Systems Thinking & Factory Farming: A Strategic Approach with Dr. Rachel Mason

Mariann Sullivan: I'm thrilled to have you, and you know, I'm sorry I didn't learn about this earlier. I try to stay on top of things, but the way I did hear about your work in general, and specifically the thing we want to talk about, so I guess the best place to start, is the article on Faunalytics, about this report that you wrote, and that led me to the full report, which is published on the Animal Charity Evaluators website. Can we just start with breaking down the title a little bit? What do you mean by a systems focused approach to industrial food animal production? What work is the word systems doing there?

Rachel Mason: Yeah, that's a great question and one that can be a bit difficult to explain succinctly. Really the concept of the system is that we need to look beyond the factory farm itself, the confined animal feeding operation or CAFO. That can often be the focus of our efforts. I mean, for very good reason.

This is where the animals live. It's where they suffer. It's where we want to intervene. But in reality, try to avoid using the word system here, the mechanism that supports the very existence of the factory farm is just so huge and sprawling and extends well beyond the farm itself. Yeah, if you really want to understand what's going on and look for opportunities to make this work differently or not even exist at all, then it's really helpful to situate the factory farm within this broader mechanism that includes the production of the feed for the animals.

It includes the policies that allow that food to be produced so cheaply that factory farming can happen. It includes the consumers that eat the food. It includes this whole culture that says it's okay to do this. It's okay to treat animals this way and produce food in this manner. And so the systems focused approach is taking a bird's eye view of the whole system and given that there is so much going on here, that's difficult and depressing to deal with, but it also means that there are lots and lots of different places where we can think about intervening.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, that's what I really liked about the way you put it, because it is so daunting, the way it's pretty much embedded in all aspects of the world. But it does create opportunity. I mean, the way you see it, that it creates opportunities. There are a lot of places to intervene and there's a lot of places that people are already intervening.

Not everybody is focused on the same thing. And I like that you count that as such a good thing. And I also wanted to take this quote out. You saw it as, Creating opportunities is raising the possibility of mounting a movement wide response, targeting the system from multiple angles in a strategic and coordinated way. And I think that movement wide, that expression movement wide is carrying a lot of baggage. Why is this big picture analysis so hard to get, and how did you set out to like really do that bird's eye view? What kind of approach do you have to take? One of the things I think is interesting about your work is that unlike so many scientists, you don't seem to hone in on getting more and more expert in one thing.

I mean, not that you're not expert, but rather there are so many different elements of scholarship and inquiry that need to be approached here. Is that right? Is that the role you're trying to play?

Rachel Mason: Well, maybe I should answer that question by taking a step back and explaining what got me to do this work in the first place, without going into my entire personal history. I did become vegetarian at the age of about 12 when I saw some pictures of pigs on factory farms, but I never really did anything with that.

And there was no sort of careers advice. I wasn't involved in any kind of advocacy activist groups at the time. So I just went off to university and did my own thing. But then, you know, I live out here in rural Hawaii, I live on a homestead, we grow our own food, and I just became increasingly fascinated with the process of growing food.

Like, how do the plants work? How does the soil work? How is this all connected? And why is this so different from the mainstream food system? Like, why has that gone in a completely different direction? And I just really honed in on this question and realized that's what I want to understand. So I went back to school, long story short, took some other jobs, learned soil science, did some work at universities in ecology, agroecology, that kind of thing.

And I'd learned a lot about the environmental effects of factory farming along the way. I had published some research into cattle production, dairy production, greenhouse gas emissions, that kind of thing. So I had that part of factory farming pretty much down, but also from having just spent time at, at the University of Vermont actually, talking to people in many different fields, from economics to anthropology, and back to the natural sciences, I just realized that there's this whole, thing happening here, and I only understand a tiny corner of it.

And I know a little bit about how people in the farmed animal advocacy movement approach this. I know something about the various tactics they use, but I just had this nagging sense of there's a whole system here, there's this whole mechanism, it works in some way, something's driving it, something's propelling it, and something's making it continue in the world.

And then on the other hand, we have the people who are fighting back against all the many different problems that it causes. But I don't understand how their work intersects with the rest of the system, how the responses from the movement interact with the factors that are driving the system in the first place.

So that's what made me make this proposal to Animal Charity Evaluators to say, I don't understand this. I can't find it written down anywhere. So somebody needs to dig into this whole thing and finally write it down once and for all and produce a reference that we can all come back to.

Mariann Sullivan: I assume your hope is not just to figure it out, but also to help people find ways to do something about it, and you use the word resist a lot, which is a word I think people like to apply to this. Do you feel that that's a piece, well, it's not really a piece that's missing from animal advocacy, it's kind of the, the piece is the whole big view, that a lot of animal advocates are focused on one approach or another, and that we all need to know more about the big overall view in order to understand how the piece that we're working on fits into that? Is that going to produce better advocacy?

Rachel Mason: My hope is, yes, this is a hypothesis. I'm a scientist, I'm proposing a hypothesis, and I think what I'm proposing is that, yes, we're all going to do the thing that we can do, the thing that we are specialized in, the thing that we're good at, and that's fine, that's okay, that's valuable. But it does help if most people, at least on a very broad, you know, not, not super detailed level, can just see this big picture to some extent. And that we also have people within the movement who kind of specialize in not specializing, who can understand this big picture in a lot of detail, and play the role of coordinators in some way. Now, this is kind of theoretical.

How you actually do this in practice is really difficult, and we still have to figure this out. But, I'm thinking, if we understand how this system works, we know that we've got the people working on, say, the supply side, on reducing, say the number of people who are willing to work in the system or who have to work in the system.

We're providing alternatives for them. Then we have people working on the demand side as well, making it so maybe plant based meals are the default in certain contexts, making it so that people are just a bit more horrified by participating in this system on the, you know, eating the food side.

Then if we have people who can kind of bring us all together and figure out, okay, if we do this all at the same time in a coordinated and strategic way, then we can start to exert pressure at many points at once and generally start to steer this system in the direction that we want to.

Then, at least in theory, we should be stronger than we are just all doing our own thing without too much connection and coordination.

Mariann Sullivan: I think it's a very compelling point. I mean, and very compelling for someone who's been in this movement for a long time, and kind of in this observational way, doing the podcast, interviewing lots of different people doing different things. And, everybody is passionate.

Everybody is very focused on doing their own thing. And there is like, I think frequently, it's just hard to know what everybody else is doing. It's one of the roles I think that we have tried to fill. But, it even goes beyond that too. Though I think there may be less of this than there used to be, one of the things that has gotten in the way of people in the animal protection movement is the

the kind of my way or the highway approach, that what I'm doing is the right thing to be doing, and everyone else is doing the wrong thing. I mean certainly in the old rights versus welfare, it's not really old, it still exists... that actually what I'm doing is the right thing, what you're doing is not only the wrong thing, but probably counterproductive. Do you think that seeing the picture as a whole and understanding that a lot of people actually are working on very different things, but they actually might be coordinating in ways that are helpful, not counterproductive?

Rachel Mason: Yeah, exactly. So you can get a bit too Kumbaya about this, a bit like, oh, we're all working together for the same thing, therefore let's not have any criticism of anything. But I don't think that's the problem we have at the moment.

Mariann Sullivan: No, that's definitely not the problem.

Rachel Mason: Yeah, so understanding this as a system means, yeah, it can mean that instead of thinking, well, why is that person working on that one thing? That doesn't make any sense to me because I do something completely different, and I feel very strongly that what I'm doing is important, and it's working, and maybe you're right.

This lets you appreciate that, well, they're not necessarily doing the wrong thing, they're just working on a different part of this system at the same time as me, and maybe that's actually a good thing, because if you, you know, you poke at something in two different places at the same time instead of just at one place, then maybe you can make more of a difference. And how to do that in practice does do I mean, that's, that's the next frontier, I think.

But just this concept, I mean, the movement ecology framework is quite widely known within the movement, I think, at the moment. That's the one where you have, okay, some people are going to work on inside game, some people are going to work on outside game, mass mobilization, personal behavior change, creating alternatives.

That's kind of a, just another way of thinking about factory farming as a system. And yeah, you need the people talking to the politicians, you need the people developing the alternatives, you need the people who are getting people to be more open to trying alternatives. All of these things are necessary and, in principle good and helpful to each other.

The next step is to figure out, well, how do you most effectively deploy all those at the same time to make the biggest difference?

Mariann Sullivan: So one of the things, I mean, this may be getting too much in the weeds for your idea of looking at the big picture, but, I'm just interested in your thoughts on it. I think it's psychologically so hard for vegan animal rights advocates, the people who have woken up, been horrified, devoted their life to changing this, who can't figure out why no one else sees this.

I might be talking about myself. Um, To support, you know, things like cage free eggs or any kind of incremental reforms because it's, I mean, one of the things that we have to do, which I think is so frequently not noticed, is we have to support the activists, the people who are working for it, in feeling that they are doing the right thing.

They're not going to just do something strategic. I mean, like I said, this is going beyond your remit and not what you're really going to talk about, but you've thought about this a lot. Does that resonate with you that it's hard for, it's a particularly difficult movement for people to understand some of the different strategies because some of them actually affirm killing animals for food and some of them are horrified by killing animals for food.

I mean, to bring it down to its most basic principles.

Rachel Mason: Yeah, this is, it's a big tent, this movement. And one of the things that I had to work through in my own head as I was trying to write this report was what even are our goals? And in the end, I came up with a list of four different things that people might be working towards from just harm reduction to entire wholesale food system transformation, not just factory farming, but the entire, you know, capitalist food system as it is.

Thank you. So all of those things are represented. And I do personally struggle with this idea of, should we put more resources towards harm reduction, you know, the cage free eggs, the corporate campaigns, when we know they can work, but it's not in our heart what we want to see. We want to work hard to make life so much less awful for animals, not just a bit less awful. Yeah, so I do struggle with that myself, but I think that perhaps the harm reduction within the system is a little bit of a separate issue. If you put that to one side, then I think it becomes, it shouldn't be that difficult. I mean, I'm talking about what people should feel here, which is, you know, not really the best thing to do, but I think a systems wide framework, it does give you that opportunity to think those people, they're just doing a different thing towards the same goal.

They might be doing something that's not as overtly activist as I'm doing, they're not just telling people, stop eating the thing because the thing is so awful. But all of it is moving towards the same goal, just from different directions. So I think this view can open up that way of looking at the world as well.

Mariann Sullivan: You know, I've always thought, maybe this is just something I think to keep myself going, that when change comes, it could come very quickly. I think it's because I see how change, on this issue, change operates in individuals. There's this consciousness raising as we used to say in the 60s, like kind of aspect to it that all of a sudden you see it, and you can't unsee it. Like, once you accept that animals matter, they just matter, and you can't change it. Not everybody changes their eating habits overnight, but it happens a lot. And that the process of realizing what's happening to animals and not eating them anymore is like a thunderbolt kind of change. I wonder am I crazy to apply that to a social level?

Do you think this is the kind of change that we're seeking here could actually come quickly?

Rachel Mason: I'm not sure I'm qualified to speak about that in particular. Um,

Mariann Sullivan: Well, I'm not either, and I just did. So, uh,

Rachel Mason: I'm not sure that there's anything in my work that says one way or the other whether that's likely to happen. On the one hand, I think about civil rights and legalization of same sex marriage, that kind of thing. There have been some rapid changes in that arena, when people are just like, oh, of course, why does it matter to me whether two women or two men can get married?

You know, there's really nothing to fight against there. But then I also think about just small things like, you know, walkable, bike friendly cities and how little progress there has been in that very simple, logical area in many cities, especially in the US. So, yeah, I don't know.

Mariann Sullivan: How do you think activists who are listening to this, whether they're grassroots, whether they're working for organizations, regardless of the type of thing they're working on, use these insights, this overview, to best focus their own efforts when they're working on a very specific thing?

Rachel Mason: I think part of it is simply an appreciation of what other people are doing, which may make us, you know, just be able to talk to each other better about what we're doing. A bit more hypothetically, but also more specifically, we might be able to start using some of this information to do small scale sort of systems experiments. And I have in mind things like what they've been doing in Denmark recently, when I think about this, with their plant based foods action plan. Might be familiar to a lot of listeners. They now have commitments from the government to support a more plant based food system, despite Denmark having the highest density of pigs per capita in the world, being one of the world's biggest meat producers.

And what they have done there is started to work on both the supply side and the demand side. They have introduced programs to help farmers be able to grow plant based foods instead of feed for animals. So they're working on everything from, say, seed varieties to, well, they're also looking into, you can't just work on the supply side, you have to think about, okay, farmers are now producing more beans, for example, but people need to eat those beans.

So at the same time, they have educational programs for, say, educating chefs how to produce really delicious plant based meals. They have some plant based default programs in institutions. But I see that as an example of taking this kind of systems thinking and applying it and coming up with something really good and promising, this like national commitment to creating a more plant forward food system.

So if we can start to get together and do more things like that, maybe in other jurisdictions, a small country, a city, a county, something like that, I think that could be a powerful way of experimenting with these techniques and seeing what works and what doesn't.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, and speaking of a smaller jurisdiction that seems to be the way to go in the U. S. right now, if we go anywhere because of this incredibly insane, disruptive political climate we're living through. Do you think that local is the way to go and that there are a lot of opportunities to use this kind of systems thinking in seeking local change?

Rachel Mason: I think that probably is the way to go, to start with, and whether it's promising or not will depend on people's own localities, what's happening locally, but there must be places around the US, just talking about where we are right now, where people can identify these opportunities. Perhaps there's a place where there's already a strong kind of grassroots advocacy movement and maybe also some plant based defaults in institution work going on.

Maybe there's just a place where there's enough people already pushing in different directions that it's worth thinking about, well, if we coordinated a bit more and if we brought in actors working in this area too, then maybe we could achieve something really big. It's a bit tricky because systems are, they're always hierarchical.

And what happens on one level, one scale, whether it's say a city or a county, is always constrained by but also influences back what happens on a larger scale, like a state or a country or the global food system. So there's always that interplay there. But I do think it's worth thinking about, okay, in my city, we've already got stuff going on, maybe we're coordinating to some extent.

Well, if we zoom out a bit and think about what we could achieve, what are the various different pieces that could work together to help us get there faster?

Mariann Sullivan: I mean I assume, maybe I shouldn't assume that federal legislation, I mean you talk about people working in all different aspects of the movement including legislation and litigation as part of the system. You don't really foreclose any type of activism as potentially being part of a system not just living on its own, but looking at it in the systems approach. Do you think federal legislation is basically foreclosed at this point and we should be looking elsewhere?

Rachel Mason: Oh, you're asking all the hard questions. Um, I'm not a great fan of what is happening at the moment, and it seems like all the sort of sane things you used to be able to rely on, like, let's go to court to decide this issue, just seems so much more difficult at the moment. I don't have enough insight into what is actually happening in those corridors

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, we'll either. Yeah, neither do any of us.

Rachel Mason: Yeah exactly, to know what can be done at that level at the moment.

I assume that a lot of people are running around with hair on fire and no time to be doing anything at all. But we, we can still do what we can where we are in our states and in our other locations.

Mariann Sullivan: I mean, have you seen, specifically regarding factory farming, though I shouldn't limit it to that, because you do indicate that even other types of animal activism can have an effect on how people feel about animals generally. You mentioned The Non Human Rights Project as one of the things that you've looked at.

But even in the past, when things were more favorable politically, have you seen legislation as a potential area of progress? Or, even looking at it from a systems wide approach, it just seems like, when you're looking at a systems wide approach, you're looking at the power of the other side as well. And particularly when it comes to governmental forces, in the U. S. anyway, it just seems, it's very hard to get anything done legislatively. Has there been progress that you thought was particularly notable? Or is that still an area that's foreclosed for animal advocates?

Rachel Mason: I know there are people who have been working hard on this, Legal Impact for Chickens in the US, and then there's groups in the UK as well, and presumably in many other places. I have the impression that they haven't won that many cases yet, but that's not necessarily a problem at this point. I mean, at this point, one thing that is being achieved is raising the profile of these issues and kind of poking at the legal system, trying novel strategies to see where we might find a way in.

So I have to say, I don't follow this closely in more of the natural science end of things, but it does seem, it certainly seems like something worth experimenting with, even if circumstances are very difficult right now.

Mariann Sullivan: What are some of the areas that, perhaps ones that you're familiar with or even not, that you do see as, either in the past or potentially in the future, creating the possibility of change? Is there anything going on in the movement as a system or even individually that fits into the system that you see as particularly productive?

Rachel Mason: Yeah, there's a few things and I'm going to preface this by saying this is very much from my perspective, given my interests and expertise. I'm sure there's a lot of other stuff that I'm just not very aware of. But from my point of view, I am seeing promising attempts to start to engender coordination in the movement.

There's a number of people bringing groups together to strategize and think in this big picture way, bringing people from organizations that span the whole range. None of that seems to be super public yet, but I think people are just sort of figuring out how to have these conversations and where to get started.

So I think there is some motion in, in that area. Then one thing that would be really valuable to us if we could do it would be to monitor what the industry is doing and monitor what we are doing as a movement and how we are affecting industry. If you think about this from a scientific point of view, this is a crazy difficult thing to do.

You have so many confounding factors in the world, you never know exactly what your actions cause to happen versus something else out in the world. But still, if we could kind of measure the baseline of industrial animal agriculture, where is it at the moment? Like, where are the farms? How many animals are in them?

What practices are being used? Which companies are present? Who is expanding, you know, all this kind of thing. If we could measure that and then look at, well, what is the animal advocacy movement doing in response and how are things changing over time? That could be really helpful and valuable, but how do you do that with this enormous system when, you know, it's difficult enough just to design one experiment to figure out, okay, you took this action, what actually happened in response.

So I think this is a multi massive project, but there are people now experimenting with AI to try and gather relevant data about what industry is doing and turn that into a resource for advocates. And at the same time, try and gather the best of academic knowledge to figure out what kind of campaign should work, what should be effective, you know, what strategy should reach people, that kind of thing.

There are organizations that are trying to figure out how to do that at the moment. It really is early days. This is a very difficult problem, but I think we're starting to see some, some promising headway. And, uh, yeah, technology in general is definitely a double edged sword for the animals, but one thing I've been thinking about and working on as well is how to use computer vision techniques and satellite data to track where factory farms are, to identify them around the world, so we can figure out... well, we know pretty much what's going on in the US and Europe, at least to some extent. We have much less of a picture of what's going on in, say, Sudan, Ethiopia, India. So using technology to try and monitor that situation and then eventually do something about it.

So I think there's loads of really exciting work going on. I'm sure a lot more than what I've just described, but those are three things that have caught my attention recently.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, it also brings up the fact that, not to complicate this huge, huge issue even further, but it's a hugely international issue. And we really don't have, you know, I kind of pay attention to what's going on, but like every time I hear about what's going on in Africa, the ground seems to have shifted, not in the good direction. What are some of the challenges that are added to the kind of work you're doing by the fact that this industry is not only growing, it's growing so internationally so quickly?

Rachel Mason: It certainly is. Yeah, I do keep in touch with people who are very concerned about those developments and actually thinking about, is there a way to stop it before it gets entrenched in certain countries? And one of the things we need to do is figure out where that is. You can get some indications by looking at FAO statistics, for example, on animal productivity, but also using satellite data to look for new farms and that kind of thing, using traditional methods and AI to just kind of monitor company, you know, news releases and things, you know, they talk about when they're going to expand into different areas.

We can try and keep a handle on it that way, but yeah, this question of how do we promote some better way of producing the protein and the micronutrients that populations need in the Global South without heading for this very destructive industrial method of animal farming, that's a big thing.

I'm not sure that really got to the heart of your question though.

Mariann Sullivan: Well, I was actually going to ask a follow up question that might make clearer what I was getting at, because I think not only has the industry internationalized, but so has the movement. I mean in unbelievable ways. We're constantly hearing about the fact that there are new organizations and new people working on this around the world. I assume you see that as crucial, given the internationalization of factory farming, and are you seeing strategies in place in some of the larger organizations or in the way people are thinking about it? To kind of, you know, I've always said that, I mean, this is a kind of corny way of putting it, I guess, but we are kind of a nation unto ourselves, like, we're everywhere, and we think something different than most of the people around us about the most important thing in our life.

And we are everywhere, but do you think that this is a big focus of the movement, or should be, in trying to bring that aspect of the movement together, not just people working on different strategies, but people working in different places?

Rachel Mason: It does seem to be something that's growing. It's funny, it seems to be a bit of a dichotomy because when you just read things about the movement, you hear a lot about new organizations starting up in, say, Southeast Asia or in Africa, and existing organizations that have been there for a long time.

And yet when you look at the amount of funding that's going to them, that tells a completely different story. It's a much smaller amount. I have talked a bit to some activists from Asia and they have been quite interested in this idea of coordination and cooperation. They feel that they might be more open to that.

Maybe it's a cultural thing or maybe it's a, well, we're all new, we're willing to try lots of different things. So I think that, yeah, they do seem to be quite open to working in this kind of way. And as a movement, yeah, there's all these questions about, yes, we definitely should be thinking internationally.

There's a graphic I keep seeing where it's like a circle superimposed on Southeast Asia, and the caption is more humans and animals live within this circle than outside it. So clearly this is just a crucial area for us to be caring about. And then, yeah, there's all these questions about how do we best support people in the Global South, for example, without getting in the way of them and imposing our methodologies and our beliefs and our ways of doing things. So yeah, there's definitely questions to be answered there.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, it seems like your work is very useful in thinking in those kind of terms. Another thing that I really liked about the report, you have a whole list of potential interventions and you specifically disavow that you're talking about, you know, which is the right one, which is the wrong one, you're just kind of laying them out. And one thing you talk about is undercover investigations, which I think, at least in the past, have been very much the backbone of the movement. I mean in this country, and I think in some other places as well. I feel like Direct Action Everywhere, which you mentioned, that their work has taken undercover investigations and taken it a step further, a very big step further with their rescue efforts. I'm just wondering, do you agree and is this a result or, one of the reasons for a systems analysis for looking at the system? To look at what we are doing and then say, how can we take it a step further? I mean, would this be an example of that? Or is that in general just a way to look at systems and figure out what do we... I mean, you're, you're in the business of gathering all the information, but we also have to think of what to do with the information.

Rachel Mason: Yeah,

Mariann Sullivan: very long convoluted question, but

Rachel Mason: Well, that can be the beauty of a systems approach. Once you've laid everything out, you can start to see the gaps. One thing that really struck me when I wrote this report was how much work has to be done by people to make factory farming possible. Like, I'm going to digress just a little bit just because I think this is fascinating.

But back in the day, we couldn't raise chickens indoors. because they got rickets and their bones broke and it just didn't work. And then someone figured out, oh, okay, it's because they need vitamin D from sunlight to have strong bones. So if we want to raise them indoors, we have to synthesize vitamin D and administer it to the chickens.

So there was this crucial scientific insight and technological development that had to happen before raising chickens in barns was possible. And there's just many more instances of things like that when you look at the technological developments that support factory farming. And from my perspective as a scientist, what this means is that there's just so many people like me out there who are needed and who are involved in making this system work.

So maybe there is some way to reach other scientists and say like, why are you doing this? Do you believe this narrative about feeding the world? Is there something else you could be doing? What other research might be possible and might be interesting and productive for you? So that, to me, illustrated this gap, that some kind of activism that nobody's doing at the moment, and made me think about, oh, well, is that something we should be doing?

I have no idea how Direct Action Everywhere came by their strategy. But I do love the way that they have a clearly explained theory of change, like we are doing this in order to accomplish this one specific thing. And yeah, I mean that they are very high profile and all over the place, so it's really interesting to see how that's working out.

Mariann Sullivan: They do seem to have taken undercover investigations, which is, I say, I think is one of the most important things, because I mean, it was the first thing that really enlightened people what was happening on factory farms. But they weren't creating the change that they wanted to see and they took them and they tweaked them to make them much more dramatic. I mean I think in dramatic is the right word. They added an element of drama I mean by saving the animal and letting people see that animal they added an element of drama to it that that no that it's just drama It's also saving an animal, but obviously it was meant for people to see and to be moved by.

I just thought it was an interesting way to take what's being done and make it different and more impactful and that seemed like very much a systems approach. I guess I can't do this interview without asking you about climate change. Obviously, it's already disrupting the food system. And it will much more in the relatively near term. Like, are there opportunities here? I mean, that sounds horrifying to say, but I guess a better way of saying it is how should animal activists approach climate change to help reveal what is happening to the earth and what is happening to animals?

Rachel Mason: Right, so climate change is a tricky one. There is scientific literature which will show that factory farmed animals are less emissions intensive than, say, pasture raised beef,

Mariann Sullivan: Absolutely, absolutely, and if I can just interrupt too, uh, and chickens. Chickens are just much more climate friendly than beef.

Rachel Mason: Exactly. And in terms of the questions that they are asking, their answers are not wrong, but it just ignores a lot of the bigger picture in various different ways. So one thing is, yeah, industrially farmed animals, for each animal farmed, you might get less emissions than a non industrially farmed animal, especially when you're talking about beef.

But, there are so many pressures within the system to just raise more and more animals and produce more and more meat, that yeah, each one might be a little bit less climate unfriendly, but when you add it all up, the result is just, it's just bad. And then, okay, so you're comparing chicken to beef, but you could also compare chicken to beans, and the beans would win, so there's that question, yeah, there's that part of it as well.

And then, yeah, so maybe industrially raised chickens may be the most climate friendly as long as you don't just keep raising more and more and more of them. But climate change isn't the only problem here. The way I look at this is, climate change is a disruption of the Earth's carbon cycle.

We also have the Earth's nitrogen cycle, and the water cycle, and the phosphorus cycle, and everything. We have all of these systems in this planet that come together to support life, human life and other life. And we need all of these systems to be functioning. So, with chickens, yeah, you might have less disruption to the carbon cycle because of chickens, but all the manure that they produce has been a tremendous disruption to, say, the nitrogen cycle.

Or even in just local communities, like, you don't want to live next to a chicken farm because it's kind of disgusting, same with a pig farm. There's just all these other impacts in terms of other environmental impacts and then things like public health, zoonotic diseases, quality of life, and just on and on and on.

So if you're just going to say, yeah, chickens are great because they are climate friendly, then that's just sort of missing the point in a variety of different ways.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, another crisis that the industry is certainly contributing to at the moment that is huge, that is, I find it, of all the bizarre things that go on with knowing about factory farming, I find bird flu one of the most extraordinary things to think about, because all anybody in the press or the mainstream press talks about is the price of eggs. I mean, there's no other reference point that I have seen for bird flu, which is, you know, is terrifying from a human point of view because like we did just do COVID

Rachel Mason: We

Mariann Sullivan: two years ago. It wasn't like it was the 1918 flu epidemic. It was very recent. We know the risks of viruses. Aside from that, there's no mention of the birds or anything.

It's just the price of eggs. How important is price to a systems analysis? Is everything we're doing should be focused on raising the price?

I mean, I won't ask you how we do that because I know that that's not your job. Your job is to look at the big picture and let other people figure out how we pull it off. But is price, how important is price?

Rachel Mason: I think price is super important. There's so much incentive to drive down costs and keep prices, maybe not quite as low as possible, because there is some, there have been price fixing scandals and that kind of thing. But yeah, the whole promise is feeding the world affordable protein. And we've seen what happened, like you just pointed out, all the talk about the bird flu is the price of eggs.

So yeah, I think price is super important. It gets a bit tricky to talk about what we should do to raise prices because opponents will pick up on that and say they want to make your groceries more expensive, when really it's more a question of absorbing the true cost of producing these goods, which is currently offloaded onto other parts of the system, people, animals, and the environment.

So yeah, I think we have to be careful about how we talk about it, but yeah, price is super important.

Mariann Sullivan: So this is probably not a fair question, but in doing this research, have you come across any work or organizations or individuals who you would wanna shout out as being particularly in tune to systems analysis of the industry or for any other reason? Can you suggest anyone to follow if people wanna become more attuned to thinking in these kinds of terms? I mean, in addition to yourself, of course.

Rachel Mason: Oh wow, there are so many people I could point to. I'm going to

Mariann Sullivan: that's why I said

Rachel Mason: unfair here. Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: a fair question because it's just horrible when people ask you to do that and inevitably you leave out people, so I'm sorry, but, but I think that people would really like to know, who are the voices to listen to here.

Rachel Mason: I like the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. They are not at all an animal focused organization, but what they do is, they think about the forces that drive the animal agriculture system as a whole. They have a couple of really good podcasts, one was about the farm bill that came out a couple of years ago, and then a more recent one called How to Fight a Factory Farm, and these go into the underlying drivers of this system, and who has the power and how you can fight back, so I really recommend their resources.

There's another organization which is very small, as far as I know, but I really like their writing, it's called Seed the Commons, I think they're based in California and they just have some really interesting perspectives on kind of this wholesale food system transformation in a way that doesn't involve farmed animals.

So, a lot of the people who are thinking about food systems transformation, kind of this, this less capitalistic, cutthroat, globalized, food system where the power is all in the hands of a few corporations, people who are thinking about what alternative food systems could be, they often have very little to say about animals, whereas Seed the Commons, their vision is very strongly a just food system that doesn't include animals, and they have some really interesting writing on the subject, especially on regenerative grazing.

I know you had some guests on recently who also talked about that. They have some good perspectives as well. And yeah, there are so many more, but I'll leave it there for the moment.

Mariann Sullivan: And how can people follow you and your work?

Rachel Mason: Oh God, I am awful at this aspect of being a scientist. I have basically no social media presence. You can find me on LinkedIn and I believe you'll be making my email address available. It's totally fine for people to get in touch. I do try to be approachable, accessible and available and I'm always happy to talk about these issues with people.

Mariann Sullivan: I guess I have a final question, which is probably another unfair question, but talking about the supply side, why is this so hard? I mean, it's so obvious that we're right. And I mean, that may sound, I mean, everybody thinks they're right, or they change their mind. But it's so obvious that we're right in so many ways and industrial animal agriculture is so at odds with, you know, lots of the health of the planet, the health of individuals, but with the moral compass of so many people. People actually do care about animals. And I know this is a big question with many components, but you are a systems analyst. So, what is your shorthand version of what makes this so difficult?

Rachel Mason: On the supply side, meaning like, why are people even willing to be involved in this system, there's a lot going on there. I mean, some people are very much removed from what's going on on the ground, and they can make a lot of money out of this system. I'm thinking about people high up in large companies, so there's that component.

Then there's the people working in the slaughterhouses, who are often people who have no choice but to be there. I've seen scientists just repeat this mantra of, we have to feed the world, it's important to increase pork

Mariann Sullivan: They say it constantly that we have that constantly. It is their only mantra.

Rachel Mason: Right. And once you start to think critically about it, that just, it just, no longer adds up. So maybe there's something we need to do in school and university curricula, like say New Roots Institute is doing. Shout out to them because they think like this too. And then people just seem to have this vision of, oh yeah, there is factory farming and it's horrible, but that's not what I'm eating.

Like, look, look, my packet of eggs has a happy chicken on the front. So yeah, this again, this is this sort of big picture systems kind of point of view. I don't know what I can do about people at the top of Tyson and JBS, for example, but maybe there is something I can do in a university that would make a difference in that context.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, we all have to be working exactly where we are, and I think one thing that's very powerful about your work is that you're telling people exactly that. Wherever you are, you can fit what you're doing into a bigger picture, and you're not all on your own, just feeling terrible about this.

There is a big world of us. It's much smaller than their world, but it's growing. So thanks for all that you do. I highly recommend that people read this report and to stay on top of your work. I'm excited to hear about your research now into AI and it's impacts and uses and figuring out where the factory farms are seems like a really important part of this.

Thanks, Rachel.

Rachel Mason: Yeah, thank you very much for having me.