Why Promoting Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) is a Strategic Mistake for Animal Advocates
Animal advocacy aims to systematically reduce suffering and ultimately transform our relationship with other sentient beings. Some advocates have proposed Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) (the application of AI, automation, and monitoring systems to animal agriculture) as a potential pathway to improved welfare. This post presents a systems-level analysis of why supporting PLF, despite apparent short-term benefits, is counterproductive to long-term movement goals.
The Optimization Trap: How PLF Entrenches Factory Farming
When evaluating interventions, we must consider not just immediate welfare impacts but system-level effects across time. PLF represents a classic case of “technological lock-in” with three key reinforcing mechanisms:
1. Economic Reinforcement Through Efficiency Gains
PLF fundamentally alters the cost structure of animal agriculture by:
Reducing mortality rates (a direct economic benefit to producers)
Lowering labor costs through automation (enabling further scaling)
Optimizing feed conversion ratios (improving profitability)
Minimizing resource waste (extending viability in resource-constrained environments)
These economic benefits don’t just marginally improve factory farming, they fundamentally extend its viable lifespan in a competitive market. Each efficiency gain makes the system more resistant to replacement by alternatives.
Historical precedent confirms this pattern:
Antibiotics enabled higher stocking densities by preventing disease spread in crowded conditions
Genetic selection optimized growth rates at the expense of animal welfare
Automated feeding systems reduced labor costs while enabling larger operations
Rather than transitioning away from animal agriculture, each technological “improvement” has historically led to more animals being farmed, not fewer. If a system becomes more efficient, it becomes harder to replace.
2. Accelerated Industry Consolidation and Monopolization
The introduction of AI-driven PLF systems demands significant upfront investment in advanced technology infrastructure:
Automated monitoring systems
Robotic feeding and milking machines
Complex data processing infrastructure
Specialized technical expertise
The enormous costs associated with these technologies mean that only the largest agribusinesses will be able to afford to implement PLF at scale. This creates:
Accelerated industry consolidation as smaller operations cannot compete
Increased barriers to entry for new market participants
Concentration of political influence among fewer, larger actors
Large and consolidated proprietary datasets giving PLF on larger farms an economic advantage
Small and medium-sized farmers, who cannot compete with the efficiency and cost-cutting potential of AI-powered factory farms, will be pushed out of the market entirely. This accelerates the monopolization of the industry, with a handful of multinational agribusiness giants gaining even more control over the global food system.
This centralization of power will increase corporate lobbying strength, allowing the industry to resist regulatory scrutiny and push back against bans on inhumane farming practices. With vast financial resources, these companies will fund research institutions, public policy initiatives, and even government-backed AI development programs, all under the guise of promoting “sustainable agriculture.”
In essence, PLF serves as a mechanism for eliminating competition, ensuring that industrial-scale factory farming remains the dominant global model for food production.
3. Regulatory Capture Through Technical Complexity
PLF systems deepen the asymmetry of information between industry and regulators, creating structural advantages for agribusiness:
Regulatory agencies often lack the technical capacity and specialized knowledge needed to independently evaluate complex AI-driven systems.
As a result, data produced and curated by the industry becomes the dominant (if not sole) basis for policy deliberation and oversight.
Over time, regulatory decisions increasingly mirror industry narratives, metrics, and priorities.
This dynamic leads to a subtle but systemic form of regulatory capture. Because PLF technologies operate as opaque, proprietary “black boxes,” regulators are effectively forced to defer to industry experts when interpreting how these systems work and what their impacts are.
This dependence undermines oversight and embeds industry influence at the heart of policymaking.
Global Expansion, Not Reduction
Rather than curbing the harms of industrial animal agriculture, PLF is poised to supercharge the global expansion of factory farming. Far from dismantling these systems, PLF enables them to scale more rapidly and efficiently than ever before. Alarming trends are already emerging:
AI-powered, multi-story pig high-rises in China now maximize output per square foot, pushing animals into ever more intensive environments.
Fully automated battery cage systems monitor millions of hens with sensors and cameras—while leaving their extreme confinement untouched.
AI-controlled insect factories are producing black soldier flies to replace soy and grain in animal feed, making animal farming even more scalable and profitable.
This is not a path toward less suffering or more sustainable food systems. Instead, PLF lowers the cost and logistical barriers to factory farming, making it easier to expand into new regions, including areas with limited infrastructure or weaker animal welfare protections. The result is a dangerous deepening of the industrial animal agriculture model, disguised as innovation.
Expected Utility Analysis: Weighing Counterfactuals
To properly evaluate PLF as a strategy, we must compare expected outcomes against plausible counterfactuals:
Counterfactual 1: Redirecting Resources to Alternative Proteins
Resources directed toward PLF could instead accelerate alternative protein development:
Technical talent developing AI monitoring systems could be working on cultivated meat bioreactors
Capital investments in PLF infrastructure could fund plant protein innovation
Computing resources used for PLF could optimize fermentation processes for alternative proteins
R&D budgets could develop more consumer-acceptable meat alternatives
The opportunity cost of PLF investment represents a significant loss of potential progress toward animal-free food systems.
Counterfactual 2: Legislative and Corporate Campaigns
Political capital spent advocating for PLF-based welfare standards could instead:
Secure bans on the most extreme confinement practices
Establish legal recognition of animal sentience
Implement institutional meat reduction policies
Pressure corporate supply chains toward plant-based alternatives
Every dollar, hour, and ounce of political capital spent on PLF is a wasted opportunity to advance these more transformative solutions.
The Dangerous Difference: PLF vs. Traditional Welfare Reforms
Unlike traditional welfare reforms, which have often been pushed as stepping stones toward abolition, PLF operates within a fundamentally different framework that makes it a unique and more dangerous threat to animal advocacy efforts:
Massive Gap Between Academic Intentions and Industry Implementation: Many academic studies propose PLF as a way to enhance welfare, but once adopted by the industry, these technologies are almost always deployed to maximize efficiency and profit rather than genuinely improve conditions.
AI’s Rapid Scaling and Evolution Capabilities: Unlike static welfare policies, AI-driven PLF can constantly optimize itself toward industry goals, which means that even if initial implementations appear welfare-friendly, the system will quickly evolve to prioritize productivity over animal well-being.
AI as a Competitive Advantage for Alternative Proteins: The use of AI in plant-based and cultivated meat production is a crucial tool to outcompete animal agriculture. By allowing AI to be co-opted by the industry, we are strengthening factory farming’s ability to adapt, survive, and scale, thereby reducing the disruptive potential of alternative proteins.
PLF Turns Factory Farming Into a Self-Optimizing System: Once AI-powered PLF is embedded in factory farms, it will no longer require human decision-makers to push for higher efficiency, it will autonomously seek ways to maximize output and reduce costs, often at the expense of animal welfare.
Direct Harms and Reduced Accountability
The implementation of PLF directly harms animals while simultaneously making it harder to hold anyone accountable for that suffering:
Direct Harms:
Technical Failures: AI-driven systems can malfunction, leading to neglected animals in distress or even mass casualties in automated facilities.
Hardware Stress and Injuries: Wearable sensors, implants, and tracking devices can cause discomfort, injuries, and stress responses in animals.
Inaccurate AI Decisions: PLF relies on predictive algorithms that often fail in real-world conditions, leading to misdiagnosed illnesses or ignored distress signals.
Reduced Human Care: As farmers become reliant on AI, personal attention to animals declines, leading to missed welfare concerns and emotional detachment.
Overcrowding and Confinement: PLF technologies that reduce disease risks might sound good on the surface, but in reality the primary reason farmers are interested in reducing disease is to intensify stocking densities.
Accountability Issues:
Technological Obfuscation: AI-driven automation creates layers of complexity that make it nearly impossible to determine responsibility when animals suffer.
Deflection to “Technical Issues”: Companies can blame “technological shortcomings” rather than taking responsibility for systemic failures.
Regulatory Gaps: Current animal welfare laws weren’t written with AI oversight in mind, making enforcement increasingly difficult.
Plausible Deniability: Without clear human decision-makers, companies can avoid accountability while continuing harmful practices.
Depersonalization: The shift to AI oversight makes systemic reform nearly impossible as there are fewer human actors to hold legally responsible.
Game Theory Analysis: Strategic Implications
From a game theory perspective, supporting PLF creates several strategic disadvantages:
Signaling Problem: Advocacy for PLF implicitly signals that factory farming can be made acceptable with technological modifications, undermining the moral case against the system itself.
Strategy Dilution: Limited movement resources become distributed across contradictory goals (improving vs. replacing animal agriculture).
Legitimization Effect: Industry can use advocate-supported PLF initiatives to claim broader social license while continuing harmful core practices.
Narrative Capture: The PLF narrative shifts public discourse from “should we factory farm?” to “how should we factory farm?”, a fundamental framing loss.
Each of these effects significantly undermines long-term advocacy leverage and moral clarity. Advocacy that aligns with PLF inherently accepts the wrong premise: that our goal should be to “improve” factory farming rather than dismantle it.
Quantifying the Net Impact
To estimate the net impact of PLF, we must consider:
Direct welfare effects: Potential modest improvement is plausible, but severe negative effects are more likely in an industry setting
Scale effects: Likely increases in total animals farmed due to efficiency gains
Temporal effects: Extended viability of the factory farming model
Opportunity costs: Diverted resources from transformative alternatives
Strategic position effects: Weakened narrative and political leverage
A conservative analysis suggests that even assuming optimistic welfare improvements per animal, the scale effects and extended industry timeline alone would result in net negative impact. When including opportunity costs and strategic disadvantages, along with the potential for direct welfare effects to be extremely negative, the case against PLF becomes even stronger.
Tactical Engagement: Restricting PLF Without Reinforcing It
If advocates engage with the political or regulatory dimensions of PLF at all, that engagement must be tightly constrained, strategically clear, and deliberately framed as resistance, not reform. The goal should never be to “improve” PLF or help design welfare-conscious deployments. Instead, our role (if any) must be strictly defensive and containment-focused: to restrict the worst-case scenarios, to mandate basic oversight, and to slow the rollout of the most abusive, autonomous, or opaque systems.
For instance, policies that ban fully automated factory farms with no on-site human oversight, prohibit invasive wearable tech that causes injuries or stress, or require public access to animal welfare data streams, may all serve to raise costs, increase scrutiny, and disrupt industry timelines. If designed and framed correctly, these kinds of constraints don’t help PLF scale, they make it harder to implement. They can shift PLF from a tool of seamless efficiency to one of liability, regulation, and friction. In some cases, well-targeted restrictions may even discourage investment altogether, especially when the expected returns are predicated on unrestricted technological deployment.
But even this is a narrow and risky path. Advocates must not signal that PLF is acceptable if done “right.” That kind of framing only bolsters the industry’s legitimacy, reinforcing the narrative that factory farming is here to stay and that the best we can do is manage its excesses. Instead, restrictions must be positioned as a warning sign, evidence that these technologies are dangerous, unaccountable, and fundamentally incompatible with ethical oversight. They should be pursued not because we believe factory farming can be fixed, but because we are trying to buy time, expose its failures and minimize its harms while working toward its replacement.
When harms are extreme, avoidable, and politically ripe for challenge, a tightly scoped campaign to obstruct the worst abuses may serve both a harm-reduction function and a longer-term strategic purpose.
Conclusion
Animal advocates must make a fundamental choice: do we want to reform factory farming so it operates more efficiently, or do we want to end it entirely? PLF is not a neutral technology, it is a pro-industry tool that will be used to sustain and expand factory farming under the guise of progress.
Rather than lending credibility to PLF, animal advocates should focus on strategies that make factory farming obsolete, whether through:
Accelerating the development and adoption of alternative proteins
Securing legislative and corporate commitments that reduce animal farming
Building the moral and social case against animal farming
Maintaining strategic clarity about long-term movement goals
If we are serious about creating a world free from factory farming, we must reject solutions that optimize it and instead fight for those that eliminate it altogether.
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?
I’ve intentionally chosen not to name individuals or organizations here, not because I haven’t seen support for PLF (I’ve seen it from across the movement: academics, NGOs, individual advocates, funders), but because I think the conversation is more productive when it stays focused on ideas rather than people.
Within the animal advocacy movement, I have a lot of respect for those exploring or supporting PLF and I believe that in most cases, their motivations come from a sincere desire to reduce suffering and make tangible progress for animals.
By keeping the focus on strategy and system-level impacts, I’m hoping to avoid unnecessary division and instead invite reflection on how different interventions interact, align, or conflict with broader movement goals. I think we do our best work when we interrogate ideas rigorously, assume good intentions and stay anchored in our shared values.
That’s why I’ve chosen not to single out individuals for engaging with this area of work. I also believe in movement ecology, the idea that strong movements benefit from diverse approaches. Disagreements about strategy are both inevitable and healthy, as long as they’re grounded in mutual respect and shared goals.
For anyone reading this who’s involved in PLF-related work, I want to emphasize that I’m always open to dialogue, collaboration and shared learning. Differing views on how to achieve change should never be a barrier to working together. We can disagree on strategy whilst still recognising that we are on the same side.
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!
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.
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.