsurprising that most people would reject this notion, leading them to ignore the issue altogether. In truth, as with any major societal issue, we need collective action from governments, corporations, and technological advances. Focusing exclusively on personal diets misses the broader picture.

I’ve read discussions regarding factory farming’s environmental impacts, particularly on surrounding communities. Residents near these farms endure air pollution and water contamination. Could you elaborate on this?

Louis: The environmental issues with factory farms stem from their concentrated environmental harm on small patches of land. In pasture-based farming, manure is spread over large areas, which the land can absorb. However, in factory farms, the sheer volume of waste far exceeds what the land can manage.

These farms generate significant ammonia buildup and other toxins without regulations to prevent air and water pollution. The industry effectively lobbied to exempt themselves from environmental regulations under both the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, resulting in a unique exemption for their operations. Consequently, there are no established standards. If they release ammonia or other toxins into the local air, they face no consequences.

Living next to a factory farm is terrible; residents wake up daily to the smell of manure in the air, an abundance of flies, and an unhealthy environment. Thankfully, some local regulations exist against water pollution, although often not enough. For instance, Des Moines, Iowa, is suing the Department of Agriculture due to its water supply being tainted by runoff from factory farms upstream.

Interviewer: How is this not more covered by the media? The Flint water crisis received significant attention after industry contamination, but this scenario seems equally egregious.

People seem to possess this strange notion that manure is natural. While it is, it’s crucial to understand that it also contains antibiotics and other harmful runoff, posing serious public health risks.

Aside from the literal waste that goes into waterways, it’s the substantial volume that is entirely unnatural. Although birds might defecate into a river, that is a normal occurrence. However, having thousands of pigs defecate into a small stream is entirely different and unacceptable.

Furthermore, one of the most horrific consequences appears during natural disasters. For example, in North Carolina, to address runoff concerns, regulators required pig factory farms to construct giant pools called manure lagoons for collecting waste. The idea was that it would dehydrate over time and become manageable.

In practice, these farms often occupy flood-prone areas near coastlines. Every time a hurricane strikes, these manure lagoons flood, contaminating local waterways with not just waste but also resulting in many drowning pigs floating in those bodies of water.

Interviewer: How absurd that this is accepted as a necessary evil.

Factory farming is woven into the fabric of the economy. The feed for this industry relies heavily on monocrop soy and corn, much of which is sourced from the Amazon. The fastest driver of deforestation in that region is often linked to the crops grown for factory farming.

Concern for climate is valid; animal agriculture accounts for 15% of global climate emissions. Factory farming contributes to numerous environmental harms—air pollution, water contamination, and toxins in our food supply—all accumulating from the system.

Another aspect many overlook is how mental health is impacted among workers in these facilities. Those who work in factory farms are often vulnerable members of society—migrants or individuals with limited job options. One worker shared how, despite not suffering physical injuries, the ambiance affected his mental health, making him feel as if a gray fog was descending over him. Night after night, he endured nightmares replaying the horrific scenes he witnessed.

It’s tough to picture someone who spends day in and day out slaughtering thousands of animals or pushing them into slaughter machines. This isn’t like hunting in a way our ancestors experienced; it’s an assembly line of mass production where every animal fights for its life.

Interviewer: Can you share what you encountered in some of these slaughterhouses?

Louis: Sure. Years ago, I visited a slaughterhouse in New Zealand that processed cows, sheep, and pigs. Even though it was one of the better-run facilities with regulations, there was no decent method for pig slaughter. The pigs were aware of their fate; as soon as they entered the kill room, they began to squeal and try to escape, fully aware of what was about to happen.

The throughput rate at these facilities is incredibly fast. They often have just four to five seconds to kill each animal. Ideally, the pigs are stunned first and then killed by an automatic knife, but if the stunning fails, the pigs continue moving down the line alive.

After the kills, they dip the carcasses into boiling water to make skin removal easier. One worker even told me that in cases where a pig made it past the initial kill, fellow employees would get annoyed. It’s challenging to disassemble a live animal, so they downplay any concern about possible survival.

This was considered a top-notch slaughterhouse. When it comes to chickens, the situation is even worse; they’re less valuable. Workers have less than one second to deal with each bird. They hoist chickens by their legs, often breaking them, and then rush them to the next stage.

Their stun settings are adjusted instead of regulated. In Europe, stun settings are designed to ensure the animals are comprehensively knocked out, but in the U.S. there are no regulations. The industry prioritizes meat quality over ensuring the animals are stunned effectively. Consequently, many chickens continue along the line conscious.

These chickens are supposed to be killed by an automatic blade, yet if they flinch, they move on without being properly dispatched. This unregulated, careless treatment is a direct result of factory farming.

Reflecting on the human impact of this work, there’s a whistleblower named Virgil Butler, who previously worked at a Tyson Foods poultry plant. He described becoming a “robot zombie machine” due to the emotional toll of the job. One of his co-workers ended up in a mental health facility after recurring nightmares of chickens pursuing him.

This highlights not only the suffering inflicted on animals but also a troubling camaraderie among workers, drawing individuals with psychopathic tendencies to factory farms. They often create games to cope with their reality, such as “the shit game,” where they squeeze a live chicken as hard as possible, causing its insides to spray everywhere.

Interviewer: What does this do to humanity’s soul, if such a thing exists? Even those who aren’t religious might be horrified at hearing these stories. The karma is stacking up, yet we do nothing to address it.

For decades, undercover animal advocates have worked in these facilities, capturing footage of routine abuses on factory farms. You’d think the cages and systematic cruelty would come up frequently.

What’s wild is that these investigators randomly select farms to infiltrate; they don’t receive warnings that certain farms are particularly egregious. Nearly every one they visit yields footage of sadistic abuse. Despite their short timeframes, they often encounter reports of shocking maltreatment.

Whether workers begin with psychopathic traits or develop them under these horrifying conditions, the environment fosters abuse and cruelty. Investigations have revealed less than 1% of these farms, yet they consistently showcase extensive abuses.

I’ll include resources in the show notes for anyone willing to explore this intense issue. It may be uncomfortable, but we need more individuals to engage with it to grasp the realities involved.

Recently, I’ve become more vocal on social media, and this topic elicits strong reactions across the political spectrum. While I anticipated social justice advocates would be outraged, I noted that even far-right accounts were retweeting in horror. It seems there’s a universal consensus that factory farming is problematic.

A 2022 study indicated that 84% of Democrats support laws banning farmed animal confinement, while 76% of Republicans agree. This is undeniably a bipartisan issue. So why is it so entrenched? We’ve touched on regulatory capture, but I’d like to understand the incentives keeping us stuck.

Louis: It’s akin to the Moloch trap, a game-theory predicament. Is it merely because meat is so cheap that this system persists?

I completely agree that it’s uplifting to see how many perceive factory farming as wrong. Very few support it. A survey by the EU found that 89% of Europeans believe the individual caging of animals should be banned. Yet, despite significant public outrage, actual change is minimal.

The disconnect often lies in political capture and a lack of public knowledge. If people were regularly confronted with factory farming’s harsh realities, I doubt we’d see its endurance.

If consumers had to witness the conditions under which animals were raised, I believe they wouldn’t buy meat if they knew the truth. Transparency, dampened by ag-gag laws banning exposure, plays a crucial role in this ongoing cycle.

It’s additionally reinforced by political capture; politicians often believe no one cares about these issues and prioritize votes on cultural or economic matters instead. Ultimately, they respond to lobbyists, who keep a close eye on these matters.

The change will come when individuals begin to communicate to politicians that they will vote based on animal welfare concerns. Various Democratic senators are just as guilty as Republicans regarding factory farming issues. Plenty of Democratic senators are influenced heavily by the industry, believing they can proceed without scrutiny.

The combination of a lack of transparency and political capture is the trap we’re caught in, but it may also be the pathway to change. Are politicians being directly compensated by large corporations like Tyson or Smithfield? How exactly do these benefits work?

There’s certainly monetary exchange involved. In the U.S., large agribusinesses are some of the biggest campaign contributors. Conversely, small farmers who attempt to implement better practices often lack the financial means to contribute.

This system has evolved into one benefiting only large factory farming corporations. In contrast, small farmers genuinely caring about proper practices struggle. The factory farming lobby has positioned itself as the voice of all farmers, playing into a cultural narrative surrounding the hardworking farmer, instilling fear among politicians.

As an example, the European Union faced protests from farmers, including tractor blockades in Brussels, whenever regulations were proposed. Such demonstrations effectively deterred governments from pursuing agricultural reforms due to fear of backlash.

I remember the late Bob Dole, a Republican Senate majority leader advocating for humane reforms. He managed several landmark pieces of legislation but openly recognized that he wouldn’t challenge farmers.

From my understanding, it’s primarily potent corporations that engage in the worst practices. When farmers unite in protests, it’s more of a representation of small farmers who unintentionally sideline regulations meant to protect animal welfare.

A notable example is the EATS Act. Can you explain what it is?

Louis: The EATS Act is potentially one of the worst steps backward for American farming. As people recognized the inhumane conditions on factory farms, particularly gestation crates, they appealed to state politicians. Unfortunately, local politicians often were reluctant to engage with those concerns due to industry pressure.

Some states enabled ballot measures, allowing advocates to push their proposals directly to voters. This method proved successful, as many red states, like Florida and Arizona, overwhelmingly voted to ban the usage of gestation crates.

However, the industry swiftly countered. After realizing that states could ban cruel practices locally, they initiated multiple lawsuits to overturn these laws. Their strategy involved rallying all industry groups to fight collectively against these regulations, even going so far as getting the Biden administration involved to champion their case before the Supreme Court.

The astonishing aspect of this is that many Democrats who didn’t support this were unaware of what was happening behind the scenes.

Despite losing the case, the pork producers walked over to Congress and demanded federal intervention. Rather than establishing their own standards, the proposed EATS Act essentially aimed to nullify existing state laws without implementing any replacements.

Shockingly, support emerged, surprisingly from both parties, but particularly surprising was the backing from states’ rights advocates who usually don’t align with federal preemption.

Their strategy involved slipping the EATS Act into the Farm Bill, a must-pass piece of legislation containing significant funds for agriculture and food aid. They knew it would be challenging to exclude it from the Farm Bill, just a strategic move to push the EATS Act through.

Watching a hearing with Brooke Rawlins, Trump’s new agriculture appointee, was disheartening. She claimed the EATS Act supported small farmers, which is misleading, because it actively harms them while benefiting factory farm operations. If passed, small farmers would continue to face challenges while factory farms dominate the industry.

It’s a complete moral inversion and a blatant lie.

Interviewer: Are small farmers realizing this?

Louis: Absolutely. Many small pork farmers have actively protested the EATS Act while advocating for a market for their value-added products. They’ve communicated that humane practices provide better profit margins without sinking to the lowest levels of factory farming.

Unfortunately, those in power seem indifferent. Legislators have learned that small farmers lack organization and pose no real threat. In contrast, factory farmers exert loud pressures, threatening conflicts and political challenges if their interests aren’t accommodated.

Additionally, I want to touch on ag-gag laws, which discourage transparency. Initially, in the early 2010s, the argument against these laws hinged on protecting farms from potential competition. They crafted legislation that made it illegal to photograph or record agricultural facilities without permission from owners.

The absurdity is that these laws aimed to stifle transparency while allowing agricultural entities to operate unchecked. Some ag-gag laws have since been overturned, but what has prompted this shift?

Louis: The initial batch of ag-gag laws pushed by the factory farming industry claimed that criticism of their practices could not be tolerated. Some statutes explicitly stated that filming to make them appear bad was illegal, while endorsing filming for a favorable portrayal as acceptable.

Thankfully, the courts recognized these laws as unconstitutional under the First Amendment due to viewpoint discrimination. This has resulted in an ongoing game of cat and mouse; each time courts strike down restrictive ag-gag laws, legislators attempt to introduce new ones.

Currently, Iowa is on its fourth version of ag-gag laws, having twice faced judicial challenges. Each iteration seeks to limit transparency more efficiently, sidestepping overt admissions of intent to stifle factory farming exposure.

Recently, new legislations avoid calling attention to their true purpose, instead framing them as general protective laws, citing privacy concerns or intellectual property rights.

They’ve taken it even further, creating legal agreements for workers who contract with major agricultural companies, stipulating that they won’t film or expose any wrongdoing. Violation of this contract could result in severe financial penalties.

They’ve effectively constructed an environment making it nearly impossible to reveal their misconduct, achieving their aim through legislative maneuvers.

Through our discussion, I hope we’ve adequately conveyed how grave the factory farming situation is. Still, there are solutions. Remarkably, progress is happening, particularly in Europe. Can you discuss methods implemented there to improve welfare standards?

There is a way forward! Many despair over the scale of factory farming, feeling powerless. The reality is significant progress has occurred. This system, despite its seeming strength, is vulnerable due to overwhelmingly unacceptable practices and societal disapproval.

In Europe, we’ve seen numerous reforms aimed at eliminating the worst factory farming practices. The UK has banned gestation crates for pigs, and Germany is in the process of phasing them out, among other nations. The European Union is contemplating similar actions too.

Additionally, practices like chick culling—killing male chicks at birth—are being phased out, with some countries, including France and Germany, implementing bans.

At the corporate level, major companies are responding to consumer and investor pressure for improved animal welfare standards. For instance, McDonald’s has committed to using 100% cage-free eggs in the U.S., Canada, and Europe—another win, as over 7 million hens are transitioning out of cages.

Interviewer: How verifiable are these commitments?

Louis: They’re verifiable. When companies make these claims to investors, they know they must uphold them. They operate within a legal framework where fraud can result in consequences. Labeling their products as “100% cage-free” entails genuine commitments backed by potential legal ramifications, thus increasing transparency.

Interviewer: Does McDonald’s own its chicken farms?

Louis: No. A considerable part of factory farms escaping scrutiny stems from their complex supply chains; they’re not directly selling to consumers but working through integrators, such as Tyson Foods.

In recent years, consumer-facing brands like fast food chains have embraced new standards. What’s interesting is that while producers previously claimed change was impossible, McDonald’s commitment prompted rapid compliance among suppliers.

Historically, the legislative process hasn’t yielded favorable outcomes for farmed animals. Yet, we consistently observe that when corporations demand adherence from their suppliers, compliance occurs almost overnight.

Interviewer: In the context of eggs, how does McDonald’s ensure compliance?

Louis: They collaborate with suppliers like Cargill, ensuring a steady supply of cage-free eggs.

The logistical challenges exist, but not insurmountable. Given the lack of transparency regarding farming practices, how can consumers trust these claims? Fortunately, big companies face substantial liability if discrepancies arise.

People should remain vigilant against ambiguous labels, but those making clear, defined commitments backed by reputable companies increase accountability, fostering a culture of ethical practices.

It’s akin to the growing divestment movement, where people often advocate for withdrawing funds. However, pressing for change within established companies through investments, they can exert powerful shareholder influence.

Could you elaborate a bit more on this idea? Absolutely! I think divestment can be counterproductive in this space; it essentially allows these companies to dismiss concerned investors. A compelling case study is Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor who took it upon himself to act against the cruelty of gestation crates.

Upon learning about these practices about ten years ago, he confronted McDonald’s, reminding them of their commitments to eliminate crates in Europe. He expressed an interest in appointing someone to their board to advocate for animal welfare issues.

Despite their initial bureaucratic resistance, Icahn’s persistence compelled McDonald’s to take action. When they eventually delayed implementing these pledges, he prepared to pressure them again by appointing people to the board. He ultimately succeeded in catalyzing McDonald’s to follow through, paving the way for a crate-free supply chain.

Investors play a significant role in harnessing consumer demands and holding corporations accountable, thereby facilitating meaningful change in ways that individual consumers often cannot.

Interviewer: Are there specific legal pressure campaigns investors can leverage?

Louis: Absolutely. There have been multiple SEC complaints focused on assessing discrepancies between what companies tell investors regarding animal welfare and their actual practices.

For example, companies may conduct materiality analyses reviewing consumer concerns—often finding that animal welfare outweighs even climate issues when considering what is material to consumers. This realization emphasizes risk; if consumers learn how poorly they treat their animals, they may abandon the company.

Actions can be effective when people bring these issues to the SEC, asserting that a company is saying one thing while failing to follow through on public pledges concerning animal welfare.

In such cases where companies make promises and subsequently neglect them, stakeholders have the opportunity to press for updates on these commitments, often compelling firms to act due to public exposure.

Interviewer: In terms of successful campaigns to achieve improved slaughter standards, what lessons can we derive?

Historically, there have been humane slaughter regulations, stemming even from religious practices designed to mitigate suffering when slaughtering animals.

While some of these laws may have initially lacked clarity that has now evolved, we also face the challenge of adhering to humane methods in an industrial context. This requires a more rapid throughput than individual care allows—they need to adapt to the industrial scale effectively.

Public mobilization against prevalent abuses has historically resulted in better regulations. The U.S. Humane Methods of Slaughter Act from the early 1950s emerged from strong public demand for humane treatment during slaughter, though unfortunately, this law generally does not cover chickens, who comprise roughly 90% of slaughtered animals.

The government passed it after rigorous public calls for reforms, highlighting the importance of civic engagement in shaping policy.

Interviewer: What role do government subsidies play in this matter? Clearly, the Farm Bill allocates billions. How much of that is invested in improving animal welfare while ensuring meat quality?

Louis: I’d argue our subsidy system is fundamentally misaligned. Louis: In the U.S., the current subsidy system originated as a response to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl crisis, which left many small family farmers bankrupt. As part of the New Deal, FDR initiated financial support for those farmers. What started as a welfare scheme gradually morphed into a corporate welfare program over time. Today, the average recipient of farm subsidies earns hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, primarily benefitting wealthy corporate farmers.

Interviewer: That sounds troubling. How does this impact factory farming?

Louis: The subsidies mainly focus on supporting the inputs required for factory farming. This means subsidizing the cheap production of corn and soy, which are heavily relied upon in factory farming systems. Additionally, factory farms receive a variety of other subsidies, including heavily subsidized insurance. For example, if there’s an overproduction of chickens, the USDA often buys up the surplus to prevent the industry from experiencing the same market outcomes that other industries would face, like being forced to sell at lower prices. This scenario creates a situation where higher welfare farming solutions are neglected.

Interviewer: So, this system creates an imbalance for smaller, pasture-based farms?

Louis: Absolutely. The subsidies have had the perverse effect of dramatically increasing the price of farmland since ownership is lucrative due to those subsidies. Consequently, pasture-based farming becomes far more expensive. Anyone wanting to start pasture farming now faces higher land prices without the benefit of subsidies for their natural feed, which is grass. This puts them at an immense disadvantage compared to industrial operators.

Interviewer: What do you suggest as a solution for this issue?

Louis: We need to reevaluate the subsidies system altogether. Ideally, we should reduce existing subsidies and redirect the funds toward practices that positively impact society—animal welfare being a significant priority. Some progress is already happening in Europe. The European Union, along with progressive nations like Denmark and the Netherlands, is beginning to adopt subsidies that require farms to improve their animal welfare practices to qualify for funding.

Interviewer: And how much funding exists for these improvements?

Louis: There’s a staggering amount—around $800 billion a year globally in farm subsidies. Just a fraction of that funding could facilitate significant transformations in these industries. Estimates suggest that getting rid of battery cages in the U.S. could cost about $10 billion, while ending gestation crates could be slightly cheaper. The operating costs might increase by only 0% to 5% at the farm level but could lead to minimal price increases at the consumer level. The government could offer subsidies to offset those costs, making this transition feasible.

Interviewer: That’s a compelling argument. But what about concerns people have regarding food costs?

Louis: That’s a critical point. Concerns about food pricing are valid, but I’m suggesting a smarter allocation of current subsidies to alleviate that burden on consumers. Owing to the current allocation, taxpayer money is misappropriated, mostly benefiting corporate cronyism instead of food security.

Interviewer: So, your argument is that better spending of existing subsidies could prevent price increases?

Louis: Precisely. The government can allocate those funds more effectively, working to meet societal needs rather than perpetuating a system that benefits only a select few. Additionally, factory farming has not always led to lowered prices. For instance, while chicken prices have decreased, the price of bacon has risen 18% faster than inflation since factory farming began. This signals that any purported savings might not be passing through to consumers as expected.

Interviewer: That’s fascinating.

Louis: Yes, and the structure of the market plays a significant role here. Many companies control the pork industry, leading to oligopolistic price-setting power. Recent antitrust actions against large chicken companies have revealed that price-fixing has been common, which indicates that if we eliminate such practices, it might open up space for reforms without burdening consumers further.

Interviewer: What about technological advancements? Can they help improve factory farming practices?

Louis: There are promising methods in development. The industry frequently claims that reform means reverting to outdated farming methods, but that’s not necessary. We can engage in high-tech, high-welfare farming practices. For instance, sexing technology can determine the gender of a chick while still in the egg, allowing companies to prevent the unnecessary culling of male chicks.

Interviewer: That sounds like a breakthrough.

Louis: It is! Countries like France and Germany are already adopting this technology, which has proven to be cost-effective. With proper implementation, we could eliminate the practice of killing male chicks globally within a decade. The financial incentives align with reducing waste, making it an attractive alternative for producers.

Interviewer: What are other examples of innovative interventions in animal welfare?

Louis: In the pork industry, a common practice is castration at birth to avoid undesirable taste qualities. However, immunocastration allows for hormone control without the need for physical castration, mostly adopted by the Brazilian pork industry. Even though the U.S. has fallen behind in adopting these methods, such technologies can eliminate cruel practices effectively.

Interviewer: There might be concerns about using hormones in this context.

Louis: Indeed, but there’s no evidence that immunocastration poses health risks. The Brazilian pork industry has been using this method for years with no negative health outcomes reported. Interestingly, marketing concerns often prevent corporations from adopting beneficial technologies like this, which is rooted in consumer perceptions rather than health risks.

Interviewer: What about cultivated meat?

Louis: The potential for alternative proteins, such as cultivated meat, is significant. We need to explore various methods of protein production since global protein demand is on the rise. While reforms should improve animal welfare, we must recognize that to meet that demand sustainably, we also need these alternative protein sources. Some regions, however, are already trying to restrict this innovation due to industry influence, which is counterproductive.

Interviewer: That’s quite a contradiction.

Louis: Absolutely. Countries that ban cultivated meats are actively stifling advancements that could help address future food insecurity. There’s a fear of accepting new solutions simply because they don’t align with traditional views. We must balance innovation while being cautious with health and safety regulations.

Interviewer: It’s a complex situation.

Louis: Yes, and it requires thoughtfulness and open-mindedness to ensure that we explore every viable path forward. Both cultivated meat and improvements to existing farming practices can coexist to meet our future needs. Interviewer: What do you think are the most promising ways to prevent the regulatory capture machine from stopping this potential solution?

Louis: Yeah. Well, as you’ve noted, it’s been quite surprising to witness the political twists people take on this issue. The idea of banning cultivated meat initially came from European socialists who felt it threatened our food traditions and farmers. Essentially, they were resistant to change. Then, somehow, it got picked up by the American right. Now, you have free-market Republicans tying themselves in knots trying to justify why they support banning a product. They’re coming up with bizarre claims like, “The FDA reviews aren’t stringent enough,” as if that’s the main problem.

Interviewer: It does seem inconsistent.

Louis: Exactly. It’s totally crazy. The good news is that we are seeing many principled conservatives and even ranchers pushing back against these laws. For instance, the Institute of Justice, which is a well-known free-market conservative think tank, is currently suing Florida and other states that have imposed these bans. We’re also seeing bills in Wyoming and South Dakota aimed at banning cultivated meat fast-track, which have recently failed, largely due to rancher opposition. Ranchers have come forward to say this is unreasonable because it sets a dangerous precedent for banning any meat.

Interviewer: It seems they’re concerned about the broader implications.

Louis: Exactly. Their argument has always been to protect a free market and let consumers decide. Now, with these bans, they’re turning the table and saying, “Wait a minute, this isn’t fair.” Another tactic industries are trying is imposing heavy labeling regulations, pushing for labels that might defame cultivated meat, saying it’s made from cells and not real meat.

Interviewer: That sounds ironic considering the history of meat labeling.

Louis: It is! The meat industry has been resisting accurate labeling for decades. They claim they can’t specify where every piece of meat in a sausage comes from—whether it’s from Canada, the U.S., or Mexico. It’s quite the double standard. They’ve labeled cultivated meat “frankenfood,” while they can’t even trace the origins of the meat in their own products, like hot dogs, which I’ve heard have been found to contain traces of human DNA!

Interviewer: Oh no! That’s wild.

Louis: Yeah, it really underscores the point that there are different rules for different industries, depending on what’s convenient at the time. They want labeling when it suits them, but they’re against it when it doesn’t.

Interviewer: And you believe there should be maximum transparency across the board?

Louis: Absolutely. All food should have clear labeling. Consumers deserve to know exactly what they’re eating—whether it’s ranch-raised meat, factory-farmed meat, cultivated meat, or plant-based alternatives. In today’s climate, making sense of all this is challenging, especially with so much misinformation out there. But labeling is a crucial first step; it allows people to make informed choices.

Interviewer: Any other potential levers to help push this forward?

Louis: Sure, one of my previous guests, Uma Valeti, CEO of Upside Foods—a cultivated meat company—shared how they’re navigating a sea of regulatory hurdles just to get started. Even trying their chicken, which I found to be indistinguishable from a traditional chicken breast, came with numerous challenges.

Interviewer: Right, and the technology isn’t easy to scale either, is it?

Louis: Exactly. The industry has decades of head start, with their research and development funded by the government for years. I believe there’s a strong case for philanthropy and government support to subsidize the development of alternative proteins. Countries like China, several European nations, the UAE, and Singapore are already investing heavily in this area, particularly because they’re concerned about food security.

Interviewer: That is hopeful.

Louis: Yes! While factory-farmed meat has reached its optimization, cultivated meat will continue to improve. Yes, it may take time and significant funding, but we need to keep pushing this forward. It’s a long game and requires sustained support, likely from government and philanthropic sources.

Interviewer: Some might view this as an all-or-nothing situation with cultivated meat.

Louis: That’s my point! People shouldn’t feel compelled to embrace cultivated meat if they don’t want to. It’s essential to have different options in the market, allowing consumers to make choices based on their preferences. If accurate labeling is in place, people will know what they’re buying, whether it’s from animals, plants, or cells, making it less likely they’ll be stuck with factory-farmed meat.

Interviewer: What advice would you give to viewers inspired to effect change in this area?

Louis: First and foremost, I encourage anyone not fully convinced to do their own research. The more you learn, the clearer the issues become. There’s nothing on our side to hide, but plenty to uncover on the other side. Also, get the word out! This industry thrives in the shadows, so discussions about it, whether on social media or with friends, can help raise awareness.

Interviewer: Spreading the word is crucial.

Louis: Exactly. We also need to make our voices heard by those in power. Let politicians know that this is an important issue for you. Similarly, communicate your values to the corporations you support—like supermarkets or fast-food chains. Also, if you have the means, consider donating to impactful organizations doing groundbreaking work in this space.

Interviewer: Can you name some of those organizations?

Louis: Sure! The Humane League is one group advocating for better standards in the food industry. Another is the Good Food Institute, which is focused on alternative proteins and the pushback against restrictive legal efforts. There are many others as well, like Mercy for Animals and Animal Equality, who are all doing essential work.

Interviewer: Are there lessons we can learn from social movements that have succeeded or failed in raising awareness and instigating change?

Louis: Yes, the abolitionist movement provides valuable insights. The British abolitionist movement is one of the earliest modern social movements, effectively publicizing and organizing around an entrenched practice that was significantly beneficial to the economy. They built pressure incrementally over time. In contrast, the U.S. movement became polarized and less focused on actionable reforms, which ultimately led to the Civil War, not the intended goal.

Interviewer: Interesting points.

Louis: Both movements established that personal purity and consumer choice are less impactful than organized political change. British abolitionists focused on a clear, narrow goal and sought cross-party support, while the U.S. movement took on too many issues. Their success hinged on organizing for structural change rather than individual actions. More recent movements that emphasize corporate and political change have achieved remarkable results.

Interviewer: That’s a good takeaway.

Louis: We need to work toward broader collective change, appealing across the political spectrum without allowing it to become a radical movement that alienates people.

Interviewer: Why do you believe solving factory farming is a win-win?

Louis: Addressing factory farming gives us multiple benefits: it combats antibiotic resistance, improves human health, and leads to cleaner air and water. It’s astonishing that this type of food production persists in the 21st century. I often think we’ll have advanced AI technologies before we abolish practices like gestation crates!

Interviewer: That is an anachronism.

Louis: Exactly! It doesn’t align with modern societal values or moral attitudes anymore. The fact that a vast majority disapproves of it and is becoming more informed gives me hope. As we explore better alternatives, I believe we can end these practices for the sake of our health, environment, and future generations.

Interviewer: Thank you so much for your insights.

Louis: Thank you for having me. I’m passionate about these conversations and appreciate your willingness to discuss such challenging topics.

Interviewer: We appreciate your dedication. Thank you, viewers, for sticking with us through this important episode. Please consider checking the show notes, which will contain additional information and actionable steps we can take. Thank you, and we hope to see you next time! Louis: Thanks for having me on the show, and thank you for everything you’re doing on this issue.

Interviewer: Thank you.