That’s really interesting, and honestly pretty surprising—I’d really have to quite radically change my view if it turns out Freedom Farms have found a way to raise >5000 animals on one farm in conditions which are broadly acceptable. If I understand you correctly you’re saying that each individual farm could plausibly be much smaller than 5000 animals though, which I would still find interesting that there’s a way for the system to produce meat in aggregate without atrocity-level cruelty, but less challenging to my existing worldview because I think it is the ‘factory’ element of factory farms which is what drives them to be especially cruel.
I’d be very interested in anything you can find on the distribution of farm sizes—or if you can wait a week or two for me to get some work deadlines out the way I’d also be happy to investigate myself and get back to you.
I can certainly wait, as I still don’t eat pork for nutritional reasons (fat composition). I guess it should be you who makes contact, I’d be a lot less rigorous. If you need locals, I could connect you with people in the community. I don’t know anyone who’s been involved in pig welfare, but I know some people who’ve done chicken stuff (meat chicken welfare in NZ is still bad, but egg chicken welfare is mostly fine.)
At this point I’m expecting we’re going to find that yes, humane farms would benefit from aggregating, but still, very large contiguous parcels of land are just rare or hard to acquire, so a large number of stock on a single farm is going to be strongly correlated with overcrowding, as you expect.
the ‘factory’ element of factory farms
You still haven’t explained what you mean by this. A factory is just a process that produces something. A factory can have humans monitoring every stage of the process and making sure nothing is going wrong. A factory can be subject to certification requirements.
That’s really interesting, and honestly pretty surprising—I’d really have to quite radically change my view if it turns out Freedom Farms have found a way to raise >5000 animals on one farm in conditions which are broadly acceptable. If I understand you correctly you’re saying that each individual farm could plausibly be much smaller than 5000 animals though, which I would still find interesting that there’s a way for the system to produce meat in aggregate without atrocity-level cruelty, but less challenging to my existing worldview because I think it is the ‘factory’ element of factory farms which is what drives them to be especially cruel.
I’d be very interested in anything you can find on the distribution of farm sizes—or if you can wait a week or two for me to get some work deadlines out the way I’d also be happy to investigate myself and get back to you.
I can certainly wait, as I still don’t eat pork for nutritional reasons (fat composition). I guess it should be you who makes contact, I’d be a lot less rigorous. If you need locals, I could connect you with people in the community. I don’t know anyone who’s been involved in pig welfare, but I know some people who’ve done chicken stuff (meat chicken welfare in NZ is still bad, but egg chicken welfare is mostly fine.)
At this point I’m expecting we’re going to find that yes, humane farms would benefit from aggregating, but still, very large contiguous parcels of land are just rare or hard to acquire, so a large number of stock on a single farm is going to be strongly correlated with overcrowding, as you expect.
You still haven’t explained what you mean by this. A factory is just a process that produces something. A factory can have humans monitoring every stage of the process and making sure nothing is going wrong. A factory can be subject to certification requirements.