Contra Grunwald on Industrial Farming
The vibe shift towards realism in future-of-food is good, but don’t forget about the animals
Michael Grunwald's recent New York Times opinion piece argues that industrial agriculture, despite its problems, is necessary for feeding our growing global population. This argument may be uncomfortable to consider for those who’ve spent recent years advocating for alternatives. However, a sobering dose of realism is healthy for this sector, which can be prone to impractical idealism. But Grunwald’s picture is incomplete because he handwaves away one of the most important parts of the conversation: animal welfare. This is a shame given that the arguments he makes for sustainability apply equally well to animal welfare.
In our age of food abundance, it's easy to forget how revolutionary modern agricultural efficiency has been. Just a few generations ago, meat could be scarce, expensive, or unsafe to eat. Today, thanks to industrial farming methods, animal protein is widely accessible, affordable, and safe. We should be grateful that we're wealthy enough as a society to now seriously consider the effects of agriculture on climate change or animal welfare.
It's precisely because of this abundance that we've had the luxury to imagine how industrial agriculture might be different. In the last decade or two, numerous solutions have been proposed and at times hyped up as the silver bullet to agriculture – from plant-based and lab-grown meat alternatives, to carbon farming or regenerative agriculture. But we're entering a new phase of the hype cycle for all of them. Funding is becoming harder to secure due to missed milestones, deflated expectations, and higher interest rates. Across the board, initial excitement is wearing off as we realize that transforming a system as complex as global agriculture is no small feat. And ultimately, we still have to eat.
This reality check is healthy. It pushes us to face difficult truths about what's possible and what's not. Grunwald is right that it’s going to be difficult to escape industrialized farming – it's simply the best way we currently know to feed billions of people while keeping food affordable. Agriculture is a “necessary evil” that will always be messy.
However, we can still work to make it better. To do this, we have to stop assuming 'small-scale' automatically means 'better.' As I've written before, the fundamental challenge of sustainability or welfare in animal agriculture is figuring out how to pay. Scale is one of our most powerful tools to reduce the effective cost of better practices, so we need to lean into it rather than run away from it.
Where Grunwald's analysis falls short is in his treatment of animal welfare. This omission is conspicuous given that consumers consistently rank animal welfare as their top concern when it comes to animal products, often beating out sustainability. He dedicates just one anecdote to the issue, describing a feedlot operator who argues that efficiency and welfare are naturally aligned because "If I don't create the friendliest possible environment for the animals, they might gain 4.1 pounds a day instead of 4.5." This severely oversimplifies a complex issue.
While efficiency and welfare align in some aspects, they are in tension in others. One area of alignment is in animal health - if an animal gets sick and dies, not only is that bad for that animal’s welfare, but the farmer then can't sell that animal for food, and the resources so far invested in that animal go to waste.
Another aspect of alignment is that increasing efficiency often reduces the effective number of animals needed to make the same amount of food. For example, genetic optimization has significantly increased the size of each individual animal when they are slaughtered, reducing the number of animals needed to make the same amount of meat. Similarly, reducing mortality during transport can further decrease the total number of animals needed. Industrialized animal agriculture is generally becoming more efficient over time, which is better for welfare in these respects (although there are some notable areas where efficiency is decreasing, like hatchability in the US broiler industry).
However, there are other areas where efficiency and welfare are at odds. Take stocking density in poultry operations. A farmer can make more money by housing more birds in the same amount of space, even if each individual bird grows slightly slower or has marginally higher mortality. The birds have less space to move and exhibit natural behaviors, and more animals means that less attention can be given to the welfare of each individual. This creates a direct tradeoff between profit and welfare that has to be acknowledged.
Or, consider male chick culling in the egg industry. Specialization in the breeds of birds we use for meat versus eggs has meant that males of the layer breed serve no economic purpose because they can’t lay eggs, and aren’t good enough at gaining weight for meat production. As a result, they’re killed on the first day of life. In other words, increases in efficiency in the poultry sector caused one of the biggest welfare issues in the egg industry.
Both sustainability and welfare share this dual relationship with efficiency. Increases in efficiency are good for sustainability when they allow us to make more food with fewer inputs. But increasing efficiency also has downsides. Consider manure management: on traditional small farms, animal waste was a valuable fertilizer for nearby crops. But industrial scale animal farming concentrates vast numbers of animals in one location, producing far more manure than nearby land can absorb. What was once a beneficial byproduct has become one of animal agriculture's biggest sources of pollution.
Grunwald acknowledges that these tradeoffs exist for sustainability, and argues that we should look for practical, scalable solutions that allow us to “produce more and protect more.” However, his analysis leaves out that the exact same arguments can apply to animal welfare.
Where efficiency naturally aligns with welfare, we should celebrate and accelerate those natural incentives, not demonize industrialization itself. Where they conflict, technology can be a powerful tool to eliminate these tradeoffs entirely. In-ovo sexing is a perfect example on the welfare side. It uses advanced biotechnology to identify the sex of eggs during development so only females hatch. This resolves the issue of male chick culling without compromising the efficiency of industrial egg production. Similar opportunities exist throughout animal agriculture, from precision livestock farming that can monitor individual animal health in large operations, to new animal stunning technologies that can make slaughter more humane at large scales.
There’s an underlying pessimism in Grunwald’s realism - it’s disappointing that we can’t conjure a better agricultural system into existence through sheer excitement and idealism. But there’s also optimism - when we stop chasing impossible ideals of a perfect food system, we can start building a better one. By taking a more pragmatic approach, consistent with the food abundance that industrialization has brought about, we can make real progress. His clear-eyed analysis of sustainability's challenges is valuable, but these insights apply just as powerfully to animal welfare. The future of animal agriculture might not be perfect, but it can be less messy. And that's something worth being optimistic about.