Imagining the Chicken Farm of the Future, Part 1: On-Farm Everything

What could we build if economics were no issue?

Some believe that artificial intelligence will dramatically increase economic growth in the near future. Once AI becomes advanced enough to perform most or all tasks currently done by humans, including running companies and scientific research, some experts believe we could have annual GDP growth reaching 30%. If this is even close to true, things will get very weird very quickly. This level of growth would mean we double societal wealth every three years, and each generation will be 1,000 times richer than their parents. The only possible analogy we have at our disposal is the transition from pre-industrial to post-industrial society, where we saw growth rates reach 13%, but only briefly and in specific regions.

No matter how much this growth changes society, humans will (probably?) stay the same. We’ll still want to raise animals for food. But we’ll also be able to afford vastly more accommodations for things like animal welfare.

One of the challenges of this newsletters’ project of applying a techno-optimist lens to animal agriculture is that it can be hard to envision the type of future we’re building towards. For sustainability, we can imagine a world where solar panels, wind turbines, and nuclear power plants provide limitless clean energy, and the electrification of every sector allows us to turn this energy into limitless productivity. That world isn’t unimaginably different from our own. What is the equivalent vision for animal farming?

The short answer is that I don’t exactly know. But I think we can and should take a stab at starting to envision it.

This is the first part of a multi-part series that tries to imagine how animal husbandry might work in a world where there are vastly more resources to throw at every problem. The ideas I discuss in this series are not meant to be prescriptive, just a first stab. Ideally, volumes of research would be devoted to this question, as has been done to map out the clean energy transition.

The practical implications of this exercise are necessarily limited. In a world of truly transformational AI, there’s no way to know what kind of scientific advancements will be made, meaning that whatever I say here will necessarily be too conservative and unambitious. And in the short term economics will continue to be a limiting factor on achieving this strange and exciting future.

However, I hope this exercise can help justify that it is, in theory, possible to build an agricultural system that can meet global protein demand while also being in line with our values. It can also serve as a roadmap to help us understand what kind of capabilities we need to start building.

We'll first turn attention towards chickens that we use for meat (called broilers), and in particular what a supply chain might look like that's optimized for welfare. Today's chicken supply chain is fragmented into multiple specialized facilities, a structure shaped largely by historical economic incentives. In a world of greater wealth, these incentives will be less important, allowing us to imagine a system where chickens live their entire lives in one location, to the benefit of their welfare.

Why chickens move around

A broiler chicken will generally visit three facilities over the course of its life, each with distinct requirements around equipment, facility infrastructure, and staff expertise.

First, it begins as an embryo in an egg that's incubated and hatched at a hatchery. These facilities run large incubators which maintain precisely controlled conditions for egg development. They also use specialized equipment for vaccination, sorting, and sexing of newly hatched chicks.

Then, the chick is transported to a farm where it will spend 4-6 weeks rapidly gaining weight. Farms need ample floor space since broilers are generally raised on the ground. They also need feeding, watering, and climate control systems. Farmers themselves must be skilled in husbandry and supported by veterinary expertise.

Finally, the mature bird is transported to a slaughter facility where it's killed and processed into marketable meat. This specialized facility contains industrial-scale machinery for stunning and killing birds, along with production lines where carcasses are hung on shackles to be bled, cleaned, cut, and packaged.

Historically, these three steps fragmented as the poultry industry industrialized. Early on, smaller independent companies specialized in a particular stage because each required unique equipment, facility infrastructure, and expertise. Over time, the industry vertically integrated, with large companies now controlling multiple steps in the supply chain, but the specialized facility model remained.

A key reason why these steps are separated is their different economies of scale. Hatcheries and slaughter plants use heavy machinery to process huge volumes, which they can do because eggs and carcasses are relatively easy to work with—they’re inanimate and uniformly shaped, making them amenable to automation. Farms, on the other hand, are limited in their throughput because they need substantial floor space to rear live birds, and there’s a limit to the extent they can speed up the chicken’s biological process of gaining weight. As a result, relatively few hatcheries supply many farms, which then supply relatively few slaughter plants. This fragmentation allows hatcheries and slaughter plants to maximize their efficiency through scale without being constrained by farming's inherent scaling limitations

While the structure of the current supply chain therefore makes economic sense, every move between facilities involves inherent welfare challenges. Each transition involves some degree of handling, which is always stressful for birds. Additionally, transport trucks generally lack infrastructure like food, water, and climate control, so transportation increases the risk of mortality and disease. In a supply chain optimized for welfare rather than economics, transportation would ideally be completely eliminated. Fortunately, with some existing technologies and a few new capabilities, this could be possible in the future.

On-farm hatching and slaughter

To eliminate transportation, a single facility must be able to accommodate hatching, rearing, and slaughter. In parts of Europe, and now in some US operations like Perdue, part of this is already beginning to happen with on-farm hatching. Instead of hatching chicks in a central hatchery, eggs are delivered to the farm shortly before they hatch, then laid out on or near the ground. The chicks then hatch in the same environment where they’ll live, avoiding the noisy, dusty, and stressful conditions associated with the hatchery and transporting vehicle. Additionally, chicks have immediate access to food and water, which is better for gut health and welfare. Improved gut health and lower stress levels, combined with a reduced exposure to pathogens, means that significantly fewer antibiotics are needed for on-farm hatched chicks. This is a proven practice that is already becoming more common around the globe.

But what about on-farm slaughter? If it were possible, chickens could remain in one place for their whole life. The chicken meat industry has already started to explore mobile slaughter units, which show promise for both economic and welfare benefits. But in a future with far greater resources, we could take a more ambitious step: merging farm and slaughter operations into a single, fully integrated facility. This would be more complex and require some technological advancement, but the purpose of this thought exercise is to imagine what's possible if we aren’t bound by such practicalities.

When it comes to animal welfare during slaughter, the gold standard is using inert gasses like nitrogen or argon. If done right, these methods can be as close to undetectable by the chickens as possible, especially if no handling is involved. Currently, controlled atmosphere stunning (CAS) is commonly considered to be the most humane way to slaughter chickens at scale. With this method, chickens are put in an airtight container where inert gas is gradually added until the animals are unconscious. Then, carcasses are manually moved from the CAS container to the shackle line.

While CAS is a big welfare improvement over other methods, birds still need to be caught, put into crates, transported to the slaughter plant, and then loaded into the CAS machine. This process inherently causes stress, welfare issues, and mortality.

Don’t take this too literally

But what if the room where the chickens lived was itself a controlled atmospheric stunning chamber, and the slaughter plant was on the same site as the farm? One could imagine a setup where chicks lived their entire lives in one room gaining weight after being on-farm hatched. Then, when it was time for slaughter, the nitrogen valves turn on, and within a few minutes the chickens are unconscious, and their carcasses are shackled and moved to the slaughter facility for further processing.

One of the engineering challenges of this setup would be minimizing the time in between gassing and processing. Generally, birds need to be bled out as quickly as possible after gassing renders them unconscious. If they aren’t bled out, one of two things might happen: birds that merely passed out and were not killed from the gas might wake up, or for the birds that were killed, blood might coagulate in their vessels, decreasing meat quality.

The engineering challenge is therefore getting all of the birds that are unconscious scattered throughout a barn room onto a shackle line as quickly as possible. How exactly this could work I’m not sure, but hopefully the AIs of the future will have some ideas. Possibly, shackle lines would be directly accessible from the barn room and lead directly to the slaughter area, so that chickens could be quickly moved (probably with robots rather than humans) from the ground onto onto the shackles. One could imagine a facility design where rooms are laid out in a cube or grid, with a shackle line snaking through the design touching each room and eventually terminating at the slaughter plant.

Another engineering challenge would be sizing the farm and slaughter parts of the facility, and managing the flow between the two parts. The farming part would need to be significantly scaled up relative to the slaughter plant in order to produce enough birds to fill its capacity. However, if too many birds need to be slaughtered all at once, then there is a risk of overloading the slaughter throughput.

One way to solve this is to segregate chickens into flock sizes based on the processing capacity of the slaughtering operations. Each flock would then live separately in an airtight room within a larger facility. As a toy example, imagine a slaughter facility with a daily capacity of 100,000 head and a production cycle of 45 days. Birds could be divided into groups of 100,000, where each group is one day older than the last. This means that 4,500,000 birds would need to live on the farm at any given time (on the larger size of industrial farms today, but not unheard of). Each of these groups could then be further subdivided into multiple airtight rooms in order to time gassing with multiple slaughter shifts over the course of a single day.

With onsite slaughter using gas, birds could even be slaughtered while asleep, which is a level of humane slaughter that’s not currently possible given that handling will always wake birds up. Each room could be run on an artificial lighting schedule to allow for precise control over the birds’ sleep schedule.

The life of a chicken might then look like this: the chick hatches directly in a clean, calm environment; spends a few weeks roaming, eating, and socializing; then one day it goes to sleep and doesn’t wake up.

There’s obviously a lot more details to work out here, particularly regarding what the chickens’ lives are like inside these rooms. If each chicken lives a healthy life, free of significant pain, discomfort, or stress, and where they have the freedom to express natural behaviors, then I think we’ll have made a lot of progress towards the promise of humane husbandry at scale.

I think technology can help do this, which will be the topic of the next post of the series. After that, there are countless other contexts and animals to consider. For example, what happens to the parents of these chickens, called broiler breeders, which are raised in different types of environments with their own unique set of challenges? How about egg laying hens, fish (of which there are many types), pigs, cows, ducks, and turkeys?

There’s a lot left to go, so stay tuned.

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