How we estimate the impact of donations and the cost to offset dietary choices
Published 10th April, 2024
Why Estimate Such Things in the First Place?
You can dig into the spreadsheet underlying our calculators here.
Image courtesy of Bridget Laudien / We Animals Media
When it comes to doing the right thing or helping living beings in need, many people find something uncomfortable about involving math or calculations, as if the importance of these actions can be reduced to mere numbers. However, we live in a world of finite resources, meaning that whenever we decide to use some of those resources to help in one way, we're choosing not to help in another. These kinds of trade-offs are sad but unavoidable. Taking the importance of doing the right thing seriously means attempting to quantify such things so we can make the best trade-offs and help as much as possible.
FarmKind has developed two main types of estimations to help guide these decisions: the Impact Calculator and the Compassion Calculator aka ‘offset calculator’.
The Impact Calculator estimates how far your donation could go. We chose to develop this tool because: (1) Many of our donors tell us this is something they want to see when donating. (2) It makes the impact of donating more concrete and tangible, helping people connect with it emotionally, which is crucial for motivation. We believe this emotional disconnect is one reason why donating to impactful charities is often overlooked as a way to make a difference.
The Compassion Calculator estimates the cost of balancing out the impact of your dietary choices. Many people are not willing or able to change their diet today but still want to make a difference. This is completely understandable! Changing one’s diet is hard. Animal welfare and environmental considerations are important, but they are not the only factors influencing dietary decisions. Health, financial, family, and other personal circumstances vary from person to person. Each individual values these factors differently, and all these sets of values are valid. By estimating how much it might cost to help animals as much as the average diet negatively impacts them, we guide people on how much they might want to donate to offset their dietary impact. Whilst we’re not suggesting that one needs to change their diet to have an impact, we’re also not suggesting that people who are making dietary changes should donate instead. These are both valuable ways to contribute, and they’re not mutually exclusive. People who are especially excited about making a difference in reforming our food system can consider some combination of the two.
But First – The Caveats
We think it’s important to be clear about the limitations of our methodology.
Ballpark accuracy: Estimating the impact of donations and the cost to offset dietary choices is inherently complex. To add to this challenge, there is often limited available data to work with. As such, our outputs should be viewed as rough ballpark estimates rather than precise figures.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. Our estimates are grounded in the real-world past performance of our recommended charities. We believe this is the strongest evidence for the likely future performance of a charity, but it is not a guarantee. The future impact of additional donations could be higher or lower, influenced by a wide range of unpredictable factors. Some programs could hit diminishing returns. Others could discover new efficiencies.
Based on a sample of programs: We base our estimates on the charity programs for which there is available data (typically their the main programs). This means that overall they may help different kinds of animals and may help them in different ways than what is captured in our estimates.
Focus on direct impacts: We typically estimate direct impacts only. Indirect benefits, such as raising public awareness and motivation to improve our food system, are not captured in our calculations, even though they can be significant.
Potential bias of data sources: Our estimates often rely on data provided by the charities themselves. While charities may have an incentive to present themselves positively, all of our recommended charities have met the rigorous standards of the Animal Charity Evaluators team, ensuring transparency and data integrity.
Estimates for some charities are based on others: When accurate estimates for a specific charity are unavailable, we base our estimates on the most similar recommended charities.
Quantifying suffering is imprecise and relies of judgement calls: For our offset calculator, we need to estimate the proportion of a farmed animal’s lifetime suffering that is prevented by different improvements to farming practices. Quantifying suffering is a new field and has inherent limitations. As such, this part of our calculations should be considered directionally accurate at best. We try to compensate for this by adding large discounts for conservatism to our offset calculations.
Now, with no further ado, let's dive into the explanation of how these estimates work.
Estimating how far your donation could go with our impact calculator
This calculator estimates how many of 5 types of animal are helped and how much carbon emissions are offset for a given sized donation to one of our recommended charities. Of our two calculators it is the far simpler one.
You can see a summary of the outputs below:
"Not affected" means there are no programs that directly help this species (although the charity may indirectly help these animals by changing people's views on factory farming in general). "Not estimated" means the charity has programs that may help these animals, but no data is available on their cost-effectiveness. Any animals helped this way are a bonus on top of the animals included in the estimate.
You can see information about the specific programs that underpin each estimate in the corresponding tab(s) for that estimate:
The Good Food Institute (GFI) : This estimate is based on a Vivid Economics study commissioned by the ClimateWorks Foundation and the UK Government which forecasts high and low innovation scenarios in the alternative protein space in terms of the tonnage of meat produced globally. We borrow from analysis by Giving Green which estimates how much of a difference GFI’s work makes on whether we end up in a high or low innovation scenario, and therefore how much less meat is produced, in expectation, due to GFI’s work. We then get from how much less meat is produced to how much carbon is abated and how many animals are saved based on the carbon intensivity of meat and the average weight of different animals. This is likely our weakest estimate from a methodological accuracy perspective.
The Humane League (THL): This estimate is based on their cage-free corporate campaigns for laying hens and their ‘Better Chicken Commitment’ campaigns for broiler chickens. For the cage-free campaigns, the estimate is based on data from THL on their 2022 performance: In particular, divides the number of chickens covered by commitments they secured that year by their total expenditure associated with these campaigns. We then factor in how long these commitments might last / how much they might have sped up this transition, and the lifespan of each laying hen. Estimates for ‘Better Chicken Commitment’ campaigns come from the conservative case in a 2019 Rethink Priorities estimate of the average cost-effectiveness of all corporate campaigns for broiler chickens from 2005-2018.
Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI): This estimate is based on their Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA) program where local farmers become members and commit to meeting certain water quality and stocking density requirements in their ponds. The FWI team keeps record of how many farms are signed up, they get the estimated number of fish and shrimp in each pond from their farmers and the FWI team takes twice daily measurements of the water quality in a sample of their ponds to ensure that the farmers are compliant with ARA requirements.
Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP): This estimate is based on information provided by SWP about their humane slaughter program, which provides shrimp producers with electrical stunning equipment so that shrimp don't have to suffer a slow and painful death by asphyxiation while fully conscious. It’s calculated by dividing the number of shrimp each producer processes each year by the cost of providing them with stunners. It doesn’t consider the future benefits from proving to industry that adopting this technology at their own cost is technically and economically feasible.
Sinergia Animal: This estimate is the combination of estimates for three different programs, weighted based on what proportion of Sinergia’s 2023 budget went to each:
(a) Pig corporate campaigns: This estimate is based on Sinergia’s program in pressuring corporations in Brazil to commit to phasing out cruel farming practices for pigs in their supply chain.
The number of pigs helped is calculated by summing the number of mother pigs and piglets farmed by each corporation who made a commitment in 2023, and reducing this total to account for the fact that some corporations won’t follow through on their commitments, and the fact that in most cases Sinergia campaigned for the commitment alongside other organizations and so we can’t attribute all of the credit to Sinergia in our calculations. We also factor in how long the commitments might last, and the life expectancy of farmed pigs, to calculate the number of pigs helped during the commitments.
The cost to help the pigs comes from Sinergia’s breakdown of expenses by program. To be conservative, we add an additional 50% to account for the fact that some commitments won in 2023 would have benefited from campaigning done in previous years (the cost of which isn’t included in 2023’s expenses). To be even more conservative, we add an additional 250% to account for the costs to enforce these welfare commitments in future years, which will be worn by the charity sector.
We also make note of which practices each corporation committed to phase out (both different types of piglet mutilations — like ear notching, tooth clipping, tusk removal and castration — and reductions to how much time mother pigs spend confined in tiny sow stalls where they’re barely able to move). This information is factored into the offset calculator below.
(b) Chicken cage-free corporate campaigns: We used our estimate for The Humane League for this program
(c) Institutional meat reduction: This estimate is based on data for Sinergia’s “Nourishing Tomorrow” campaign, which in 2023 saw partner institutions run plant-based menu days that offset 1 million factory farmed meals, helping >130,000 animals. We used Dr Cynthia Schuck’s analysis to determine the rough breakdown of different types of animals who didn’t need to be factory farmed because of this program, and the CO2 emissions prevented as a result.
Dansk Vegetarisk Forening (DVF): It is very difficult to quantify DVF’s impact as it works at the systems level, impacting government policy and other institutions. To estimate DVF’s impact we use the estimate we have for the Good Food Institute, which also works at the systems level to reduce the amount of factory farmed animal products needed to feed the population
Estimating how much to donate with our compassion calculator
As a reminder, you can interrogate the underlying calculations in detail here.
This calculator builds off the work underlying the impact calculator.
How many animals are farmed to provide for the average Western diet?
The first step is to figure out how many animals need to be farmed to meet the demand of an average Western diet. Note that the average diet we use in this calculator isn’t the global average, but rather a weighted average of a handful of Western, English-speaking countries (USA, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand) which roughly reflect the donors that use FarmKind.
For land animals, we calculate how many farmed animals of each major type are available for consumption per person per year. This calculation combines two data sets from the UN FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization): (1) How many kilograms of each type of animal product are consumed per person, divided by (2) How much of each type of animal product are produced per animal (e.g. how many eggs per chicken).1
For aquatic animals, UN FAO data is unavailable, and so we use estimates for the US specifically from their National Fisheries Institute. These estimates give the amount of each aquatic animal consumed per person per year, but we then need to adjust these based on the percentage of these animals that are farmed as opposed to wild caught. Finally, we convert to the number of animals using estimates of the average ‘head-off gutted weight’ of each animal, taken from various sources.
Having estimated the amount of animals consumed per person on average, we then make two adjustments to convert it to an estimate of animals consumed per omnivorous adult (i.e. nor vegetarian or vegan) as this better reflects our donor base. This conversion used data sets for the percentage of people who are under 18 and the percentage of people who are vegetarian and vegan by country, and worked under the assumptions that adults each ~50% more food than people aged 0-18, and vegetarians eat the same amount of eggs and dairy on average as omnivores.
Finally, we converted from the amount of animals consumed to the amount of animals that need to be farmed. These numbers differ because of wastage in the supply chain which means that to produce 100 animals’ worth of food, more than 100 animals need to be farmed. The biggest driver of this wastage tends to be mortality, which is relatively low for some animals (e.g. ~1% for beef cows) and shockingly high for others (e.g. over 25% for shrimp and many kinds of fish). We only factor mortality into our estimates, so other forms of wastage like spoilage during transport, are not included.
What does it cost to help animals as much as being factory farmed harms them?
This bit of the calculator builds off the Impact Calculator:
The cost to help meat and dairy cows comes from the estimate of how much it costs for The Good Food Institute to help these animals
The cost to help pigs comes from our estimate for Sinergia Animal
The cost to help laying hens comes from our estimate for The Humane League
The cost to help broiler chickens (i.e. those raised for meat) comes from Rethink Priorities estimate for broiler corporate campaigns on average
The cost to help fish comes from the estimate for the Fish Welfare Initiative
The cost to help shrimp comes from the estimate for the Shrimp Welfare Project
In the case of The Good Food Institute (GFI), whose works reduces the number of animals farmed, we can simply divide the number of cows (for example) farmed to feed each person for a year by the expected cost for GFI to help one cow.
For other animals, the estimate requires an additional step: Our recommended charities address key welfare issues for pigs, chicken, fish and shrimp, however the welfare improvements they achieve today still do not result in completely kind farming practices. For example, by one estimate, broiler chickens raised in accordance with the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) suffer roughly 50% less over the course of their lives than industry standard practices. This means you would need to cause 2 chickens to be raised in accordance with the BCC to help as much as the demand for 1 chicken harms them. We’ve used estimates of percentage suffering reduction for each charity program used in our calculations to get from the cost to help an animal to the cost to prevent the total amount of suffering an animal experiences throughout its life on a factory farm. This is a very difficult thing to estimate, that involves some subjective judgement calls about how much worse certain kinds of experiences are than others. Fortunately, we get to rely on the work of the expert researchers at Ambitious Impact who have developed a metric, the Suffering Adjusted Day (or SAD), which they used to make these estimates for us.
The final calculation
The last step is to divide the number of each animal farmed each year to support the average Western person’s diet by the cost to prevent one animal’s worth of suffering. At this point we also make an adjustment to make our estimate more conservative. We do this because our estimates involve a lot of uncertainty, and we want donors to be quite confident that the amount they’re donating is, in fact, enough to help animals (in expected value terms) as much as one’s diet harms them. We’d rather be conservative and have people end up helping more than they intend rather than have people think they've offset their consumption when they haven't.
We also make it possible to estimate the cost to offset your specific diet based on the amount of servings of each type of animal product you consume each week (which may differ significantly from the average person). We estimates average serving sizes by taking the average of a number of recipes online (rather than relying on dietary recommendations, which are almost always considerably lower than the actual amount of animal products people eat per serve).
Wrapping up
We hope this write-up has made it clearer how our calculators work and given you some degree of confidence in the amount of work and the level of rigour that went into them. But more importantly, I hope it shows just how uncertain these sorts of estimates are.
One final thought we’ll leave you with, as an example of why doing these sorts of calculations perfectly is endlessly complicated: To farm animal products for human consumption, we feed farmed animals other animals. For example, wild caught fish make up part of the food fed to farmed fish, chickens and pigs. In fact, according to a Faunalytics estimate, for every pig farmed, an estimated 58 wild fish are slaughtered to feed them. In addition to being a surprising and depressing statistic, this shows just how complicated our food system is and how difficult it is to measure all of the harms that factory farming of animals creates.
But the good news is that making a big difference is easy!
You can help many animals per dollar by supporting some of the most effective charities working to fix our food system. So what are you waiting for?
