This is a lightly-edited memo I wrote for the 2025 Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum, which were encouraged to be highly opinionated to generate strategy discussion.

It seems strange to me that animal advocates rely on animal ag to come up with the solutions that we want to see. We identify a problem, we look to see what exists in the world, we try to find the best of those things, and then we try to get them implemented.

I would like to see welfare-oriented engineers actively develop the tech that we want to see deployed on farms.

For example, Shrimp Welfare Project is trying to get new stunners developed, which I'm excited about ^[1]. But I think there are a lot of other examples that this would work for. In-Ovo sexing seems like another good example of technology that I'm kind of surprised that the animal movement wasn't more involved in the development of ^[2].

I'm also spending a lot of time nowadays looking into Precision Livestock Farming tech, which seems like a pretty interesting new Wild West of factory farming. 
Rather than just looking at what's being developed, why don't we be the change we want to see in the world and actually design and build the Precision Welfare tech we want to see?

It also seems possible that the money for these developments could come from non-philanthropic sources. 
For example, as part of McDonald’s eight Broiler Welfare Commitments in 2017, they committed to:

Innovative On-Farm Animal Health and Welfare Monitoring Technologies

Partner with technology companies, producers, and suppliers to develop on-farm monitoring systems to automate the gathering of key animal health and welfare indicators, including behavioral measures. Once established, these technologies will highlight potential areas for improvement in real time and will be among the first of their kind available at a commercial scale.

McDonald’s invested nearly $2m (and $2.6m of matching funding) into their (SMART) Broiler Initiative, to automate gathering their health and welfare indicators.

The projects that are continuing to receive funding through this program are:

• OPTICFLOCK (Marian Dawkins) - The system automatically monitors the behaviors of broiler chicken flocks around the clock to deliver real-time information on key welfare indicators such as mortality, walking ability, leg health and infection. The tool uses inexpensive and commercially available closed-circuit television cameras linked to small on-farm computers.
• FlockFocus (Niamh O’Connell) - This camera-based technology can automatically monitor and track activity patterns and the weight of individual birds within large flocks on commercial farms. It can also monitor feeding behavior and the distribution of birds in key areas of the chicken house.

Whatever people think of McDonald’s broiler commitment (and to what extent they are humanewashing) - I think these projects being funded seems pretty positive. And it seems like more projects like this could have been funded if we were ready for them ^[3]. 

To summarise, I think we should be actively trying to develop novel welfare technology that we want to see on the farms rather than expect it to be developed by the industry. And I also think this could be financed non-philanthropically.

I'm aware of some engineers in the EA space who have thought about this, such as Koen van Pelt and Amanda Matthes. 
So if you're interested in developing welfare tech (or getting welfare tech developed!), I think Amanda would be a great person to get in touch with (Koen too, but he's just co-founded Scale Welfare, so may not have the capacity to engage as much).

1. ^{^}

   For those interested, we're working with Amodo Design on this. 

2. ^{^}

   Though I think Innovate Animal Ag has done great work popularising this technology among producers.

3. ^{^}

   EU Horizon's calls for projects also seem promising sources of large counterfactual funding, such as: Towards modern, integrated, and effective fisheries monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) systems