A new wave of welfare technology companies is developing tools to monitor, improve, and verify animal welfare at scale. These innovations could transform farming systems globally.
Technology alone cannot solve animal welfare problems, but it can dramatically increase the quality and scalability of welfare monitoring. Automated systems that detect lameness, respiratory disease, or hunger before human stockpeople would notice them represent genuine welfare improvements in intensive systems. More transformatively, companies developing cultivated meat, precision fermentation, and plant-based proteins are working to eliminate factory farming at the source. Welfare technology investment should be evaluated alongside — not instead of — systemic farming system reform.