I’m curious who in particular you think it making this strategic error? Is it mostly academics promoting PLF or are there NGOs / thought leaders doing it?
This is an interesting piece, Sam, thanks for writing it.
These are my almost entirely uninformed thoughts: based on a tiny bit of background knowledge of PLF and general observations of the animal movement.
It seems quite likely to me that PLF is coming to animal ag whether we like it or not. If this is the case, the important question isn’t so much “should we promote PLF or do some other campaign?” but rather “how should we respond to PLF?”
At the end of your piece, you say “our role (if any) must be strictly defensive and containment-focused”—I can get behind most of this sentence, apart from the “(if any)”. Surely, for many of the reasons you set out earlier in the article, to not engage with PLF at all would be borderline neglence on the part of our movement: the risks that this transforms the industry and locks in practices are just so high that we can’t afford to ignore this development.
So then the question is what should we do about it? I think I would favour a broader approach than you suggest which places multiple bets.
It seems plausible to me that some organisations should be trying to contain/prevent this new technology. I think such a campaign could bring animal advocates, smaller farmers and the general public together in quite a powerful way that would be able to get decent media/political traction at least in NA and Europe.
However, it still seems like there is a big risk that such a campaign would overall fail. This might be because, for example, the lure of big profits from allowing such practices outweighs any political pushback, or even simply because other countries (e.g. China) do adopt these practices and are then simply able to provide imports much more cheaply, effectively ‘offshoring’ the cruelty by displacing domestic production.
For this reason, I would favour some organisations also taking a much more ‘good cop’ role, working behind the scenes with PLF developers and regulators in a much more cooperative way in addition to campaigns opposing PLF. If PLF does become widespread, there are potentially very large wellbeing gains to be had by influencing the development of the technology at an early stage and maybe even locking in some welfare considerations.
I don’t think it is completely naive to think this is possible: For example:
the food industry doesn’t just compete on price alone, so including welfare could be a product differentiator for PLF creators and/or users;
the combination of some outside public pressure might convince PLF creators to introduce some welfare considerations voluntarily in an effort to head off the risk of more onerous regulations if they were seen as making no welfare concessions.
So, while I’d agree that we should be pretty suspicious about PLF and not welcome it with open arms. I think that we could be making a serious strategic error by either ignoring it (this seems the worst possible option) or providing only implacable opposition across the board.
This is a really great post!! I really appreciated the point industry consolidation point. I also appreciate how you describe advocacy for PLF as a “framing” loss, since it implicitly concedes that we will be factory farming. This framing loss is an issue with a lot of welfarist interventions, and I don’t think means we need to rule such interventions out, but I think it does make these sorts of interventions less attractive for public-facing campaigns. I think people sometimes underestimate the badness of framing loss, and I think this post makes the point really sharply; thanks.
I think there are some narrative reasons why opposing the worst instances of PLF might make attractive campaign targets: the industry is still underdeveloped, automated farming is disturbing to the public, small farmers might be willing to support these campaigns (because of the concentration effects of PLF), and there are existing ties between animal advocates and AI firms (through EA). Some of these arguments are stronger than others of course.
I think PLF is likely to disproportionately increase the efficiency of farming small animals. This is because it allows farmers to deploy individual level monitoring where it was previously infeasible (because the labor costs of monitoring individual animals on e.g. a chicken farm with tens of thousands of animals is too high). This is another reason why the total number of animals farmed is likely to increase as a result of increased PLF adoption.
Another article that people might be interested in is this one, which proposes specific ethical restrictions/guidelines for PLF.
Thanks for writing this up, Sam. “Fixing” factory farms through PLF seems cynical and defeatist, and I wonder if automating factory farms could make it a lot harder to do undercover investigations.
Thank you for mapping the systemic risks of Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) – I really appreciate this post and how you’ve highlighted some worrying trends.
I’m horrified by the idea of PLF. While it could potentially, maybe, help some animals in some ways – at what cost?
I agree with you that by supporting it we would be locking in values that factory farming is ok and strategically entrenching an exploitative system. Efforts to improve conditions absolutely matter – but we need to make sure the ‘how’ doesn’t eclipse the deeper question of ‘should we?’ That tension feels especially urgent with PLF, which risks locking in factory farming more deeply than ever.
The future we need doesn’t come from better surveillance of suffering, but from phasing out the systems that cause it.
I appreciated how you countered the natural question –“Isn’t it plausible that improving conditions for billions of animals is high-impact?” by reframing the discussion from per-animal welfare gains to system-level consequences (Quantifying the Net Impact section).
The idea of using regulation as a tool to create liability and slow down investment is compelling—and perhaps necessary if PLF expansion is politically inevitable. A key question, perhaps, is—what would the world look like in 2040 if PLF succeeds versus if we block or delay it? The challenge is walking a fine line: resisting effectively without becoming part of the machinery we’re trying to dismantle.
I think you are right to conclude that it is a pro-industry tool. That’s why we need to be cautious—not to mistake PLF for progress, when it may in fact be entrenchment in disguise.
Thanks for writing this Sam! This is a topic I’ve been giving some thought to as I read pro-PLF pro-animal-welfare writers like Robert Yaman (The Optimist’s Barn).
There are two assumptions you make that I think are worth interrogating.
Factory farming cannot be ‘fixed’? Some animal advocates believe that one of the possible end games for animal suffering in factory farming is making welfare so good that animals lives are net positive. I’m unsure if I think this is possible even in principle (it depends on one’s philosophy of wellbeing), but I’m open to it, and if it is, then PLF entrenching an optimised form of factory farming isn’t neccessarily a point against it—in fact it’s exactly what pro-PLF pro-animal-welfare want to happen. We can challenge the possibility of positive welfare factory farming, but I don’t think we can assume it away.
Public advocacy for fixing factory farming in the short-term is counterproductive if our goal is abolishing it in the long-term? I’m far from convinced of this. For example, I think there’s a good case to be made that (a) calling for the abolition of factory farming is so outside the overton window and/or so challenging of most people’s need to see themselves as good-people-that-aren’t-participating-in-a-moral-atrocity that it’s not an effective message for advocates today, (b) calling for reform is a lot more palatable to people, (c) people who are bought into the case for reform today will be more likely to be open to case for abolition tomorrow.
I think you make some strong points in this post though, which I plan to put to pro-PLF folks like Robert Yaman to see what they say. Specifically:
(a) The incentives for industry will remain to maximise profit with welfare as an externality which matters only insofar as it impacts profit due to consumer preferences. Therefore assuming that industry will be willing to trade-off any profit gains for welfare gains is naive, and assuming that using AI to maximise profit will improve welfare (let alone lead to net positive lives) is unjustified.
(b) Managing welfare through opaque blackbox-style optimisation technology, which is developed and deployed too fast for regulators to keep up, is not conducive to holding industry accountable
(c) Using AI towards the PLF end-game for suffering on factory farms instead of the alt-protein end-game for suffering on factory farms seems unwise given one has big downside risks (i.e. increasing total suffering and/or entrenching a food production system that creates net negative lives) and the other doesn’t. We’d need to believe that using AI to advance alt-proteins is far harder to prefer the PLF route, and I haven’t seen a good case for this.
I think PLF is too broad for one to conclude that advocating for or against is a mistake. I would say it depends on which particular PLF systems are are advocated for, and what would be the counterfactual. I believe targeted advocacy for tracking welfare indicators beyond the ones needed to minimise costs would be useful.
More fundamentally, extending factory-farming may eventually be beneficial for animals (from their own perspective). I estimated broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns make the lives of chickens almost positive.
Executive summary: Supporting Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) is strategically harmful for animal advocates because it entrenches and expands factory farming, undermines regulatory oversight, and diverts resources and political capital away from transformative alternatives like alternative proteins and abolitionist reforms.
Key points:
PLF creates technological lock-in by making factory farming more efficient and profitable, thereby extending its viability and making it harder to replace with humane alternatives.
Industry consolidation and monopolization are accelerated by PLF’s high costs and technical demands, pushing out smaller farms and concentrating power among large agribusinesses with greater political influence.
Regulatory capture becomes more likely as the complexity and opacity of PLF systems make regulators reliant on industry-generated data and expertise, weakening oversight.
Global factory farming expansion is enabled by PLF, which lowers logistical and economic barriers to scale, especially in regions with weak welfare protections.
PLF diverts critical resources and political capital from more promising interventions like alternative proteins, legislation banning cruel practices, and corporate meat reduction initiatives.
Strategic and narrative harms include legitimizing factory farming, diluting advocacy goals, and reframing public discourse around optimizing rather than ending animal agriculture.
PLF’s direct harms and accountability issues (e.g., AI failures, animal stress, depersonalization of care) further erode welfare while shielding industry from responsibility.
Advocates should only engage defensively, using narrowly framed restrictions to obstruct and delay PLF deployment—not to improve or endorse it.
The post urges a strategic pivot: reject PLF as a false solution and focus instead on abolishing factory farming through alternative proteins, legislative reforms, and cultural change.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
I’m curious who in particular you think it making this strategic error? Is it mostly academics promoting PLF or are there NGOs / thought leaders doing it?
This is an interesting piece, Sam, thanks for writing it.
These are my almost entirely uninformed thoughts: based on a tiny bit of background knowledge of PLF and general observations of the animal movement.
It seems quite likely to me that PLF is coming to animal ag whether we like it or not. If this is the case, the important question isn’t so much “should we promote PLF or do some other campaign?” but rather “how should we respond to PLF?”
At the end of your piece, you say “our role (if any) must be strictly defensive and containment-focused”—I can get behind most of this sentence, apart from the “(if any)”. Surely, for many of the reasons you set out earlier in the article, to not engage with PLF at all would be borderline neglence on the part of our movement: the risks that this transforms the industry and locks in practices are just so high that we can’t afford to ignore this development.
So then the question is what should we do about it? I think I would favour a broader approach than you suggest which places multiple bets.
It seems plausible to me that some organisations should be trying to contain/prevent this new technology. I think such a campaign could bring animal advocates, smaller farmers and the general public together in quite a powerful way that would be able to get decent media/political traction at least in NA and Europe.
However, it still seems like there is a big risk that such a campaign would overall fail. This might be because, for example, the lure of big profits from allowing such practices outweighs any political pushback, or even simply because other countries (e.g. China) do adopt these practices and are then simply able to provide imports much more cheaply, effectively ‘offshoring’ the cruelty by displacing domestic production.
For this reason, I would favour some organisations also taking a much more ‘good cop’ role, working behind the scenes with PLF developers and regulators in a much more cooperative way in addition to campaigns opposing PLF. If PLF does become widespread, there are potentially very large wellbeing gains to be had by influencing the development of the technology at an early stage and maybe even locking in some welfare considerations.
I don’t think it is completely naive to think this is possible: For example:
the food industry doesn’t just compete on price alone, so including welfare could be a product differentiator for PLF creators and/or users;
the combination of some outside public pressure might convince PLF creators to introduce some welfare considerations voluntarily in an effort to head off the risk of more onerous regulations if they were seen as making no welfare concessions.
So, while I’d agree that we should be pretty suspicious about PLF and not welcome it with open arms. I think that we could be making a serious strategic error by either ignoring it (this seems the worst possible option) or providing only implacable opposition across the board.
This is a really great post!! I really appreciated the point industry consolidation point. I also appreciate how you describe advocacy for PLF as a “framing” loss, since it implicitly concedes that we will be factory farming. This framing loss is an issue with a lot of welfarist interventions, and I don’t think means we need to rule such interventions out, but I think it does make these sorts of interventions less attractive for public-facing campaigns. I think people sometimes underestimate the badness of framing loss, and I think this post makes the point really sharply; thanks.
I wrote a similar post arguing that animal advocates should oppose PLF, available here. A few ideas from that piece that I think are complementary to this one:
I think there are some narrative reasons why opposing the worst instances of PLF might make attractive campaign targets: the industry is still underdeveloped, automated farming is disturbing to the public, small farmers might be willing to support these campaigns (because of the concentration effects of PLF), and there are existing ties between animal advocates and AI firms (through EA). Some of these arguments are stronger than others of course.
I think PLF is likely to disproportionately increase the efficiency of farming small animals. This is because it allows farmers to deploy individual level monitoring where it was previously infeasible (because the labor costs of monitoring individual animals on e.g. a chicken farm with tens of thousands of animals is too high). This is another reason why the total number of animals farmed is likely to increase as a result of increased PLF adoption.
Another article that people might be interested in is this one, which proposes specific ethical restrictions/guidelines for PLF.
Thanks for writing this up, Sam. “Fixing” factory farms through PLF seems cynical and defeatist, and I wonder if automating factory farms could make it a lot harder to do undercover investigations.
Thank you for mapping the systemic risks of Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) – I really appreciate this post and how you’ve highlighted some worrying trends.
I’m horrified by the idea of PLF. While it could potentially, maybe, help some animals in some ways – at what cost?
I agree with you that by supporting it we would be locking in values that factory farming is ok and strategically entrenching an exploitative system. Efforts to improve conditions absolutely matter – but we need to make sure the ‘how’ doesn’t eclipse the deeper question of ‘should we?’ That tension feels especially urgent with PLF, which risks locking in factory farming more deeply than ever.
The future we need doesn’t come from better surveillance of suffering, but from phasing out the systems that cause it.
I appreciated how you countered the natural question –“Isn’t it plausible that improving conditions for billions of animals is high-impact?” by reframing the discussion from per-animal welfare gains to system-level consequences (Quantifying the Net Impact section).
The idea of using regulation as a tool to create liability and slow down investment is compelling—and perhaps necessary if PLF expansion is politically inevitable. A key question, perhaps, is—what would the world look like in 2040 if PLF succeeds versus if we block or delay it? The challenge is walking a fine line: resisting effectively without becoming part of the machinery we’re trying to dismantle.
I think you are right to conclude that it is a pro-industry tool. That’s why we need to be cautious—not to mistake PLF for progress, when it may in fact be entrenchment in disguise.
Thanks for writing this Sam! This is a topic I’ve been giving some thought to as I read pro-PLF pro-animal-welfare writers like Robert Yaman (The Optimist’s Barn).
There are two assumptions you make that I think are worth interrogating.
Factory farming cannot be ‘fixed’? Some animal advocates believe that one of the possible end games for animal suffering in factory farming is making welfare so good that animals lives are net positive. I’m unsure if I think this is possible even in principle (it depends on one’s philosophy of wellbeing), but I’m open to it, and if it is, then PLF entrenching an optimised form of factory farming isn’t neccessarily a point against it—in fact it’s exactly what pro-PLF pro-animal-welfare want to happen. We can challenge the possibility of positive welfare factory farming, but I don’t think we can assume it away.
Public advocacy for fixing factory farming in the short-term is counterproductive if our goal is abolishing it in the long-term? I’m far from convinced of this. For example, I think there’s a good case to be made that (a) calling for the abolition of factory farming is so outside the overton window and/or so challenging of most people’s need to see themselves as good-people-that-aren’t-participating-in-a-moral-atrocity that it’s not an effective message for advocates today, (b) calling for reform is a lot more palatable to people, (c) people who are bought into the case for reform today will be more likely to be open to case for abolition tomorrow.
I think you make some strong points in this post though, which I plan to put to pro-PLF folks like Robert Yaman to see what they say. Specifically:
(a) The incentives for industry will remain to maximise profit with welfare as an externality which matters only insofar as it impacts profit due to consumer preferences. Therefore assuming that industry will be willing to trade-off any profit gains for welfare gains is naive, and assuming that using AI to maximise profit will improve welfare (let alone lead to net positive lives) is unjustified.
(b) Managing welfare through opaque blackbox-style optimisation technology, which is developed and deployed too fast for regulators to keep up, is not conducive to holding industry accountable
(c) Using AI towards the PLF end-game for suffering on factory farms instead of the alt-protein end-game for suffering on factory farms seems unwise given one has big downside risks (i.e. increasing total suffering and/or entrenching a food production system that creates net negative lives) and the other doesn’t. We’d need to believe that using AI to advance alt-proteins is far harder to prefer the PLF route, and I haven’t seen a good case for this.
Thanks again!
Great post, Sam! I strongly upvoted it.
I think PLF is too broad for one to conclude that advocating for or against is a mistake. I would say it depends on which particular PLF systems are are advocated for, and what would be the counterfactual. I believe targeted advocacy for tracking welfare indicators beyond the ones needed to minimise costs would be useful.
More fundamentally, extending factory-farming may eventually be beneficial for animals (from their own perspective). I estimated broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns make the lives of chickens almost positive.
Executive summary: Supporting Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) is strategically harmful for animal advocates because it entrenches and expands factory farming, undermines regulatory oversight, and diverts resources and political capital away from transformative alternatives like alternative proteins and abolitionist reforms.
Key points:
PLF creates technological lock-in by making factory farming more efficient and profitable, thereby extending its viability and making it harder to replace with humane alternatives.
Industry consolidation and monopolization are accelerated by PLF’s high costs and technical demands, pushing out smaller farms and concentrating power among large agribusinesses with greater political influence.
Regulatory capture becomes more likely as the complexity and opacity of PLF systems make regulators reliant on industry-generated data and expertise, weakening oversight.
Global factory farming expansion is enabled by PLF, which lowers logistical and economic barriers to scale, especially in regions with weak welfare protections.
PLF diverts critical resources and political capital from more promising interventions like alternative proteins, legislation banning cruel practices, and corporate meat reduction initiatives.
Strategic and narrative harms include legitimizing factory farming, diluting advocacy goals, and reframing public discourse around optimizing rather than ending animal agriculture.
PLF’s direct harms and accountability issues (e.g., AI failures, animal stress, depersonalization of care) further erode welfare while shielding industry from responsibility.
Advocates should only engage defensively, using narrowly framed restrictions to obstruct and delay PLF deployment—not to improve or endorse it.
The post urges a strategic pivot: reject PLF as a false solution and focus instead on abolishing factory farming through alternative proteins, legislative reforms, and cultural change.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.