Bringing higher-welfare technologies into mainstream animal agriculture.
Pro Animal Ag Foundation identifies welfare-improving practices that are already technically possible — and works to remove the barriers that keep them from being adopted at scale.
Our current work focuses on pig and chicken welfare: increasing the adoption of immunocastration as a higher-welfare alternative to surgical castration in pigs, and promoting in-ovo sexing technologies that can reduce or eliminate the culling of male chicks in the egg industry.
Focus areas
Two concrete, tractable welfare interventions where better technology already exists and adoption is the bottleneck.
Immunocastration
Tens of millions of male piglets are surgically castrated each year, often without anesthesia, to prevent boar taint. Immunocastration is a proven, vaccine-based alternative that avoids the pain of surgery. We work to understand the barriers to its adoption and to identify practical pathways for implementation.
Read about our pig welfare work →In-Ovo Sexing
Billions of male chicks are culled each year by the egg industry because they cannot lay eggs. In-ovo sexing identifies the sex of a chick before it hatches, making it possible to reduce or eliminate this culling. We work to promote and accelerate the spread of these technologies.
Read about our chicken welfare work →What we do
More broadly, our activities span research, engagement, and partnership-building across emerging animal welfare technologies.
1 Research & landscape analysis
We conduct research and landscape analyses on emerging animal welfare technologies — mapping what is technically possible, who is working on it, and where the real bottlenecks to adoption lie.
2 Expert & stakeholder engagement
We engage with experts, producers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations to evaluate welfare-improving interventions and pressure-test them against commercial and operational realities.
3 Partnerships for adoption
We explore partnerships that can facilitate the adoption of higher-welfare practices within animal agriculture — connecting the people who can build, fund, regulate, and scale them.