Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
CHRIS: All right.
Good afternoon everybody.
Can you hear me OK?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
CHRIS: Excellent.
All right.
I'm here today to introduce Aaron Gross who founded Farm
Forward in 2006 as an organization entirely devoted
to ending factory farming and creating humane, sustainable,
and just alternatives to it.
He collaborated heavily with Jonathan Safran Foer on Foer's
bestselling "Eating Animals" in 2009.
Foer also spoke at Google, I believe, about
a year or two ago.
So you may remember that talk.
He's currently working with Jonathan and Natalie Portman
and director Christopher Quinn to transform the book into a
feature length documentary.
Gross serves as Farm Forward CEO and is professor of
theology and religious studies at the
University of San Diego.
He recently published "Animals in the Human Imagination," a
companion to "Animal Studies."
And just so you know, there'll be time at the end of the talk
for questions.
So please save your questions for then.
And we appreciate you all coming.
Without further ado, help me welcome Aaron Gross.
AARON GROSS: Well, thanks.
Thanks everybody for coming.
It's really good to be here and really good to talk about
these issues and nice to have a good crowd like this.
So my name is Aaron Gross.
As Chris was telling you, I started this organization
called Farm Forward about five years ago.
And there's two big things that Farm Forward works on.
One is we try to work on the kind of supply-side end of the
problem of factory farming, changing what's available,
working with producers to try to create more humane and
sustainable farms.
And there our work really centers
on the poultry industry.
And I'm gonna in most of this talk center on the poultry
industry for reasons that will become clear.
The other end of our work is consumer focused.
And that's really in some ways what I'm doing right now,
doing educational outreach in a whole variety of ways to get
people more knowledgeable about what this thing is we
call factory farming and how we can respond to it.
Because we really live in a world that's changed radically
in a very short period of time when it comes to food.
I mean, we're getting used to very rapid change.
Certainly in this building you've got to be.
But with farming, there's a lot of important knowledge
that in a previous generation might have been passed on to
us through our parents, through grandparents.
And today, what our parents and grandparents might know
about farming is just irrelevant to what's going on.
It really changes that quickly.
And so I'm gonna try to fill some of those gaps.
I have to say, I had a bit of fun with my title, "Robot
Chickens and Virtual Farms." Probably with such a serious
topic, I shouldn't have so much fun.
But really, each one of the kind of images here-- that is
the image of the robot chicken, the image of the
virtual farm, the image of pink slime--
really does help kind of set up what I want to do.
We do, I think, live in the age of pink slime, that is,
the pink slime controversy.
People familiar with pink slime controversy?
For those who aren't, it looks like kind of pink soft-serve
ice cream, but it's actually a beef product.
And it's kind of seen as pretty
disgusting by consumers.
It's not really the problem I want to focus on, but this was
a big recent controversy.
And ABC showed that this pink slime stuff wasn't just kind
of occasionally used here and there.
But in about 70% of the ground beef in supermarkets there was
this substance pink slime.
And why I think this is kind of an image of the age is it
was there all along for more than a decade and we didn't
know it, even though it was something with us every day.
And that really is the kind of situation we're facing in
trying to understand factory farming.
And we don't have cybernetic chickens yet.
That is true.
But we do have transgenic chickens, chickens that have a
human-created gene snipped from a virus and
inserted into a chicken.
That's already a done deal.
Those same scientists who are in Edinburgh at the Roslin
Institute, where Dolly the sheep was created, are now
working on putting a mouse gene into a chicken.
So the image of a cybernetic chicken isn't actually that
far off from what we're actually doing.
Chickens may not come to mind when we think high tech, but
chickens are pretty high tech today.
And what I mean by the virtual farm is this.
In a certain sense, all of us here are farmers.
We're virtual farmers.
What we decide to eat, the decisions we make, go through
a chain and tell farmers what they're gonna make.
And we really have tremendous influence that way.
Wendell Berry, an interesting person in the broader movement
of kind of reflecting on food, he's kind of the
quintessential farmer intellectual.
He has this famous statement--
or famous within foodie circles-- which is we're all
farmers by proxy.
I think it's a powerful idea that what we choose to eat
ends up dictating what gets farmed.
So, with that as an introduction, I want to have
one little piece to kind of complicate the social justice
issues and so forth associated with food which is that when
we talk about food, we're never talking
about a simple issue.
We're never talking about just the environmental issues that
might be affected by it or just the animal protection
issues that might be connected with it or just the social
justice issues.
We're also talking about something that's really close
to our identity, that we think tells us who we are, how we
choose to eat.
It's a very personal statement.
To drive this home, I want to share with you two small
excerpts from the book, "Eating Animals" by Jonathan
Safran Foer.
That book begins and ends this with a chapter named
"Storytelling." Both the opening and the closing
chapter have the same title.
And I've got a small quote I want to share with
you from each one.
So in the opening section, Jonathan includes a monologue
from his grandmother--
his grandmother who was a Holocaust survivor.
And the clip I have here is Jonathan's grandmother
speaking, and then them in conversation.
And I'll just read this.
So this is grandmother speaking,
"Then it all changed.
During the war, it was hell on earth.
I was always running day and night because the Germans are
always right behind me.
If you stopped, you died.
There was never enough food.
I became sicker and sicker from not eating.
And I'm not just talking about being skin and bones.
I had sores all over my body.
It became difficult to move.
The worst it got was near the end.
A lot of people died right at the end.
And I didn't know if I could make it another day.
A farmer, a Russian, God blessed
him, he saw my condition.
And he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat
for me."
And then Jonathan interjects, "He saved your life."
Grandma, "I didn't eat it."
"You didn't eat it?
"It was pork."
"I wouldn't eat pork."
"Why?"
"What do
you mean why?" "What?
Because it was kosher?"
"Of course."
"But not even to save your life?"
"If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."
Something really ultimate was at stake for Jonathan's
grandmother here.
Something about food cuts to a deeper level.
Now at the end of the book, Jonathan revisits this story.
He ends up kind of sharing a little story that comes out of
the history books about Abraham Lincoln.
"While returning to Washington from Springfield, Abraham
Lincoln forced his entire party to stop to help some
small birds he saw in distress.
When chided by the others, he responded quite plainly, 'I
could not have slept tonight if I had left those poor
creatures on the ground and not restored them to their
mother.'
He did not make a case for the moral value of the birds.
Instead, he observed quite simply that once those
suffering birds came into his view, a moral
burden had been assumed.
He could not be himself if he walked away.
Whether I sit at the global table with my family or with
my conscience, to accept the factory farm feels inhuman.
To accept the factory farm would make me less myself,
less my grandmother's grandson,
less my son's father.
This is what my grandmother meant when she said, 'If
nothing matters, there's nothing to save.'"
This is a complicating factor with food we don't have with a
lot of other social justice causes, and something I want
to have us keep in mind.
Now food matters so much.
I Imagine if you're here, it's already because you have some
sense that food is important.
But I think the scale of it always needs to be emphasized.
So I've got five points I want to begin with here just to
give you a sense of how important this issue is, just
how much we shape our world in the choices we eat.
The number one cause of global warming, the number one
contributor of global warming related gases, is animal
agriculture.
This has now been well documented in two studies, one
initiated by the UN, another initiated by the Pew
Commission.
Those are not lightweight bodies when they do research.
So if we care about global warming, we got to care a lot
about animal agriculture, about the way in which we
raise and eat animals, because that is the biggest cause.
Not [INAUDIBLE]
something obviously good or bad but just gives you a sense
of the magnitude, a third of the surface area of the
planet, excluding kind of frozen tundra and that sort of
area, a third of the planet on which human beings can walk is
occupied either by animals grazing or by the farms that
have to feed those animals that are grazing, a third of
the surface area of the planet occupied by this single
activity-- not producing food, but just
producing animal food.
We can also talk about this-- and we do less of this, for
whatever reason, publicly--
but we could talk about this problem not just in relation
to land animals but in relation to sea animals.
The industry that produces seafood has undergone the same
kind of radical transformation that we've seen in animal
agriculture.
Really, a lot of actual military technology's applied
to fishing-- to catch fish in areas they weren't able to do
before, at depths human beings were never able to
reach, and so forth.
And we now actually have a situation where we're hauling
so much biomass out of the ocean-- so much biomass out of
the oceans--
we can actually measure a decline in the overall
vibrance and health of ocean ecosystems.
Now think about what I'm saying here.
We're not talking about like a particular gulf near a human
area where a particular route which salmon follow.
I'm talking about the whole of the oceans,
all of it as a whole.
There's a statistic called marine tropic index, MTI.
It took about 20 years to develop.
But it's a way scientists have that allow them to actually
get a snapshot of the global ocean.
And they can actually watch a process of kind of reducing
food webs by eliminating certain kind
of top level predators.
And so we end up with basically a lot of jellyfish
or a lot of algae instead of a diverse range of species, and
less of them.
So we're actually emptying the oceans.
In other words, if we were just to stay where we are
right now and continue, the end of that curve would be a
completely kind of empty ocean.
Really an amazing thing to think about.
It used to be we thought there's no way we can have an
impact on the oceans, but indeed we can.
And farming is also related to global inequity.
I'm not gonna focus on this right here.
But I have one statistic worth pondering.
By 2050, the world's livestock will consume as much food as
four billion people.
You can do the kind of math and think about how this will
work in terms of conflicted resources around water or land
or even food itself, how that's gonna become an
increasing issue.
We have a situation right now where the poor compete with
wealthy people's livestock grains.
And that is only gonna become a more serious situation as we
move into the future.
And finally, the source of what we call super bugs or
super pathogens-- these things you hear about referred to as
bird flu and swine flu and so forth with scientists really
worried about it becoming a serious pandemic--
this is primarily driven by the kind of animal
agriculture we have.
I mean very simply--
I'll flesh this out a little bit later-- but very simply,
we've got about 50 billion chickens being raised for meat
on the planet.
These are chickens which are kept in circumstances such
that their health is compromised.
And they're constantly being fed drugs because that's the
way the system works to make them productive.
So we've got 50 billion sick animals being fed antibiotics.
That creates a perfect situation for viruses to
emerge that are gonna be able to survive this, or new
bacteria to emerge that aren't gonna be able to respond to
antibiotics.
So we've got this perfect recipe for
creating new pathogens.
And this is really worrying scientists quite a bit.
To give you a sense why, just the other month I had the
interesting privilege of go to the Roslin
Institute in Edinburgh.
This is where Dolly the sheep was created--
mentioned it a second ago because of
the transgenic chicken--
and I was speaking with one of the virologists there.
And this is somebody not interested in farm or food
issues, but he's working on transgenic chickens.
He developed the transgenic chickens because he's so
worried about what could happen with H5N1.
That's the bird flu virus that folks are most worried about.
Viruses all have these H's and N's to classify them.
So when we say H5N1, we're talking about a particular
kind of lineage, a particular lineage of a virus.
And that lineage--
this is why it worries folks.
Because when human beings have gotten that virus, about 60%
of them die.
That's a very high death rate.
To give you a sense of how high that is, in 1918 we had
the biggest natural disaster in human history.
20 to 50 million people, they estimate, died.
The US was bulldozing mass graves.
It's really an amazing thing.
We don't hear too much about it.
But that pandemic, they estimate, had
a 2% fatality rate.
So we're dealing with something that currently has--
if that virus doesn't decrease in its virulence--
is a 60% death rate.
Now what that virus hasn't yet done is mutate in a form which
allows it to be easily transmitted.
So it's very deadly, but we don't worry about it because
at the moment it can't be easily transmitted.
But birds and pigs and humans, we all share receptors that
allow us to be susceptible to viruses.
And so when birds can get sick by something or pigs can get
sick by something, it's a relatively small step for
humans to get sick by something.
So we pay careful attention to this.
And the scientists are looking at-- and they're saying we've
got this virus what appears to about to be adapting to a form
where it can spread quickly in the human population, and it
would be the most deadly virus we've ever seen.
And we know that the situation of the factory farm helps
create these viruses.
So we're dealing with a very important topic, one that will
shape us in profound ways going into the future.
Now what I want to do here in the center of the talk is tell
you a short history of factory farming.
How did we get to where we are today with this industry I
keep telling you is so radically different than other
kind of farming industries we had before?
Well, my story's gonna start in the 1920s in Delmarva.
Delmarva is Delaware, Maryland,
Virginia kind of area.
And this is where the poultry industry has really grown up.
And in somewhere around 1926, there was an Oceanview
housewife, a woman named Celia Steele.
And like many housewives at the time, she had a small
flock of chickens.
Actually at this time in the US history, we had an
estimated 26 million poultry farms, 26
million poultry farms.
But each one only had 20, 30, 40 birds.
And this was the way America produced its poultry and its
eggs, by lots of very small-scale producers.
So Celia Steele was one of them.
And she placed an order for chicks, for baby chicks.
And there was--
this is a legend--
a mistake.
She ordered 50 chicks, that which she could deal with, but
you've got 500.
So she had all these extra birds that she
wasn't able to sell.
And so she experimented with actually trying to keep the
birds alive indoors during the winter when they wouldn't
survive outdoors and actually keep them healthy and fat
enough that they would be sellable at the end.
Now had she tried this at any other point in history, she
would have failed.
We know it wouldn't have worked.
But at that particular moment, we had some new knowledge.
We knew a little bit more about how nutrition worked.
So she knew to add vitamin A and vitamin D to the animals
feed that made them a bit healthier.
And very quickly, she had access to drugs that could
deal with the diseases that were cropping up by keeping
the animals inside.
So what she was able to do is kind of figure out a way to
put birds inside, which caused a lot of health problems, but
then counteract those health problems by manipulating the
feed and ultimately by putting drugs into the feed.
And she was very successful.
So at a time when the average poultry farm is 20 some birds,
her farm very quickly had 10,000.
And in that area, that county today, there's still 250
million chickens produced.
In terms of county specific, that's the largest county for
producing broiler chickens.
So the rest of the country is looking around at this
incredibly productive farm and say, this is great.
This is the way of the future.
We're gonna put birds indoors.
And it's gonna be more efficient.
We can do it in all seasons.
And it started to grow.
Now as it started to grow, the industry became interested in
intensifying this process and creating kind of a loop that
made it go faster and faster.
So after this basic idea of putting birds inside and then
giving them specialized feed had been developed, they went
after the genetics.
That's really what drives the poultry
industry is the genetics.
Once you have a certain set of genetics in place, you have to
raise the animal in a certain set of circumstances that fit
the animal's genetic makeup.
So they wanted to breed a chicken that would be really
profitable in this kind of circumstance.
Unlike previous generations which had to deal with
chickens being able to survive in diverse kinds of weather
because they were outdoors, this new generation of
chickens could be bred with the notion that they could
control their environment and various other kinds of things.
And so they were able to come up with a new chicken.
The government actually held a chicken of tomorrow contest in
the 1940s that helped lead to this.
And it was amazing, in some ways, what they
were able to do.
They've now taken the chicken and they've created a bird
that can grow three times as fast--
three times as fast.
That is, it'll reach market weight in 35 to 40 days
instead of something more like 120 days like it would have
been in the 1920s.
And not only will it reach market weight in a third the
time, while it's growing it will eat a third less feed.
This is kind of like a five-year-old that looks like
they're 15 but has only ever eaten breakfast.
Now from the point of view of efficiency, this
looks really great.
But you can imagine there's gonna be some cost to an
animal if you push its immune system that hard.
And indeed, there is.
These are very sick animals.
These are really in some ways mutant animals.
They all share, for example, what we call colloquially an
obese gene.
They have a particular genetic marker.
We actually have the gene coded.
We know what it is.
And that seems to be the kind of key factor in creating this
rapid growth.
But it also means that the birds flesh--
the birds meat, its fat, and so forth--
grow faster than its bones are capable of growing.
So you've got a situation where the animal is constantly
breaking its bones or unable to walk.
Pretty serious problem.
It means that for about the last third of their lives--
even though these birds are only a month and a half old--
about the last third of their lives, it's painful for them
to move, just to walk.
And so as a result, they don't walk very much.
But it turns out the not walking very much is
profitable because they don't burn as many calories and they
build more fat.
So we created a situation where we have to use drugs,
where we have to use confinement because this
genetics won't work.
We put these birds out on pasture, we just deal with
very, very high mortality rates.
So a lot of our free-range farms are dealing with like
30%, 40%, 50% mortality rates because they're using these
factory genetics and just responding to this market
demand to put birds outside.
But if we don't change the birds genetics and we just put
them outside, it's just a lot of suffering.
Now you and I may be looking at this situation saying, this
sounds awful.
Like why would you want to do farming in this way?
But the industry looked at the situation and
said, this is great.
And as the ag industry looked at this, said this is the way
farming should be.
Look at the way this system works.
The genetics of these birds end up being controlled by a
few corporations.
That's actually a story worth pausing on a bit.
Let me explain how that happened.
It used to be that farmers who had chickens could just breed
chickens together and get more chickens, right?
Wouldn't you have thought that was still the case?
You could just breed your chickens together and get more
chickens, just like somebody can breed their golden
retrievers together and get more golden retrievers?
Doesn't work that way anymore with chickens.
Because in the process of creating that new chicken, in
the process of moving from the chicken that we've had with us
throughout history to the chicken we now have with us
today, they changed the breeding
techniques rather radically.
This is why I would say the chicken is essentially a
genetically engineered bird even though it doesn't fit
that definition as commonly defined.
So, here's what happened.
Normally what you could do is take chickens from two
different lines.
Let's say this line is especially fast growing and
this line is especially good at laying eggs.
And if I've breed those two birds together-- a mother from
here, a father from here--
I'd get what they call hybrid vigor.
That is, the first generation of birds born from a cross
show some increased productivity.
But here is the problem.
The birds that came from that cross-- if I was the farmer
and I bred those together--
those gains wouldn't be sustained over time.
So I could cross birds once, get a little boon, but then it
wouldn't be sustainable.
You couldn't have this kind of hybrid thing be a permanent
situation in the old way of doing things.
But what the companies figured out is they could actually
find ways to make all birds hybrids
by doing the following.
So it used to be I had my small flock of birds.
But now if you want to breed birds, you have to have at
least around two million birds because what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna preserve parent line, grandparent and
grandparent lines.
And each line I have is gonna take about 100,000 birds.
And then I'm gonna breed them together in a
kind of cocktail fashion.
And then it's only the end resulting bird, the result of
somewhere between 10 and 20 crosses, that I'm gonna sell
to the consumer.
And that bird is just completely useless as far as
breeding is concerned.
It'll have a really big breast, have a lot of fat on
it, or it will lay a lot of eggs depending on
what I want to do.
But if I try to breed the offspring together, just
completely unviable.
So this was fantastic from the point of view of corporations.
As long as they could control these big farms, control the
genetics, they could own everything.
So vertical integration started moving.
They had reduced the cost, and in general that increases
market share.
And so the other industries started following suit.
I'm not gonna go through anywhere near the kind of
detail I just did with poultry.
But it's basically the same story.
First the pork industry jumps on board and starts to ask
what it can do, then the dairy industry.
The beef industry is last.
The beef industry is still, to a large extent, removed from
the factory system in the early part of beef cow's life.
In the latter half, it ends up being in a pretty kind of
factory setting.
But poultry became the model.
It drove the whole thing.
And I think that's important to know because if we want to
change it, poultry is kind of the hardest nut to crack.
It's the biggest problem that we have out there.
So one of the things that happened in the course of this
breeding is we ended up with two
different types of chicken.
We ended up with what's called layers--
birds that are specialized in laying eggs but absolutely
useless for meat production--
and another set called broilers.
This was a new thing.
It used to be birds were always dual production.
You'd get certain number of eggs.
If you were a meat farmer, that would be side income.
Now it's completely specialized.
At the egg end, we've made the bird produce twice as many
eggs as it produced pre-1950 and with similar consequences.
The stress on the system weakens the immune system and
creates this kind of cycle where you then need to control
the animals environment and feed it drugs in order to make
it productive.
So I want to show you a few things we're doing kind of in
response to this situation, cause we've kind of all grown
up with this situation, not being quite aware that it was
unique for chicken to be as cheap as it is today.
We actually eat more than 100 times per capita as much
chicken as we did in the 1920s.
100 times.
It's really hard to believe this, but I've looked at the
primary sources and the data.
It's really true.
It's only in the '90s that chicken became the most
consumed food.
So we've got this exciting thing going on.
How many people here are familiar with the
book "Eating Animals"?
I imagine some of you that brought you here.
So "Eating Animals" was a book very important to my
organization, by Jonathan Safran Foer.
It really kind of captures the ethos of what I'd like to see
kind of happen, and certainly the ethos of what we're doing
here at Farm Forward.
And it's really exciting to report to you it's now being
made into a documentary.
And an amazing lineup of folks are behind this.
Jonathan is the author.
Natalie Portman ended up being the kind of key person who
really pushed this into the realm of being
a documentary film.
And as it turns out-- this is kind of hot
off the presses news--
but Biz Stone and Evan Williams have agreed to
finance the film.
So they're putting about $1.25 million into
making this film happen.
So over the next two years, this
film is gonna be produced.
Filming has just started.
It's gonna be about a year of filming, a year of editing.
And I want to show you some of the scouting that we've done
to give you a sense, kind of fill in with some images some
of the things I've talked about.
So what you're seeing right here is actually an egg
factory farm.
This is what an egg farm looks like in the contemporary day.
This is Christopher Quinn, the director I mentioned, doing
the shooting.
What he's standing in front of here is chicken ***.
This is just a vast lagoon of chicken waste.
It's kind of pretty here with the farm
reflecting in the cesspool.
It's pretty disturbing.
But this is what rural landscape begins to look like
with factory farming.
You'll notice you don't see any animals.
They're there.
You just aren't gonna see them.
This last shot is an empty egg factory farm.
I don't include any shots, in case you're wondering, of
animals actually suffering on factory farms.
I think it's really important to see, but sometimes it's a
little bit overwhelming.
So I do encourage folks to look at that.
But being inside that empty egg factory farm was an
interesting experience.
Those cages you saw end up being split into cages about
this long in which--
it's basically the size of folded newspaper in which five
to six birds would be raised.
That particular one was abandoned because the factory
farmer who owned it went on hard economic times and just
stopped feeding his animals.
So it was seized by the state, which had to then kill the
animals that were remaining in there.
And it ended up being a good place to do some filming.
So that's the problem we're fighting.
But there is some good grounds for being hopeful.
So this gentleman here is Frank Reese.
And he's in some ways the last like traditional poultry
farmer we have in the country.
This is Christopher filming Frank working with his birds
when they're first hatched coming out of the hatcheries.
This is still a kind a high tech
operation in certain ways.
This part of the operation looks the same, that is the
birth of the birds.
But after the birds are born, it's night and day.
These are his turkeys out in the field.
And these birds roam around all day.
They fly.
They spend time in trees.
They basically do the kinds of things you thought birds would
do, as opposed to industrial turkeys which aren't even
capable of *** reproduction.
This bird right here, it's actually a wild turkey.
I'm not kidding.
This wild turkey joined the flock of Frank's turkeys.
It's a good life.
They have a good life.
I personally wish they didn't have to be killed at the end,
but at least they have a really good life.
Here are some of the chickens.
Now these birds are so unusual that you're seeing because
these are pre-industrial genetics.
This is one of the things we're working on
that really very few--
in some sense, no other really big players are working on--
is actually trying to get these traditional genetics
back in the market, to recognize that that road we
went down when we introduced that fat gene and intensified
the bird's growth rate so that it would grow three times as
fast, that forced us into a situation where we need to use
drugs, where we need to use confinement because otherwise
we deal with such rapid death rates.
We need to reverse that situation.
It's very hard.
We're kind of locked in as far as the big industry is
concerned in using these fast-growing birds.
What we're trying to do at Farm Forward is work with
folks like Frank to try to create an alternative model, a
model that can be profitable, that can deliver a product
people feel really good about, and that can eventually
challenge the industry.
Because what we see right now is there's just not a model in
the poultry industry.
In the pork industry, in the beef industry, I can point you
to small producers which are doing truly extraordinary
things entirely outside of the factory system.
But if you have in your mind a poultry producer you know,
maybe a poultry producer whom you buy eggs or meat from at
the farmer's market or that kind of thing, probably that
farmer is in the end getting their chicks from the same
factory hatcheries with the same factory genetics that
other folks are.
We don't have alternatives in the poultry industry the way
we have another industries.
So working with Frank is a way to create that.
And our aim is to create a model.
Frank, bless his heart, is willing to share all his
economic data and what it takes him to be successful.
And we're working on, basically, producing a model
that can be repeated and that can be duplicated.
So one of the other things we're doing, I
mentioned, is education.
And here's where technology starts to end up entering in
an interesting kind of way.
So one of the things we've done is try to bring Johnson
Safran Foer into classrooms.
We found that if you have a kind of live interaction, you
get a lot more ***, a lot more emotional impact.
But how do you do that on a large scale?
How do you reach young people on a large scale?
So we're getting very excited about using video conference
technology to provide at very low-cost--
we spend a few thousand dollars and we can provide a
live kind of experience for students in high schools and
small classrooms that otherwise couldn't interact
with Jonathan an opportunity to interact with him live.
So I'm just gonna play here a minute or so of Jonathan just
from October 3--
so this is just earlier this month--
Jonathan speaking to about 3000 students.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-I am at the New York Video Conference Center which is in
midtown Manhattan, just a couple
blocks from Times Square.
And I came here this morning from my house in Brooklyn.
There are many things I could have done with my day to day.
I have two little kids.
I could have played with them.
I could have worked on my writing--
novel.
But I really wanted to be here.
I'm very happy to be here.
I wanted to be here because I believe strongly in the issues
we're gonna talk about.
I believe very, very strongly in this form of communication.
Something that's direct.
Something that's conversational.
I prefer it, actually, to writing books.
What I would prefer even more would be to join you in the
classrooms, have a genuinely personal conversation, a
real-time conversation.
That's the best--
obviously, won't be able to do.
And finally, I'm happy to be here because I like talking to
younger people.
Students--
grade school, high school, and college--
are more able and more open to change than older people are.
That's been very well demonstrated.
So when thinking about factory farming as a problem and when
thinking about the solution to the problem, which will not be
huge amounts of money, will not be going to war with
another country, will not be electing new governments,
it'll not even be finding news values, but simply changing as
individuals, changing our daily habits, I, of course, am
most excited to talk to people most able to change.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
AARON GROSS: So we had tremendous feedback.
As you can see this is low tech.
This is him off the cuff.
That conversational style really worked.
We just got incredible feedback from teachers.
It's something we're gonna do again next year.
Now another thing we're doing-- and this is really
more of a serious use of technology--
is we're looking for a tool that's gonna allow consumers
to make smarter choices around poultry.
And what we've come up with is the idea of a program we're
calling buyingpoultry.com.
And the idea is not to promote the buying of poultry but to
educate consumers so they can make choices about what
poultry they want to buy, if they want to buy it.
Simple kind of idea here is to have a mobile app that looks
something like this.
We're working with a wonderful firm, BLT and Associates,
which is a Hollywood marketing firm.
They really help us kind of impact in a way we can't as a
small organization.
So this is kind of a partnership between us and a
much bigger gun.
And the idea is that you'll have something very simple.
You open it up.
It's gonna geo-locate.
You'll know where you are, tell you what's available in
that area in terms of poultry.
But it's gonna have some kind of system that's gonna help
you understand what's going on.
So it's gonna help you learn about sustainable poultry.
It's gonna have easy to access information.
It's gonna tell you what certifications actually mean.
It's gonna provide some real commentary, not just technical
information, give you a sense what are the kind of labels
and buzz words which probably don't mean anything in terms
of your own values and which ones really do.
It'll have things like national top 10 lists, worst
10 lists, ways that will help create competition among
businesses to do this.
It'll also allow a consumer to immediately be in the
supermarket.
There isn't the chicken they want to buy.
There isn't that faux chicken they want to buy.
They can with one click send an email.
It will know what building they're in and
be able to do it.
And we've worked out the kind of back end of this.
We're in the process of doing the fundraising for it.
We've got a Kickstarter campaign that's gonna be
kicked off.
And of course, the web version will just simply be a little
bit more robust.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Hi, I'm Jonathan Safran Foer coming to you
from my home in Brooklyn.
And I wanted to talk to a bit about buyingpoultry.com.
People ask me all the time what they should be eating.
And, I always return their question with a question,
which is what do you care about?
The food choices that we make have very serious
repercussions in the world, not just for the animal we're
eating or not eating, but for an entire food system.
The farm industry is famously secretive.
It can be very complicated to buy food because we are
bombarded with different kinds of labels,
different stamps of approval.
So what can you do?
Sign up on this page that can connect good
farmers with consumers.
You will know where to buy food that is cage-free,
free-range, natural, organic.
And perhaps more importantly, you'll know what those terms
actually mean.
It's a project that's in development.
But in the meantime, you can offer your input, you can
receive updates, and when it ultimately goes live be among
the first to have it.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
AARON GROSS: So these are some of the ways we're trying to
think about to reach consumers in new ways,
to change the culture.
And that's in some ways the most important work.
But as I mentioned, we're also working on the production end.
And I just want to share one thing we have just recently
been able to accomplish there.
What we found out is there's a bit of a problem with getting
investment in these kinds of high-welfare operations, but
not because there isn't demand.
That is, pretty much everybody who's looking at investing in
something like a higher welfare poultry operation
knows there's a whole bunch of people out there who will pay
quite a bit more to have a product that's produced
according to their values.
You might be sitting here thinking, I'd pay another
dollar a pound for chicken if it met my values.
And you may be some of those people.
That market is there.
But here's the thing.
There's this kind of scary situation where even if
somebody produces a product that really does fit your
values, they don't have a vehicle for
protecting its integrity.
They don't have a way of communicating to the consumer,
hey, we're different.
It's too easy for another corporation to come up right
now and kind of steal the language and appear to be like
that other company.
That's where buyingpoultry became very important.
We realized unless there was a tool that allowed consumers to
discriminate, you couldn't get investment in these new
operations to make these kinds of
high-welfare products available.
Now in the interim while we're kind of in this place where we
don't have good certifications, we don't have
good labels, where it's easy to confuse the consumer, we
still need to be building that alternative infrastructure.
We don't really want to waste any time.
Especially true because what happens in the US, even if
it's on a really small scale in poultry farming, if we
change just a few poultry farms, get a few things
happening differently, that can have a massive impact
globally because of what's going on in India and China
who have not, like us, factorized their whole
production process.
There's still a lot of stuff there that can be transformed.
So I'm very excited about changes here even if they're
at a relatively small scale.
And so we created a loan program that's
directly for farmers.
And the money comes from animal protection groups.
This is pretty unprecedented to have animal protection
groups actually supporting people who are involved in the
killing of animals.
And that's a bit of an uncomfortable relationship.
And some people think that's just a bad idea all told.
But what it's enabled is--
or what it is enabling is the truly high-welfare producers
to get a slight edge that allows them
to get off the ground.
We are talking about a loan program.
They have to pay it back.
And that shows that this is a real economic model.
This is part of what I was saying in terms of
demonstrating a model's viability, if you can't
demonstrate it, if you can't get a loan to begin with.
So we've solved that problem by bringing in some nonprofit
interests to put together in this case $150,000 to fund a
barn for Frank Reese, the farmer I showed you before who
actually has wild turkeys joining his flock.
What you see in the background there looks from a distance
not all that different from a factory farm barn like those
ones you saw next to the cesspool.
But on the inside, it looks completely different.
It just has a bunch of roosts.
And it's really where the birds will go in the evening.
Birds are natural roosters.
They like to go in and be protected in the evening.
But during the day, the barn doors open and the birds are
out on the field.
But this barn has a lot of high-tech features that would
otherwise been very hard for Frank to invest in.
We've got automated feed for water and--
automated feeders and automated water and fans and
various devices that help control the
temperature in the building.
So basically taking advantage of high-tech solutions that
help and that create better welfare, but not going that
route of using those genetics that force us into using
confinement and drugs and all of this kind of thing.
And we'll see.
We're right in the midst of this experience.
This barn just opened a month ago.
If the model is successful, if it can pay the loan back as
I'm very certain it's going to, we'll then have another
tool in our shed.
We can really bring that data out to the public.
And in the meantime, of course, there's people forging
relationships between consumers and
these special producers.
And that's an exciting thing in and of itself.
Now I added this little piece at the end.
I'm calling this kind of part two 'cause
it's kind of an add-on.
What I've given you so far is kind of my usual stick.
But I'm sitting here.
I'm coming to Google.
I couldn't help think like what if--
this is my little personal fantasy, not something I think
is gonna actually be a strategy-- but I'm like if
Google decided it wanted to fight factory farming, what
would it do?
And I actually think if Google wanted to, it's a company in a
perfect position to end factory farming.
And I think we can do it in three steps.
And it begins with asking a simple question.
If we have technology that can make, say, every road in the
country visible, why not consider using similar kind of
technology to make every farm visible.
I realize a little bit more of a technical accomplishment,
but we're in the realm of kind of thought experiments here.
You see, the thing is the factory farm industry depends
entirely in its business model in a very
serious way on secrecy.
It depends on that.
It's very, very serious about protecting that.
You may have heard something about what we call ag-gag
legislation.
That is special legislation which makes it illegal to do--
makes it more illegal to do things that are basic
investigative techniques that have allowed various
investigators to uncover things that happen on factory
farms and bring it to public view.
That's really the main channel right now of bringing
information to folks like us about what goes
on in factory farms.
And so threatening is this information to companies,
they've actually gotten together and supported
legislation that does things like make it illegal to take
photographs of animals on a farm.
You may be thinking, don't I have free speech rights that
protect that?
And you do.
But the time in which they passed the law and the years
in which it's going through the court system and so forth,
will all be years where investigations don't take
place because the investigators are scared of
the kind of draconian possible consequences that are there.
So they're introducing a bunch of things which probably won't
pass constitutional muster but which you should be very
worried about nonetheless because the industry is
expanding this strategy.
They were in a few states last year, about 15 states in this
coming legislative session.
They're gonna be introducing this kind of legislation.
Point being, this industry is so concerned about secrecy
that it will publicly support anti-free speech legislation.
It's incredibly unpopular.
You can imagine.
Folks do not like an industry trying to pass legislation
that hides it.
But it's worth their while because so dangerous is
transparency to this industry.
So what if Google offered to put cameras on every farm?
It's actually happening in slaughterhouse auditing.
They're doing remote auditing through cameras.
It's probably what will be the way in which slaughterhouses
are audited in the future.
So this is not a complete science fiction scenario, if
it is to somewhat.
I think if you pretty much do it, it's gonna go like this.
If there was push in that direction, some kind of push
towards providing that technology, activist groups
can put plenty of pressure on farms in various ways to go
transparent, including by passing ballot initiatives.
We have a movement that's organized enough to pass
legislation at the state level.
So you could imagine them pushing for transparency.
There's a vehicle for it.
They can't complain that it's costing them money.
I think very much what would happen as soon as those video
cameras got installed, the very simple economic cycle
would start where people would see this farm, they'd see that
farm, and they'd make their choice very clearly.
And I genuinely believe that would be enough
to end factory farming.
I don't know if it's gonna happen that way, but it could.
And that is what I wanted to share with you guys.
I'm hoping we can have a bit of a conversation here.
Thanks so much.
[APPLAUSE]
BRIAN: Hey.
Thank you for the talk.
I saw Jonathan's talk here.
I subsequently read his book.
Loved it.
Think what you're doing about raising
awareness is fantastic.
And as a person who's been vegetarian basically 25 years
or vegan my whole adult life, I mean I generally support
anything that's going to better the
condition of animals.
But I look at it, I guess, a little bit skeptically.
And I say that just in a friendly way because--
AARON GROSS: Please.
AUDIENCE: --I'm definitely sympathetic.
But let's say factory farming ends tomorrow.
Let's say the industry adopts all of your standards, or
Frank Reese's standards, tomorrow, right.
So you already said at the beginning of the presentation
a third of the land on earth is devoted to raising animals.
So if they adopt this, then that means more land needs to
go towards eating animals.
Why don't you just tell people to be vegetarian or vegan and
help them make those choices because if you--
and I'm not advocating factory farming, but you can't scale
what you're doing.
AARON GROSS: Yeah, so let me--
BRIAN: People have to eat less meat.
I mean it's just a simple equation.
So I--
AARON GROSS: You're actually correct.
So the question is why not just promote like
no meat, less meat.
And tell me your name.
BRIAN: Brian.
AARON GROSS: Brian is absolutely correct that
there's no way around eating less meat as a population.
And one way to accomplish that is a lot more
vegetarians and vegans.
There's really no scenario, whether factory farming stays
with us or not.
So that's absolutely correct.
And I do encourage people to be vegetarian.
I would encourage people to go vegan.
There's very few ways you can have as much impact on animals
and the environment than simply just by removing them
from your diet entirely because it's extremely hard to
find the really good producers.
So that is something I would advocate.
But what we see is that meat eating is very entrenched.
It's probably not gonna go anywhere, no matter how much
the vegetarian movement grows.
And it is growing, and I think it will continue to.
And so what I focused on today really was about how to make a
future in which meat is still there but has to be a smaller
part of the plate, possible.
BRIAN: Fair enough.
And I think that makes sense.
I mean I would pose sort of a counter argument which is that
I see round other than San Francisco, and a lot of my
friends they hear, oh, you're vegan, you're vegetarian.
Oh, I buy my eggs here.
I'm really careful and stuff like that.
And then we're out late night in the Mission at a taqueria,
and they're having beef tacos.
And guess what?
Like that taqueria in the Mission isn't buying
free-range beef.
And so what I've seen is that it becomes almost more of an
excuse for people to kind of go on with their existing
habits of eating meat because they're lured into this sense
of, oh yeah, I'm making a conscious choice and I've
thought about it or whatever.
But they're really kind of not.
And in a sense, the people who are the most
receptive to change--
like people like us, people who are affluent, people who
are well educated, people who are open minded and willing to
make the change--
are kind of siphoned off when they have options like this.
AARON GROSS: So this is, yeah--
you're presenting a very serious argument that we
thought a lot about.
And what I would say is I'm sympathetic
to what you're saying.
I'm making a bet on a different strategy.
My observation is that vegetarianism and lower meat
or higher ethical meat diets rise and fall together.
So I see a lot of evidence that if we get people eating
higher welfare meat that we'll also encourage vegetarianism,
rather than the competitive scenario.
And I think we actually need to do some research.
This is really what I came to.
Because what I want to say is I think there are large
elements of the so-called kind of ethical or humane meat
movement which are actually really hostile to vegetarian.
They don't say that explicitly.
But there's this notion that's really kind of a meat advocacy
and then do it right on the back end.
And I think that's a really serious thing to avoid.
We think it's really important to say as we work towards
higher welfare animal farms that there is another viable
option and that many people really need to be adopting it
if we're gonna be successful, which is
vegetarianism or veganism.
So I don't take that as a small part of the solution.
I think it's a big part.
But my bet is that we can work for these high-welfare farms
and advance that at the same time.
But I think the real answer is we need to do some studies
because this is a really serious question.
And we need to find out when we promote this kind of thing,
does it make vegetarians go back to eating higher welfare
meat or does it in fact promote higher welfare,
high-ethical eating in general.
BRIAN: Cool.
Thanks for the answer.
AARON GROSS: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: I talked a lot of farmers who do like the whole
small farm thing.
And they have problems with the USDA.
I was wondering if you're addressing that discrimination
between the factory farms and the smaller farmers?
AARON GROSS: Yeah.
Absolutely.
So the question is about addressing the way in which
the USDA is often a kind of problem for small farmers.
So the USDA is structured in such a way that it really
supports factory farming.
They don't really know what to do with small
farmers like Frank.
So the USDA comes to Frank's farm.
They're like, where are your waste lagoons, like the big
cesspool you saw there?
And he's like, I don't have any waste lagoons.
Like, but you're a chicken operation.
And they literally don't know what to do.
They don't even have like a check box for how to
investigate a farm like that.
And that wasn't a problem per se.
But of course in other cases, they really do create all
sorts of problems.
It is something we're working on.
We've mostly found that what these small farmers need is
kind of business or consulting services.
They know how to farm.
They know how to produce a product.
But they don't know how to deal
with government paperwork.
They don't know how to put together a business plan.
They don't know how to think in those ways.
And so those are the services we've really been providing,
not just to Frank but to
Kansas-area farmers in general.
And as we develop this model and as we have more resources,
the idea is precisely to make those services available.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for the talk and for your time.
What are the major factors that keep high-welfare farms
from being cost competitive with the factory farms?
You mentioned that there was more losses in terms of
animals dying if they're outside?
And is it more labor intensive?
And can automation drive that cost down?
AARON GROSS: Yeah.
So the question is what are the main factors that make
high-welfare farming more expensive than
lower welfare farming?
Just to first clarify what I said before, if we stick with
the factory chicken genetics and we put those birds
outside, it creates that problem.
Of course, if we take traditional birds and we raise
them outside, they're phenomenally healthy and have
robust immune system.
There's two issues.
There's one of scale.
What Frank is doing right now is expensive in part just
because he's so small.
If we can scale that up by demonstrating the
effectiveness of this model, the costs will
go down to an extent.
The other factor is externalities.
You currently have a factory farm industry which can cause
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pollution,
create all sorts of injury issues for their workers and
not pay them.
So you've got all of these externalized costs that aren't
externalized in the high-welfare farm.
They are polluting something.
They're cleaning it up and so forth.
They're different kind of players.
So if we can clean up the externalities, which is a
legal issue, that would deal with the largest
kind of chunk of it.
And it's hard to calculate exactly how much those things
cost for the reasons you can imagine.
It's a complicated equation.
But it will be more expensive.
Meat is artificially cheap right now.
We pay less for food of any kind then at any point in
human history in terms of percentage of our income.
It's incredibly small.
We think food's gotten a little bit more expensive
recently, but it's still historically
at an all-time low.
And so part of the solution here is to get us a little bit
more comfortable spending a larger percentage of our
income, whether we're wealthy or poor, but a larger
percentage of our income on food and probably less higher
quality meat.
AUDIENCE: Hi there.
I used to work for a large environmental organization.
And I was always amazed that animal agriculture really
didn't make the list of things we talked about.
We talked about a lot of other things.
But as the number one cause of climate change, I felt like we
were burying our heads in the sand when we
didn't address it directly.
And, I guess it's not a really targeted question, but I would
guess that if we could get the environmental community more
behind alternatives to current animal agriculture that we'd
see faster progress potentially.
Do you have thoughts on why we haven't seen the
environmental movement--
is it just that vegetarianism or eating meat is so personal
that it's something they're scared to touch?
I'd just love to hear your thoughts on that.
AARON GROSS: Yeah.
Thank you.
No, it's a great question.
So the question is why haven't environmental groups been more
active fighting factory farming and talking about
these diet issues, and yeah, a question of longstanding
interest to me.
It is one of the reasons I started the talk with talking
about identity and the way in which it's bound up because I
think that's a huge part of it.
There's something--
with many environmental groups, there's history of
connection with hunting and preservation around that which
has become part of their ethos.
But whether it's an environmental group or any
other kind of group, for the most part, Americans work
within a frame in which you have to eat meat.
That's not a decision that's going to be negotiated or
considered.
It's kind of an unwritten law.
The way you can kind of do this as a thought experiment
is could someone become president if they were a
vegetarian?
There's no law against a presidential candidate being
vegetarian.
But honestly, what do you think would happen if we had a
vegetarian?
They'd be killed, no pun intended here.
It's just completely unacceptable.
And it's only really the animal movement which has
gotten over that cultural barrier and is willing to say
to people, you know what, maybe you shouldn't eat them
at all or you should eat less.
It's happening in the environmental movement now.
A few years ago, Sierra, Club became the first to kind of
have a big campaign against factory farms.
And it does help a lot.
And the Waterkeepers Alliance won some incredible lawsuits
against pig factory farms.
It cost them $12 million in lawsuits.
Unfortunately the CEO of Smithfield at the time took a
$12 million bonus.
So it shows you how much that is a big fine.
But the environmental groups are having an impact.
And we are seeing progress there.
But that's a cultural battle.
And I think one of the most important things we can do is
really just to get people comfortable talking about meat
as something optional, as something which may be if it
doesn't meet our values, we shouldn't be eating it.
And if we do want to eat it, maybe we need
to change the system.
And that's a tough one and very important one.
Good question.
Good question to end on.
CHRIS: Great.
Please join me in thanking Aaron one more time for
joining us at Google today.