I guess what I mean by Welfare Labs in this context is something lower down on the Scientific Evidence Pyramid. There doesn’t seem to be an agreed-upon version of the evidence pyramid (especially in animal welfare), but often it looks something like this:
1 - Systematic Reviews /​ RCTs
2 - Primary Studies
3 - Observational Studies /​ Case Reports
4 - Expert Opinion
Where the lower down the pyramid you go, the weaker the evidence is. I think that academic research and the process you outlined above falls in the category of Primary Studies. But I think that leaping from Opinion to Primary Study often misses out this useful middle step of Observational Studies. And I think farms are well placed to rapidly test hypotheses, before committing to a Primary Study with more rigour.
To answer your specific questions:
This very much depends on the farm, but I think it can be surprising how well equipped some farms are to collect data (I think many have more data than they know what to do with)
I think Universities aren’t really incentivised to be quick—and I’d imagine there are a bunch of ways you could structure work like this to be more streamlined than university research
Yeah I think this very much depends on the question you’re trying to answer, but I do think that by jumping straight to Primary Studies, you can miss important insights from Observational Studies
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I guess what I mean by Welfare Labs in this context is something lower down on the Scientific Evidence Pyramid. There doesn’t seem to be an agreed-upon version of the evidence pyramid (especially in animal welfare), but often it looks something like this:
1 - Systematic Reviews /​ RCTs
2 - Primary Studies
3 - Observational Studies /​ Case Reports
4 - Expert Opinion
Where the lower down the pyramid you go, the weaker the evidence is. I think that academic research and the process you outlined above falls in the category of Primary Studies. But I think that leaping from Opinion to Primary Study often misses out this useful middle step of Observational Studies. And I think farms are well placed to rapidly test hypotheses, before committing to a Primary Study with more rigour.
To answer your specific questions:
This very much depends on the farm, but I think it can be surprising how well equipped some farms are to collect data (I think many have more data than they know what to do with)
I think Universities aren’t really incentivised to be quick—and I’d imagine there are a bunch of ways you could structure work like this to be more streamlined than university research
Yeah I think this very much depends on the question you’re trying to answer, but I do think that by jumping straight to Primary Studies, you can miss important insights from Observational Studies