A dairy cow is worth about $3,000 to a farmer, whereas a broiler chicken — raised for meat — returns less than $5 in gross revenue and under a dollar in profit. Quantifying animals this way may feel uncomfortable, but this financial margin determines the entire health budget of an animal! It helps explain why farmers often only spend pennies per bird on vaccines and healthcare. To improve animal lives at scale, then, biotechnology interventions must scale to an extreme degree.
In this episode, Robert Yaman, CEO of Innovate Animal Ag, argues that the way to improve animal welfare is to make farming more efficient rather than less. We discuss in-ovo sexing (which uses PCR or hyperspectral imaging to identify an egg’s sex before it hatches, and which could help end the culling of 300 million male chicks a year); why hyperspectral cameras work on brown eggs but not white ones; and electron-beam vaccines, which shred a bacterium’s DNA while leaving its surface proteins intact, thus producing a farm-specific vaccine for less than one penny per dose.
Robert also reveals publicly, for the first time, that Innovate Animal Ag is building an “accelerator farm”: a commercial broiler facility that will double as a testbed where startups can trial new technologies.
Chapters
0:00 Why animal welfare needs scalable technologies
6:40 How chickens were bred for meat and eggs
12:43 Does farm efficiency improve animal welfare overall?
23:41 How the poultry supply chain works, from hatchery to farm
32:01 In ovo sexing to prevent chick culling
47:12 Electron beams and vaccines
1:01:04 Ozempic for chickens
1:15:30 Precision farming and the Accelerator Farm
Watch on YouTube
Further Reading
Before They Hatch (Asimov Press)
Lewis Bollard on Dwarkesh Podcast
