CHRIS: All right.
Good afternoon everybody.
Can you hear me OK?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
CHRIS: Excellent.
All right.
I'm here today to introduce
Aaron Gross who founded Farm
Forward in 2006 as an
organization entirely devoted
to ending factory farming and
creating humane, sustainable,
and just alternatives to it.
He collaborated heavily with
Jonathan Safran Foer on Foer's
bestselling "Eating
Animals" in 2009.
Foer also spoke at Google,
I believe, about
a year or two ago.
So you may remember that talk.
He's currently working with
Jonathan and Natalie Portman
and director Christopher Quinn
to transform the book into a
feature length documentary.
Gross serves as Farm Forward
CEO and is professor of
theology and religious
studies at the
University of San Diego.
He recently published "Animals
in the Human Imagination," a
companion to "Animal Studies."
And just so you know, there'll
be time at the end of the talk
for questions.
So please save your questions
for then.
And we appreciate
you all coming.
Without further ado, help
me welcome Aaron Gross.
AARON GROSS: Well, thanks.
Thanks everybody for coming.
It's really good to be here and
really good to talk about
these issues and nice to have
a good crowd like this.
So my name is Aaron Gross.
As Chris was telling you, I
started this organization
called Farm Forward about
five years ago.
And there's two big things that
Farm Forward works on.
One is we try to work on the
kind of supply-side end of the
problem of factory farming,
changing what's available,
working with producers to try
to create more humane and
sustainable farms.
And there our work
really centers
on the poultry industry.
And I'm gonna in most of this
talk center on the poultry
industry for reasons that
will become clear.
The other end of our work
is consumer focused.
And that's really in some ways
what I'm doing right now,
doing educational outreach in a
whole variety of ways to get
people more knowledgeable about
what this thing is we
call factory farming and how
we can respond to it.
Because we really live in a
world that's changed radically
in a very short period of time
when it comes to food.
I mean, we're getting used
to very rapid change.
Certainly in this building
you've got to be.
But with farming, there's a
lot of important knowledge
that in a previous generation
might have been passed on to
us through our parents,
through grandparents.
And today, what our parents and
grandparents might know
about farming is just irrelevant
to what's going on.
It really changes
that quickly.
And so I'm gonna try to fill
some of those gaps.
I have to say, I had a bit of
fun with my title, "Robot
Chickens and Virtual Farms."
Probably with such a serious
topic, I shouldn't
have so much fun.
But really, each one of the kind
of images here-- that is
the image of the robot chicken,
the image of the
virtual farm, the image
of pink slime--
really does help kind of set
up what I want to do.
We do, I think, live in the age
of pink slime, that is,
the pink slime controversy.
People familiar with pink
slime controversy?
For those who aren't, it looks
like kind of pink soft-serve
ice cream, but it's actually
a beef product.
And it's kind of seen as pretty
disgusting by consumers.
It's not really the problem I
want to focus on, but this was
a big recent controversy.
And ABC showed that this pink
slime stuff wasn't just kind
of occasionally used
here and there.
But in about 70% of the ground
beef in supermarkets there was
this substance pink slime.
And why I think this is kind of
an image of the age is it
was there all along for more
than a decade and we didn't
know it, even though it was
something with us every day.
And that really is the kind of
situation we're facing in
trying to understand
factory farming.
And we don't have cybernetic
chickens yet.
That is true.
But we do have transgenic
chickens, chickens that have a
human-created gene snipped
from a virus and
inserted into a chicken.
That's already a done deal.
Those same scientists who are
in Edinburgh at the Roslin
Institute, where Dolly the sheep
was created, are now
working on putting a mouse
gene into a chicken.
So the image of a cybernetic
chicken isn't actually that
far off from what we're
actually doing.
Chickens may not come to mind
when we think high tech, but
chickens are pretty
high tech today.
And what I mean by the
virtual farm is this.
In a certain sense, all of
us here are farmers.
We're virtual farmers.
What we decide to eat, the
decisions we make, go through
a chain and tell farmers what
they're gonna make.
And we really have tremendous
influence that way.
Wendell Berry, an interesting
person in the broader movement
of kind of reflecting on
food, he's kind of the
quintessential farmer
intellectual.
He has this famous statement--
or famous within foodie
circles-- which is we're all
farmers by proxy.
I think it's a powerful idea
that what we choose to eat
ends up dictating what
gets farmed.
So, with that as an
introduction, I want to have
one little piece to kind of
complicate the social justice
issues and so forth associated
with food which is that when
we talk about food, we're
never talking
about a simple issue.
We're never talking about just
the environmental issues that
might be affected by it or just
the animal protection
issues that might be connected
with it or just the social
justice issues.
We're also talking about
something that's really close
to our identity, that we think
tells us who we are, how we
choose to eat.
It's a very personal
statement.
To drive this home, I want to
share with you two small
excerpts from the book, "Eating
Animals" by Jonathan
Safran Foer.
That book begins and ends this
with a chapter named
"Storytelling." Both the
opening and the closing
chapter have the same title.
And I've got a small quote
I want to share with
you from each one.
So in the opening section,
Jonathan includes a monologue
from his grandmother--
his grandmother who was
a Holocaust survivor.
And the clip I have here is
Jonathan's grandmother
speaking, and then them
in conversation.
And I'll just read this.
So this is grandmother
speaking,
"Then it all changed.
During the war, it was
hell on earth.
I was always running day and
night because the Germans are
always right behind me.
If you stopped, you died.
There was never enough food.
I became sicker and sicker
from not eating.
And I'm not just talking about
being skin and bones.
I had sores all over my body.
It became difficult to move.
The worst it got was
near the end.
A lot of people died
right at the end.
And I didn't know if I could
make it another day.
A farmer, a Russian,
God blessed
him, he saw my condition.
And he went into his house and
came out with a piece of meat
for me."
And then Jonathan interjects,
"He saved your life."
Grandma, "I didn't eat it."
"You didn't eat it?
"It was pork."
"I wouldn't eat pork."
"Why?"
"What do
you mean why?" "What?
Because it was kosher?"
"Of course."
"But not even to save
your life?"
"If nothing matters, there's
nothing to save."
Something really ultimate was
at stake for Jonathan's
grandmother here.
Something about food cuts
to a deeper level.
Now at the end of the book,
Jonathan revisits this story.
He ends up kind of sharing a
little story that comes out of
the history books about
Abraham Lincoln.
"While returning to Washington
from Springfield, Abraham
Lincoln forced his entire party
to stop to help some
small birds he saw
in distress.
When chided by the others, he
responded quite plainly, 'I
could not have slept tonight
if I had left those poor
creatures on the ground and
not restored them to their
mother.'
He did not make a case for the
moral value of the birds.
Instead, he observed quite
simply that once those
suffering birds came into
his view, a moral
burden had been assumed.
He could not be himself
if he walked away.
Whether I sit at the global
table with my family or with
my conscience, to accept the
factory farm feels inhuman.
To accept the factory farm would
make me less myself,
less my grandmother's grandson,
less my son's father.
This is what my grandmother
meant when she said, 'If
nothing matters, there's
nothing to save.'"
This is a complicating factor
with food we don't have with a
lot of other social justice
causes, and something I want
to have us keep in mind.
Now food matters so much.
I Imagine if you're here, it's
already because you have some
sense that food is important.
But I think the scale of it
always needs to be emphasized.
So I've got five points I want
to begin with here just to
give you a sense of how
important this issue is, just
how much we shape our world
in the choices we eat.
The number one cause of global
warming, the number one
contributor of global warming
related gases, is animal
agriculture.
This has now been well
documented in two studies, one
initiated by the UN, another
initiated by the Pew
Commission.
Those are not lightweight bodies
when they do research.
So if we care about global
warming, we got to care a lot
about animal agriculture, about
the way in which we
raise and eat animals, because
that is the biggest cause.
Not [INAUDIBLE]
something obviously good or bad
but just gives you a sense
of the magnitude, a third of
the surface area of the
planet, excluding kind of frozen
tundra and that sort of
area, a third of the planet on
which human beings can walk is
occupied either by animals
grazing or by the farms that
have to feed those animals that
are grazing, a third of
the surface area of the planet
occupied by this single
activity-- not producing
food, but just
producing animal food.
We can also talk about this--
and we do less of this, for
whatever reason, publicly--
but we could talk about this
problem not just in relation
to land animals but in relation
to sea animals.
The industry that produces
seafood has undergone the same
kind of radical transformation
that we've seen in animal
agriculture.
Really, a lot of actual military
technology's applied
to fishing-- to catch fish in
areas they weren't able to do
before, at depths human beings
were never able to
reach, and so forth.
And we now actually have a
situation where we're hauling
so much biomass out of the
ocean-- so much biomass out of
the oceans--
we can actually measure a
decline in the overall
vibrance and health of
ocean ecosystems.
Now think about what
I'm saying here.
We're not talking about like a
particular gulf near a human
area where a particular route
which salmon follow.
I'm talking about the
whole of the oceans,
all of it as a whole.
There's a statistic called
marine tropic index, MTI.
It took about 20 years
to develop.
But it's a way scientists have
that allow them to actually
get a snapshot of the
global ocean.
And they can actually watch a
process of kind of reducing
food webs by eliminating
certain kind
of top level predators.
And so we end up with basically
a lot of jellyfish
or a lot of algae instead of a
diverse range of species, and
less of them.
So we're actually emptying
the oceans.
In other words, if we were
just to stay where we are
right now and continue, the end
of that curve would be a
completely kind of
empty ocean.
Really an amazing thing
to think about.
It used to be we thought there's
no way we can have an
impact on the oceans,
but indeed we can.
And farming is also related
to global inequity.
I'm not gonna focus on
this right here.
But I have one statistic
worth pondering.
By 2050, the world's livestock
will consume as much food as
four billion people.
You can do the kind of math and
think about how this will
work in terms of conflicted
resources around water or land
or even food itself, how
that's gonna become an
increasing issue.
We have a situation right now
where the poor compete with
wealthy people's livestock
grains.
And that is only gonna become a
more serious situation as we
move into the future.
And finally, the source of what
we call super bugs or
super pathogens-- these things
you hear about referred to as
bird flu and swine flu and so
forth with scientists really
worried about it becoming
a serious pandemic--
this is primarily driven
by the kind of animal
agriculture we have.
I mean very simply--
I'll flesh this out a little bit
later-- but very simply,
we've got about 50 billion
chickens being raised for meat
on the planet.
These are chickens which are
kept in circumstances such
that their health
is compromised.
And they're constantly being fed
drugs because that's the
way the system works to
make them productive.
So we've got 50 billion sick
animals being fed antibiotics.
That creates a perfect situation
for viruses to
emerge that are gonna be able
to survive this, or new
bacteria to emerge that aren't
gonna be able to respond to
antibiotics.
So we've got this perfect
recipe for
creating new pathogens.
And this is really worrying
scientists quite a bit.
To give you a sense why, just
the other month I had the
interesting privilege
of go to the Roslin
Institute in Edinburgh.
This is where Dolly the
sheep was created--
mentioned it a second
ago because of
the transgenic chicken--
and I was speaking with one
of the virologists there.
And this is somebody not
interested in farm or food
issues, but he's working
on transgenic chickens.
He developed the transgenic
chickens because he's so
worried about what could
happen with H5N1.
That's the bird flu virus that
folks are most worried about.
Viruses all have these H's
and N's to classify them.
So when we say H5N1, we're
talking about a particular
kind of lineage, a particular
lineage of a virus.
And that lineage--
this is why it worries folks.
Because when human beings have
gotten that virus, about 60%
of them die.
That's a very high death rate.
To give you a sense of how high
that is, in 1918 we had
the biggest natural disaster
in human history.
20 to 50 million people,
they estimate, died.
The US was bulldozing
mass graves.
It's really an amazing thing.
We don't hear too
much about it.
But that pandemic, they
estimate, had
a 2% fatality rate.
So we're dealing with something
that currently has--
if that virus doesn't decrease
in its virulence--
is a 60% death rate.
Now what that virus hasn't yet
done is mutate in a form which
allows it to be easily
transmitted.
So it's very deadly, but we
don't worry about it because
at the moment it can't be
easily transmitted.
But birds and pigs and humans,
we all share receptors that
allow us to be susceptible
to viruses.
And so when birds can get sick
by something or pigs can get
sick by something, it's a
relatively small step for
humans to get sick
by something.
So we pay careful attention
to this.
And the scientists are looking
at-- and they're saying we've
got this virus what appears to
about to be adapting to a form
where it can spread quickly in
the human population, and it
would be the most deadly
virus we've ever seen.
And we know that the situation
of the factory farm helps
create these viruses.
So we're dealing with a very
important topic, one that will
shape us in profound ways
going into the future.
Now what I want to do here in
the center of the talk is tell
you a short history of
factory farming.
How did we get to where we are
today with this industry I
keep telling you is so radically
different than other
kind of farming industries
we had before?
Well, my story's gonna start
in the 1920s in Delmarva.
Delmarva is Delaware, Maryland,
Virginia kind of area.
And this is where the poultry
industry has really grown up.
And in somewhere around 1926,
there was an Oceanview
housewife, a woman named
Celia Steele.
And like many housewives at
the time, she had a small
flock of chickens.
Actually at this time in the
US history, we had an
estimated 26 million
poultry farms, 26
million poultry farms.
But each one only had
20, 30, 40 birds.
And this was the way America
produced its poultry and its
eggs, by lots of very
small-scale producers.
So Celia Steele was
one of them.
And she placed an order for
chicks, for baby chicks.
And there was--
this is a legend--
a mistake.
She ordered 50 chicks, that
which she could deal with, but
you've got 500.
So she had all these extra
birds that she
wasn't able to sell.
And so she experimented with
actually trying to keep the
birds alive indoors during the
winter when they wouldn't
survive outdoors and actually
keep them healthy and fat
enough that they would be
sellable at the end.
Now had she tried this at any
other point in history, she
would have failed.
We know it wouldn't
have worked.
But at that particular moment,
we had some new knowledge.
We knew a little bit more about
how nutrition worked.
So she knew to add vitamin A and
vitamin D to the animals
feed that made them
a bit healthier.
And very quickly, she had access
to drugs that could
deal with the diseases that were
cropping up by keeping
the animals inside.
So what she was able to do is
kind of figure out a way to
put birds inside, which caused
a lot of health problems, but
then counteract those health
problems by manipulating the
feed and ultimately by putting
drugs into the feed.
And she was very successful.
So at a time when the average
poultry farm is 20 some birds,
her farm very quickly
had 10,000.
And in that area, that county
today, there's still 250
million chickens produced.
In terms of county specific,
that's the largest county for
producing broiler chickens.
So the rest of the country
is looking around at this
incredibly productive farm
and say, this is great.
This is the way of the future.
We're gonna put birds indoors.
And it's gonna be
more efficient.
We can do it in all seasons.
And it started to grow.
Now as it started to grow, the
industry became interested in
intensifying this process and
creating kind of a loop that
made it go faster and faster.
So after this basic idea of
putting birds inside and then
giving them specialized feed had
been developed, they went
after the genetics.
That's really what drives
the poultry
industry is the genetics.
Once you have a certain set of
genetics in place, you have to
raise the animal in a certain
set of circumstances that fit
the animal's genetic makeup.
So they wanted to breed a
chicken that would be really
profitable in this kind
of circumstance.
Unlike previous generations
which had to deal with
chickens being able to survive
in diverse kinds of weather
because they were outdoors,
this new generation of
chickens could be bred with
the notion that they could
control their environment and
various other kinds of things.
And so they were able to come
up with a new chicken.
The government actually held a
chicken of tomorrow contest in
the 1940s that helped
lead to this.
And it was amazing, in
some ways, what they
were able to do.
They've now taken the chicken
and they've created a bird
that can grow three
times as fast--
three times as fast.
That is, it'll reach market
weight in 35 to 40 days
instead of something more like
120 days like it would have
been in the 1920s.
And not only will it reach
market weight in a third the
time, while it's growing it will
eat a third less feed.
This is kind of like a
five-year-old that looks like
they're 15 but has only
ever eaten breakfast.
Now from the point of view
of efficiency, this
looks really great.
But you can imagine there's
gonna be some cost to an
animal if you push its immune
system that hard.
And indeed, there is.
These are very sick animals.
These are really in some
ways mutant animals.
They all share, for example,
what we call colloquially an
obese gene.
They have a particular
genetic marker.
We actually have
the gene coded.
We know what it is.
And that seems to be the kind of
key factor in creating this
rapid growth.
But it also means that
the birds flesh--
the birds meat, its fat,
and so forth--
grow faster than its bones
are capable of growing.
So you've got a situation where
the animal is constantly
breaking its bones or
unable to walk.
Pretty serious problem.
It means that for about the last
third of their lives--
even though these birds are only
a month and a half old--
about the last third of their
lives, it's painful for them
to move, just to walk.
And so as a result, they
don't walk very much.
But it turns out the not
walking very much is
profitable because they don't
burn as many calories and they
build more fat.
So we created a situation where
we have to use drugs,
where we have to use confinement
because this
genetics won't work.
We put these birds out on
pasture, we just deal with
very, very high mortality
rates.
So a lot of our free-range farms
are dealing with like
30%, 40%, 50% mortality rates
because they're using these
factory genetics and just
responding to this market
demand to put birds outside.
But if we don't change the birds
genetics and we just put
them outside, it's just
a lot of suffering.
Now you and I may be looking at
this situation saying, this
sounds awful.
Like why would you want to
do farming in this way?
But the industry looked
at the situation and
said, this is great.
And as the ag industry looked at
this, said this is the way
farming should be.
Look at the way this
system works.
The genetics of these birds end
up being controlled by a
few corporations.
That's actually a story worth
pausing on a bit.
Let me explain how
that happened.
It used to be that farmers who
had chickens could just breed
chickens together and get
more chickens, right?
Wouldn't you have thought
that was still the case?
You could just breed your
chickens together and get more
chickens, just like somebody
can breed their golden
retrievers together and get
more golden retrievers?
Doesn't work that way anymore
with chickens.
Because in the process of
creating that new chicken, in
the process of moving from the
chicken that we've had with us
throughout history to the
chicken we now have with us
today, they changed
the breeding
techniques rather radically.
This is why I would say the
chicken is essentially a
genetically engineered bird
even though it doesn't fit
that definition as
commonly defined.
So, here's what happened.
Normally what you could do
is take chickens from two
different lines.
Let's say this line is
especially fast growing and
this line is especially
good at laying eggs.
And if I've breed those two
birds together-- a mother from
here, a father from here--
I'd get what they call
hybrid vigor.
That is, the first generation
of birds born from a cross
show some increased
productivity.
But here is the problem.
The birds that came from that
cross-- if I was the farmer
and I bred those together--
those gains wouldn't be
sustained over time.
So I could cross birds once, get
a little boon, but then it
wouldn't be sustainable.
You couldn't have this kind of
hybrid thing be a permanent
situation in the old way
of doing things.
But what the companies figured
out is they could actually
find ways to make all
birds hybrids
by doing the following.
So it used to be I had my
small flock of birds.
But now if you want to breed
birds, you have to have at
least around two million birds
because what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna preserve parent
line, grandparent and
grandparent lines.
And each line I have is gonna
take about 100,000 birds.
And then I'm gonna breed
them together in a
kind of cocktail fashion.
And then it's only the end
resulting bird, the result of
somewhere between 10 and 20
crosses, that I'm gonna sell
to the consumer.
And that bird is just completely
useless as far as
breeding is concerned.
It'll have a really big breast,
have a lot of fat on
it, or it will lay a lot
of eggs depending on
what I want to do.
But if I try to breed the
offspring together, just
completely unviable.
So this was fantastic from the
point of view of corporations.
As long as they could control
these big farms, control the
genetics, they could
own everything.
So vertical integration
started moving.
They had reduced the cost, and
in general that increases
market share.
And so the other industries
started following suit.
I'm not gonna go through
anywhere near the kind of
detail I just did
with poultry.
But it's basically
the same story.
First the pork industry jumps
on board and starts to ask
what it can do, then
the dairy industry.
The beef industry is last.
The beef industry is still, to
a large extent, removed from
the factory system in the early
part of beef cow's life.
In the latter half, it ends up
being in a pretty kind of
factory setting.
But poultry became the model.
It drove the whole thing.
And I think that's important to
know because if we want to
change it, poultry is kind of
the hardest nut to crack.
It's the biggest problem
that we have out there.
So one of the things that
happened in the course of this
breeding is we ended
up with two
different types of chicken.
We ended up with what's
called layers--
birds that are specialized in
laying eggs but absolutely
useless for meat production--
and another set called
broilers.
This was a new thing.
It used to be birds were
always dual production.
You'd get certain
number of eggs.
If you were a meat farmer, that
would be side income.
Now it's completely
specialized.
At the egg end, we've made the
bird produce twice as many
eggs as it produced pre-1950 and
with similar consequences.
The stress on the system weakens
the immune system and
creates this kind of cycle where
you then need to control
the animals environment and feed
it drugs in order to make
it productive.
So I want to show you a few
things we're doing kind of in
response to this situation,
cause we've kind of all grown
up with this situation, not
being quite aware that it was
unique for chicken to be as
cheap as it is today.
We actually eat more than 100
times per capita as much
chicken as we did
in the 1920s.
100 times.
It's really hard to believe
this, but I've looked at the
primary sources and the data.
It's really true.
It's only in the '90s that
chicken became the most
consumed food.
So we've got this exciting
thing going on.
How many people here are
familiar with the
book "Eating Animals"?
I imagine some of you that
brought you here.
So "Eating Animals" was a book
very important to my
organization, by Jonathan
Safran Foer.
It really kind of captures the
ethos of what I'd like to see
kind of happen, and certainly
the ethos of what we're doing
here at Farm Forward.
And it's really exciting to
report to you it's now being
made into a documentary.
And an amazing lineup of
folks are behind this.
Jonathan is the author.
Natalie Portman ended up being
the kind of key person who
really pushed this into
the realm of being
a documentary film.
And as it turns out--
this is kind of hot
off the presses news--
but Biz Stone and Evan Williams
have agreed to
finance the film.
So they're putting about
$1.25 million into
making this film happen.
So over the next
two years, this
film is gonna be produced.
Filming has just started.
It's gonna be about a year of
filming, a year of editing.
And I want to show you some of
the scouting that we've done
to give you a sense, kind of
fill in with some images some
of the things I've
talked about.
So what you're seeing right
here is actually an egg
factory farm.
This is what an egg farm looks
like in the contemporary day.
This is Christopher Quinn, the
director I mentioned, doing
the shooting.
What he's standing in front
of here is chicken shit.
This is just a vast lagoon
of chicken waste.
It's kind of pretty
here with the farm
reflecting in the cesspool.
It's pretty disturbing.
But this is what rural landscape
begins to look like
with factory farming.
You'll notice you don't
see any animals.
They're there.
You just aren't gonna
see them.
This last shot is an empty
egg factory farm.
I don't include any shots, in
case you're wondering, of
animals actually suffering
on factory farms.
I think it's really important
to see, but sometimes it's a
little bit overwhelming.
So I do encourage folks
to look at that.
But being inside that empty
egg factory farm was an
interesting experience.
Those cages you saw end up being
split into cages about
this long in which--
it's basically the size of
folded newspaper in which five
to six birds would be raised.
That particular one was
abandoned because the factory
farmer who owned it went on hard
economic times and just
stopped feeding his animals.
So it was seized by the state,
which had to then kill the
animals that were remaining
in there.
And it ended up being a good
place to do some filming.
So that's the problem
we're fighting.
But there is some good grounds
for being hopeful.
So this gentleman here
is Frank Reese.
And he's in some ways the last
like traditional poultry
farmer we have in the country.
This is Christopher filming
Frank working with his birds
when they're first hatched
coming out of the hatcheries.
This is still a kind
a high tech
operation in certain ways.
This part of the operation looks
the same, that is the
birth of the birds.
But after the birds are born,
it's night and day.
These are his turkeys
out in the field.
And these birds roam
around all day.
They fly.
They spend time in trees.
They basically do the kinds of
things you thought birds would
do, as opposed to industrial
turkeys which aren't even
capable of sexual
reproduction.
This bird right here, it's
actually a wild turkey.
I'm not kidding.
This wild turkey joined the
flock of Frank's turkeys.
It's a good life.
They have a good life.
I personally wish they didn't
have to be killed at the end,
but at least they have
a really good life.
Here are some of the chickens.
Now these birds are so unusual
that you're seeing because
these are pre-industrial
genetics.
This is one of the things
we're working on
that really very few--
in some sense, no other really
big players are working on--
is actually trying to get these
traditional genetics
back in the market, to recognize
that that road we
went down when we introduced
that fat gene and intensified
the bird's growth rate so that
it would grow three times as
fast, that forced us into a
situation where we need to use
drugs, where we need to use
confinement because otherwise
we deal with such rapid
death rates.
We need to reverse
that situation.
It's very hard.
We're kind of locked in as far
as the big industry is
concerned in using these
fast-growing birds.
What we're trying to do at
Farm Forward is work with
folks like Frank to try to
create an alternative model, a
model that can be profitable,
that can deliver a product
people feel really good about,
and that can eventually
challenge the industry.
Because what we see right now is
there's just not a model in
the poultry industry.
In the pork industry, in the
beef industry, I can point you
to small producers which are
doing truly extraordinary
things entirely outside
of the factory system.
But if you have in your mind a
poultry producer you know,
maybe a poultry producer whom
you buy eggs or meat from at
the farmer's market or that kind
of thing, probably that
farmer is in the end getting
their chicks from the same
factory hatcheries with the
same factory genetics that
other folks are.
We don't have alternatives in
the poultry industry the way
we have another industries.
So working with Frank is
a way to create that.
And our aim is to
create a model.
Frank, bless his heart, is
willing to share all his
economic data and what it takes
him to be successful.
And we're working on, basically,
producing a model
that can be repeated and
that can be duplicated.
So one of the other things
we're doing, I
mentioned, is education.
And here's where technology
starts to end up entering in
an interesting kind of way.
So one of the things we've done
is try to bring Johnson
Safran Foer into classrooms.
We found that if you have a kind
of live interaction, you
get a lot more bang, a lot
more emotional impact.
But how do you do that
on a large scale?
How do you reach young people
on a large scale?
So we're getting very excited
about using video conference
technology to provide
at very low-cost--
we spend a few thousand dollars
and we can provide a
live kind of experience for
students in high schools and
small classrooms that otherwise
couldn't interact
with Jonathan an opportunity
to interact with him live.
So I'm just gonna play here a
minute or so of Jonathan just
from October 3--
so this is just earlier
this month--
Jonathan speaking to about
3000 students.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-I am at the New York Video
Conference Center which is in
midtown Manhattan,
just a couple
blocks from Times Square.
And I came here this morning
from my house in Brooklyn.
There are many things I could
have done with my day to day.
I have two little kids.
I could have played with them.
I could have worked
on my writing--
novel.
But I really wanted
to be here.
I'm very happy to be here.
I wanted to be here because I
believe strongly in the issues
we're gonna talk about.
I believe very, very strongly in
this form of communication.
Something that's direct.
Something that's
conversational.
I prefer it, actually,
to writing books.
What I would prefer even more
would be to join you in the
classrooms, have a genuinely
personal conversation, a
real-time conversation.
That's the best--
obviously, won't
be able to do.
And finally, I'm happy to be
here because I like talking to
younger people.
Students--
grade school, high school,
and college--
are more able and more open to
change than older people are.
That's been very well
demonstrated.
So when thinking about factory
farming as a problem and when
thinking about the solution to
the problem, which will not be
huge amounts of money, will
not be going to war with
another country, will not be
electing new governments,
it'll not even be finding news
values, but simply changing as
individuals, changing our daily
habits, I, of course, am
most excited to talk to people
most able to change.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
AARON GROSS: So we had
tremendous feedback.
As you can see this
is low tech.
This is him off the cuff.
That conversational style
really worked.
We just got incredible feedback
from teachers.
It's something we're gonna
do again next year.
Now another thing we're doing--
and this is really
more of a serious use
of technology--
is we're looking for a tool
that's gonna allow consumers
to make smarter choices
around poultry.
And what we've come up with is
the idea of a program we're
calling buyingpoultry.com.
And the idea is not to promote
the buying of poultry but to
educate consumers so they can
make choices about what
poultry they want to buy,
if they want to buy it.
Simple kind of idea here is to
have a mobile app that looks
something like this.
We're working with a wonderful
firm, BLT and Associates,
which is a Hollywood
marketing firm.
They really help us kind of
impact in a way we can't as a
small organization.
So this is kind of a partnership
between us and a
much bigger gun.
And the idea is that you'll have
something very simple.
You open it up.
It's gonna geo-locate.
You'll know where you are, tell
you what's available in
that area in terms of poultry.
But it's gonna have some kind
of system that's gonna help
you understand what's
going on.
So it's gonna help you learn
about sustainable poultry.
It's gonna have easy to
access information.
It's gonna tell you what
certifications actually mean.
It's gonna provide some real
commentary, not just technical
information, give you a sense
what are the kind of labels
and buzz words which probably
don't mean anything in terms
of your own values and
which ones really do.
It'll have things like national
top 10 lists, worst
10 lists, ways that will help
create competition among
businesses to do this.
It'll also allow a consumer
to immediately be in the
supermarket.
There isn't the chicken
they want to buy.
There isn't that faux chicken
they want to buy.
They can with one click
send an email.
It will know what building
they're in and
be able to do it.
And we've worked out the kind
of back end of this.
We're in the process of doing
the fundraising for it.
We've got a Kickstarter campaign
that's gonna be
kicked off.
And of course, the web version
will just simply be a little
bit more robust.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Hi, I'm Jonathan Safran
Foer coming to you
from my home in Brooklyn.
And I wanted to talk to a bit
about buyingpoultry.com.
People ask me all the time what
they should be eating.
And, I always return their
question with a question,
which is what do
you care about?
The food choices that we
make have very serious
repercussions in the world, not
just for the animal we're
eating or not eating, but for
an entire food system.
The farm industry is
famously secretive.
It can be very complicated to
buy food because we are
bombarded with different
kinds of labels,
different stamps of approval.
So what can you do?
Sign up on this page that
can connect good
farmers with consumers.
You will know where to buy
food that is cage-free,
free-range, natural, organic.
And perhaps more importantly,
you'll know what those terms
actually mean.
It's a project that's
in development.
But in the meantime, you can
offer your input, you can
receive updates, and when it
ultimately goes live be among
the first to have it.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
AARON GROSS: So these are some
of the ways we're trying to
think about to reach consumers
in new ways,
to change the culture.
And that's in some ways the
most important work.
But as I mentioned, we're also
working on the production end.
And I just want to share one
thing we have just recently
been able to accomplish there.
What we found out is there's a
bit of a problem with getting
investment in these kinds of
high-welfare operations, but
not because there
isn't demand.
That is, pretty much everybody
who's looking at investing in
something like a higher welfare
poultry operation
knows there's a whole bunch of
people out there who will pay
quite a bit more to have a
product that's produced
according to their values.
You might be sitting here
thinking, I'd pay another
dollar a pound for chicken
if it met my values.
And you may be some
of those people.
That market is there.
But here's the thing.
There's this kind of scary
situation where even if
somebody produces a product
that really does fit your
values, they don't have
a vehicle for
protecting its integrity.
They don't have a way of
communicating to the consumer,
hey, we're different.
It's too easy for another
corporation to come up right
now and kind of steal the
language and appear to be like
that other company.
That's where buyingpoultry
became very important.
We realized unless there was a
tool that allowed consumers to
discriminate, you couldn't get
investment in these new
operations to make
these kinds of
high-welfare products available.
Now in the interim while we're
kind of in this place where we
don't have good certifications,
we don't have
good labels, where it's easy
to confuse the consumer, we
still need to be building that
alternative infrastructure.
We don't really want
to waste any time.
Especially true because what
happens in the US, even if
it's on a really small scale
in poultry farming, if we
change just a few poultry
farms, get a few things
happening differently, that
can have a massive impact
globally because of what's going
on in India and China
who have not, like us,
factorized their whole
production process.
There's still a lot of stuff
there that can be transformed.
So I'm very excited about
changes here even if they're
at a relatively small scale.
And so we created a loan
program that's
directly for farmers.
And the money comes from animal
protection groups.
This is pretty unprecedented
to have animal protection
groups actually supporting
people who are involved in the
killing of animals.
And that's a bit of an
uncomfortable relationship.
And some people think that's
just a bad idea all told.
But what it's enabled is--
or what it is enabling is the
truly high-welfare producers
to get a slight edge
that allows them
to get off the ground.
We are talking about
a loan program.
They have to pay it back.
And that shows that this is
a real economic model.
This is part of what I was
saying in terms of
demonstrating a model's
viability, if you can't
demonstrate it, if you can't
get a loan to begin with.
So we've solved that problem by
bringing in some nonprofit
interests to put together in
this case $150,000 to fund a
barn for Frank Reese, the farmer
I showed you before who
actually has wild turkeys
joining his flock.
What you see in the background
there looks from a distance
not all that different from a
factory farm barn like those
ones you saw next
to the cesspool.
But on the inside, it looks
completely different.
It just has a bunch of roosts.
And it's really where the birds
will go in the evening.
Birds are natural roosters.
They like to go in and be
protected in the evening.
But during the day, the barn
doors open and the birds are
out on the field.
But this barn has a lot of
high-tech features that would
otherwise been very hard
for Frank to invest in.
We've got automated feed
for water and--
automated feeders and automated
water and fans and
various devices that
help control the
temperature in the building.
So basically taking advantage
of high-tech solutions that
help and that create better
welfare, but not going that
route of using those genetics
that force us into using
confinement and drugs and all
of this kind of thing.
And we'll see.
We're right in the midst
of this experience.
This barn just opened
a month ago.
If the model is successful, if
it can pay the loan back as
I'm very certain it's going to,
we'll then have another
tool in our shed.
We can really bring that
data out to the public.
And in the meantime, of course,
there's people forging
relationships between
consumers and
these special producers.
And that's an exciting thing
in and of itself.
Now I added this little
piece at the end.
I'm calling this kind
of part two 'cause
it's kind of an add-on.
What I've given you so far is
kind of my usual stick.
But I'm sitting here.
I'm coming to Google.
I couldn't help think
like what if--
this is my little personal
fantasy, not something I think
is gonna actually be a
strategy-- but I'm like if
Google decided it wanted to
fight factory farming, what
would it do?
And I actually think if Google
wanted to, it's a company in a
perfect position to end
factory farming.
And I think we can do
it in three steps.
And it begins with asking
a simple question.
If we have technology that can
make, say, every road in the
country visible, why not
consider using similar kind of
technology to make every
farm visible.
I realize a little bit more of
a technical accomplishment,
but we're in the realm of kind
of thought experiments here.
You see, the thing is the
factory farm industry depends
entirely in its business
model in a very
serious way on secrecy.
It depends on that.
It's very, very serious
about protecting that.
You may have heard something
about what we call ag-gag
legislation.
That is special legislation
which makes it illegal to do--
makes it more illegal to do
things that are basic
investigative techniques that
have allowed various
investigators to uncover things
that happen on factory
farms and bring it
to public view.
That's really the main channel
right now of bringing
information to folks like
us about what goes
on in factory farms.
And so threatening is this
information to companies,
they've actually gotten
together and supported
legislation that does things
like make it illegal to take
photographs of animals
on a farm.
You may be thinking, don't I
have free speech rights that
protect that?
And you do.
But the time in which they
passed the law and the years
in which it's going through the
court system and so forth,
will all be years where
investigations don't take
place because the investigators
are scared of
the kind of draconian possible
consequences that are there.
So they're introducing a bunch
of things which probably won't
pass constitutional muster but
which you should be very
worried about nonetheless
because the industry is
expanding this strategy.
They were in a few states last
year, about 15 states in this
coming legislative session.
They're gonna be introducing
this kind of legislation.
Point being, this industry is
so concerned about secrecy
that it will publicly support
anti-free speech legislation.
It's incredibly unpopular.
You can imagine.
Folks do not like an industry
trying to pass legislation
that hides it.
But it's worth their while
because so dangerous is
transparency to this industry.
So what if Google offered to
put cameras on every farm?
It's actually happening in
slaughterhouse auditing.
They're doing remote auditing
through cameras.
It's probably what will be the
way in which slaughterhouses
are audited in the future.
So this is not a complete
science fiction scenario, if
it is to somewhat.
I think if you pretty much do
it, it's gonna go like this.
If there was push in that
direction, some kind of push
towards providing that
technology, activist groups
can put plenty of pressure on
farms in various ways to go
transparent, including by
passing ballot initiatives.
We have a movement that's
organized enough to pass
legislation at the
state level.
So you could imagine them
pushing for transparency.
There's a vehicle for it.
They can't complain that it's
costing them money.
I think very much what would
happen as soon as those video
cameras got installed, the very
simple economic cycle
would start where people would
see this farm, they'd see that
farm, and they'd make their
choice very clearly.
And I genuinely believe
that would be enough
to end factory farming.
I don't know if it's gonna
happen that way, but it could.
And that is what I wanted
to share with you guys.
I'm hoping we can have a bit
of a conversation here.
Thanks so much.
[APPLAUSE]
BRIAN: Hey.
Thank you for the talk.
I saw Jonathan's talk here.
I subsequently read his book.
Loved it.
Think what you're doing
about raising
awareness is fantastic.
And as a person who's been
vegetarian basically 25 years
or vegan my whole adult life,
I mean I generally support
anything that's going
to better the
condition of animals.
But I look at it, I guess,
a little bit skeptically.
And I say that just in a
friendly way because--
AARON GROSS: Please.
AUDIENCE: --I'm definitely
sympathetic.
But let's say factory farming
ends tomorrow.
Let's say the industry adopts
all of your standards, or
Frank Reese's standards,
tomorrow, right.
So you already said at the
beginning of the presentation
a third of the land on earth is
devoted to raising animals.
So if they adopt this, then that
means more land needs to
go towards eating animals.
Why don't you just tell people
to be vegetarian or vegan and
help them make those choices
because if you--
and I'm not advocating factory
farming, but you can't scale
what you're doing.
AARON GROSS: Yeah, so let me--
BRIAN: People have
to eat less meat.
I mean it's just a
simple equation.
So I--
AARON GROSS: You're
actually correct.
So the question is why
not just promote like
no meat, less meat.
And tell me your name.
BRIAN: Brian.
AARON GROSS: Brian is absolutely
correct that
there's no way around eating
less meat as a population.
And one way to accomplish
that is a lot more
vegetarians and vegans.
There's really no scenario,
whether factory farming stays
with us or not.
So that's absolutely correct.
And I do encourage people
to be vegetarian.
I would encourage people
to go vegan.
There's very few ways you can
have as much impact on animals
and the environment than simply
just by removing them
from your diet entirely because
it's extremely hard to
find the really good
producers.
So that is something
I would advocate.
But what we see is that meat
eating is very entrenched.
It's probably not gonna go
anywhere, no matter how much
the vegetarian movement grows.
And it is growing, and I think
it will continue to.
And so what I focused on today
really was about how to make a
future in which meat is still
there but has to be a smaller
part of the plate, possible.
BRIAN: Fair enough.
And I think that makes sense.
I mean I would pose sort of a
counter argument which is that
I see round other than San
Francisco, and a lot of my
friends they hear, oh, you're
vegan, you're vegetarian.
Oh, I buy my eggs here.
I'm really careful and
stuff like that.
And then we're out late night in
the Mission at a taqueria,
and they're having beef tacos.
And guess what?
Like that taqueria in the
Mission isn't buying
free-range beef.
And so what I've seen is that
it becomes almost more of an
excuse for people to kind of
go on with their existing
habits of eating meat because
they're lured into this sense
of, oh yeah, I'm making a
conscious choice and I've
thought about it or whatever.
But they're really
kind of not.
And in a sense, the people
who are the most
receptive to change--
like people like us, people who
are affluent, people who
are well educated, people who
are open minded and willing to
make the change--
are kind of siphoned off when
they have options like this.
AARON GROSS: So this
is, yeah--
you're presenting a very serious
argument that we
thought a lot about.
And what I would say
is I'm sympathetic
to what you're saying.
I'm making a bet on a
different strategy.
My observation is that
vegetarianism and lower meat
or higher ethical meat diets
rise and fall together.
So I see a lot of evidence that
if we get people eating
higher welfare meat that we'll
also encourage vegetarianism,
rather than the competitive
scenario.
And I think we actually need
to do some research.
This is really what I came to.
Because what I want to say is
I think there are large
elements of the so-called kind
of ethical or humane meat
movement which are actually
really hostile to vegetarian.
They don't say that
explicitly.
But there's this notion that's
really kind of a meat advocacy
and then do it right
on the back end.
And I think that's a really
serious thing to avoid.
We think it's really important
to say as we work towards
higher welfare animal farms that
there is another viable
option and that many people
really need to be adopting it
if we're gonna be successful,
which is
vegetarianism or veganism.
So I don't take that as a small
part of the solution.
I think it's a big part.
But my bet is that we can work
for these high-welfare farms
and advance that at
the same time.
But I think the real answer is
we need to do some studies
because this is a really
serious question.
And we need to find out when we
promote this kind of thing,
does it make vegetarians go back
to eating higher welfare
meat or does it in fact promote
higher welfare,
high-ethical eating
in general.
BRIAN: Cool.
Thanks for the answer.
AARON GROSS: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: I talked a lot of
farmers who do like the whole
small farm thing.
And they have problems
with the USDA.
I was wondering if you're
addressing that discrimination
between the factory farms
and the smaller farmers?
AARON GROSS: Yeah.
Absolutely.
So the question is about
addressing the way in which
the USDA is often a kind of
problem for small farmers.
So the USDA is structured in
such a way that it really
supports factory farming.
They don't really know
what to do with small
farmers like Frank.
So the USDA comes
to Frank's farm.
They're like, where are your
waste lagoons, like the big
cesspool you saw there?
And he's like, I don't have
any waste lagoons.
Like, but you're a chicken
operation.
And they literally don't
know what to do.
They don't even have like
a check box for how to
investigate a farm like that.
And that wasn't a
problem per se.
But of course in other cases,
they really do create all
sorts of problems.
It is something we're
working on.
We've mostly found that what
these small farmers need is
kind of business or consulting
services.
They know how to farm.
They know how to produce
a product.
But they don't know how to deal
with government paperwork.
They don't know how to put
together a business plan.
They don't know how to
think in those ways.
And so those are the services
we've really been providing,
not just to Frank but to
Kansas-area farmers in general.
And as we develop this model and
as we have more resources,
the idea is precisely to make
those services available.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for the
talk and for your time.
What are the major factors that
keep high-welfare farms
from being cost competitive
with the factory farms?
You mentioned that there was
more losses in terms of
animals dying if they're
outside?
And is it more labor
intensive?
And can automation drive
that cost down?
AARON GROSS: Yeah.
So the question is what are
the main factors that make
high-welfare farming
more expensive than
lower welfare farming?
Just to first clarify what I
said before, if we stick with
the factory chicken genetics
and we put those birds
outside, it creates
that problem.
Of course, if we take
traditional birds and we raise
them outside, they're
phenomenally healthy and have
robust immune system.
There's two issues.
There's one of scale.
What Frank is doing right now
is expensive in part just
because he's so small.
If we can scale that up
by demonstrating the
effectiveness of this model,
the costs will
go down to an extent.
The other factor is
externalities.
You currently have a factory
farm industry which can cause
hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of pollution,
create all sorts of injury
issues for their workers and
not pay them.
So you've got all of these
externalized costs that aren't
externalized in the
high-welfare farm.
They are polluting something.
They're cleaning it
up and so forth.
They're different
kind of players.
So if we can clean up the
externalities, which is a
legal issue, that would
deal with the largest
kind of chunk of it.
And it's hard to calculate
exactly how much those things
cost for the reasons
you can imagine.
It's a complicated equation.
But it will be more expensive.
Meat is artificially
cheap right now.
We pay less for food of any
kind then at any point in
human history in terms of
percentage of our income.
It's incredibly small.
We think food's gotten a little
bit more expensive
recently, but it's still
historically
at an all-time low.
And so part of the solution here
is to get us a little bit
more comfortable spending a
larger percentage of our
income, whether we're wealthy
or poor, but a larger
percentage of our income on food
and probably less higher
quality meat.
AUDIENCE: Hi there.
I used to work for a large
environmental organization.
And I was always amazed that
animal agriculture really
didn't make the list of things
we talked about.
We talked about a lot
of other things.
But as the number one cause of
climate change, I felt like we
were burying our heads
in the sand when we
didn't address it directly.
And, I guess it's not a really
targeted question, but I would
guess that if we could get the
environmental community more
behind alternatives to current
animal agriculture that we'd
see faster progress
potentially.
Do you have thoughts on why
we haven't seen the
environmental movement--
is it just that vegetarianism or
eating meat is so personal
that it's something they're
scared to touch?
I'd just love to hear your
thoughts on that.
AARON GROSS: Yeah.
Thank you.
No, it's a great question.
So the question is why haven't
environmental groups been more
active fighting factory farming
and talking about
these diet issues, and yeah,
a question of longstanding
interest to me.
It is one of the reasons I
started the talk with talking
about identity and the way in
which it's bound up because I
think that's a huge
part of it.
There's something--
with many environmental groups,
there's history of
connection with hunting and
preservation around that which
has become part of
their ethos.
But whether it's an
environmental group or any
other kind of group, for the
most part, Americans work
within a frame in which
you have to eat meat.
That's not a decision that's
going to be negotiated or
considered.
It's kind of an unwritten law.
The way you can kind of do this
as a thought experiment
is could someone become
president if they were a
vegetarian?
There's no law against a
presidential candidate being
vegetarian.
But honestly, what do you think
would happen if we had a
vegetarian?
They'd be killed, no
pun intended here.
It's just completely
unacceptable.
And it's only really the animal
movement which has
gotten over that cultural
barrier and is willing to say
to people, you know what, maybe
you shouldn't eat them
at all or you should eat less.
It's happening in the
environmental movement now.
A few years ago, Sierra, Club
became the first to kind of
have a big campaign against
factory farms.
And it does help a lot.
And the Waterkeepers Alliance
won some incredible lawsuits
against pig factory farms.
It cost them $12 million
in lawsuits.
Unfortunately the CEO of
Smithfield at the time took a
$12 million bonus.
So it shows you how much
that is a big fine.
But the environmental groups
are having an impact.
And we are seeing
progress there.
But that's a cultural battle.
And I think one of the most
important things we can do is
really just to get people
comfortable talking about meat
as something optional, as
something which may be if it
doesn't meet our values, we
shouldn't be eating it.
And if we do want to eat
it, maybe we need
to change the system.
And that's a tough one and
very important one.
Good question.
Good question to end on.
CHRIS: Great.
Please join me in thanking
Aaron one more time for
joining us at Google today.
