EA - Announcing Innovate Animal Ag (like GFI but for Animal Welfare Tech) by RobertY

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing Innovate Animal Ag (like GFI but for Animal Welfare Tech), published by RobertY on April 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I’m very excited to announce the launch of Innovate Animal Ag, a new nonprofit whose mission is to support agricultural technologies that directly improve animal welfare. Our first focus is on helping introduce in-ovo egg sexing technologies into the US. We’re currently hiring and fundraising!The problemCompanies improve their treatment of animals when the cost of the status quo is higher than the cost of change. Historically, pressure from activists, consumers, and regulators has been effective at increasing the cost of the inhumane practices that are part of the status quo. But significantly less work has been done on the other side of the equation: decreasing the cost of change.Similarly to how The Good Food Institute, New Harvest, and The Material Innovation Initiative support the field of alternative proteins, Innovate Animal Ag supports the field of animal welfare technology. Through education, networking building, and other ecosystem-level interventions, we aim to make it as easy as possible for companies to adopt new technologies that improve animal welfare.The technologies that we focus on will be guided by the EA principles of importance, tractability and neglectedness. Based on these criteria, some classes of technology we could be interested in include humane seafood slaughter machines, humane poultry euthanasia techniques, humane pest control technologies, and in-ovo egg sexing.Initial focus: in-ovo egg sexingMost of our work in the short term will be spent on in-ovo egg sexing technologies, specifically on helping introduce them to the US market. We chose this focus because it addresses an important problem that’s particularly tractable right now: The culling of male chicks in the egg industry. We hope to use this as a test-case for our overall approach.For each of the more than 6 billion egg-laying hens in the world, there was a male chick that was fertilized, incubated, hatched, manually identified by a human, sorted, and then immediately killed. This practice is inhumane, wasteful for the industry, and unpopular with the consumers that know about it.Fortunately, there are a number of solutions being developed by companies and labs around the world. Some are even in the early stages of commercialization in Europe, where governments have started to ban the practice of chick culling. This rollout is going better than many realize: Extrapolating from publicly available partnership announcements, we estimate that current in-ovo sexing companies already supply between 10 and 20% of the entire EU market, with a cost impact of 1–3 euro cents per table egg (similar to, if not lower than cage-free). This leads us to believe that current technology is already ready for the high-end specialty egg market in the US. A small market foothold at the high end is then the first step towards wider adoption. Once companies demonstrate that there is demand for these products, they can more easily invest in lowering costs and scaling.Eventually the goal is to fulfill The United Egg Producers promise to completely eliminate chick culling across the industry.In our conversations with the companies developing this technology, a common refrain is that they’re interested in the US market, but have little direct engagement with the US egg industry. For the most part, companies are focused on Europe because that's where governments are banning chick culling.Jumpstarting the market in the US will be challenging. Producers may not be aware that this technology is ready, and if they are, they may not be confident that consumers will be willing to pay a price premium. We aim to help solve these problems through interventions such as:...