Insect farming for food and feed is expanding rapidly, with emerging welfare science examining whether insects have sentience and what welfare standards are appropriate given the profound uncertainty about insect experience.
Insect farming welfare engages with genuinely unresolved scientific questions about the necessary conditions for morally relevant suffering. Unlike vertebrate farming where the welfare case is clear, insect welfare requires navigating deep uncertainty about consciousness and experience in organisms with radically different neural architectures. The scale of insect farming — potentially trillions of individuals — means that even low probability of morally relevant experience creates large expected welfare costs. Responsible engagement with insect welfare uncertainty involves investing in research to resolve key questions, applying precautionary welfare improvements where low-cost, and maintaining intellectual honesty about what is and is not known. This is a domain where early investment in welfare science will determine whether a major new food system develops with or without welfare consideration.