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About the Foundation

Pro Animal Ag Foundation works to improve the lives of farmed animals by helping higher-welfare technologies move from possible to practiced.

Our mission

Animal agriculture is enormous, and so is its welfare footprint. Many of the worst routine harms to farmed animals are not inevitable: there are already better ways to do things. Pro Animal Ag Foundation exists to help those better ways become the norm — by identifying welfare-improving technologies and practices and working to remove the barriers that keep them from being adopted at scale.

What we focus on now

Our current work focuses primarily on pig and chicken welfare.

  • Pigs. We are exploring opportunities to increase the adoption of immunocastration as a higher-welfare alternative to surgical castration. This includes research, stakeholder engagement, and educational efforts aimed at understanding barriers to adoption and identifying pathways for implementation.
  • Chickens. We are exploring the promotion of in-ovo sexing technologies, which can identify the sex of chicks before hatching and thereby reduce or eliminate the need for the culling of male chicks in the egg industry.

How we work

More broadly, our activities include conducting research and landscape analyses on emerging animal welfare technologies; engaging with experts, producers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations to evaluate welfare-improving interventions; and exploring partnerships that can facilitate the adoption of higher-welfare practices within animal agriculture. You can read more on our approach page.

Our principles

  • Evidence first. We follow the research and the realities of production, not assumptions.
  • Adoption-oriented. A welfare gain only counts when animals actually experience it, so we focus on what gets implemented.
  • Collaborative. We work with producers, researchers, technology developers, funders, and other nonprofits rather than around them.
  • Pragmatic. We look for the realistic path that respects commercial and regulatory constraints while improving welfare.

Get in touch

We are always glad to connect with people working on — or interested in — higher-welfare animal agriculture. Contact us.