We dig into the research so you don’t have to
This page gives an introduction to our thinking in some key areas and serves as a launch pad for you to learn more.
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Why fix factory farming?
Imagine a world where our meals do no harm: to animals, people or the planet
Why should we fix factory farming? Because it catastrophically fails on all these fronts. Torturing animals, destroying our environment, and risking our health with potential pandemics.
If someone treated cats or dogs like we treat billions of farmed animals, there would be national uproar and they'd go to jail: hens kept in cages no bigger than a microwave for their entire lives, pigs confined so they can't move for months when they give birth and fish eaten alive by pests in filthy water.
Why do we love our dogs but tolerate torturing pigs, chickens and cows? These animals feel pain, fear and distress. They're smart and able to form friendships with each other and with people.
Why do we allow factory farms to pollute our water and destroy rainforests? The largest farms produce more sewage than the world's human population, and half of cropland is used to feed farmed animals, driving deforestation.
Why do we put our health at risk? Factory farms breed pandemics, with 50% of new diseases originating in animals. Overuse of antibiotics in farming is a leading cause of superbugs that threaten our entire medical system.
Factory farming ignores these questions, simply to deliver us cheap food.
Learn more about the issues with factory farming
Factory farming is a global system which causes a wide range of issues. Some simple and obvious while others are complicated and even surprising. If you'd like to learn more you can dig into our thinking here:
Animals
Factory farming puts profits before animal welfare, causing suffering at an industrial scale.
People
Factory farming endangers our health: It increases antibiotic resistance and the risk of new pandemics, all while contributing to global hunger.
The Planet
Factory farming is a major climate change culprit, it drives deforestation, it depletes the ocean and pollutes our soil, air and waterways.
The great news: there is another option.
We can make our farming kinder.
Charities we support have made incredible progress:
Winning legal battles to improve animal welfare
Convincing hundreds of companies to cut out the cruelest practices
Making plant-based alternatives more available for people to choose
Supporting alternative protein development around the world
At FarmKind, we're not just imagining a kinder future – we're building it. With your support for the best charities out there, we can fix factory farming.
Which charities should you support?
Super-effective charities are a smart choice
Fact: Some charities help hundreds, if not thousands of animals for the same amount of money that some of the best-known animal charities need to help just one¹.
How is this possible?
The answer is that there are so many farmed animals – a million are killed every hour in the US alone – and that they suffer so badly on factory farms. Because of this, shifting farms away from the cruelest practices, like using battery cages, sow stalls and slaughter without stunning, can make a huge difference for millions of animals at a time. Meanwhile, it costs thousands of dollars for a pet shelter to look after an animal for a year¹. For this reason, where you donate can matter even more than how much you donate.
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Let’s start by being really clear. The evidence is overwhelming that farmed animals like pigs, chickens, cows and even fish can feel pain². The experience of a pig on a factory farm is going to be pretty similar to how a dog or cat would feel in the same situation.
So, if we agree that we don’t want our pets to suffer, it makes sense to want to prevent the suffering of farmed animals too. By supporting campaigns to pressure corporations to boycott the cruelest practices, your donation can stop more than a thousand chickens from spending their lives confined to battery cages, for example. This has got to matter in the same way that helping dogs and cats does.
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Of course, human suffering matters and we should do what we can to end it. But factory farming doesn’t just torture animals – it is destroying our planet and endangering us too. Animal agriculture contributes at least around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It is a leading cause of new antibiotic resistant diseases and a breeding ground for the next COVID-style pandemic. Donating to farmed animal charities is a holistic way to give, helping animals, people and the planet all at once.
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The core insight that some charities do hundreds of times more good per dollar than others is equally true for those working on climate change. Some charities are evidence-based and laser-focused on efficiency and others just aren't. Consider for example the REDD+ carbon offset scheme, which has been repeatedly accused of being 10x less effective than advertised and in some cases of actively causing harm by restricting indigenous peoples' access to forestry resources on which they depend.
Meanwhile, combatting factory farming through food systems reform is a particularly holistic approach as it brings benefits for not just the climate but the environment more broadly (for example, through reduced air, water and soil pollution) not to mention the enormous benefits for animal welfare, human health and justice.
But you don't have to choose between giving with your head and giving with your heart
Maybe you already donate to your local shelter, an environmental organisation or natural disaster relief. That’s great! But you might also want to make sure your donation dollars are used wisely by charities and have the biggest positive impact possible.
The good news is that you don't have to choose between giving with your head and with your heart. On our platform, you can split your donation between your favorite charity and a super-effective charity, giving you the best of both worlds.
We find the super-effective charities so you don't have to
There are a lot of charities out there. It can be really difficult to figure out which ones are making a difference at all, let alone which one will make the biggest difference possible with your donation. How can you compare charities that do completely different things? How do you separate the real facts from misleading marketing? Now, you don't have to.
We’ve done the homework for you, so that you can donate to the best charities working to reform factory farming without the hassle of spending hours doing research.
What we look for:
Charities that will do the most good with additional donations, based on the best evidence available. Transparency is key, so that we know where your money goes and how many animals it can help.
Charities that collectively address all the major harms of factory farming. This means helping all main groups of animals harmed by factory farming while also making farming kinder to people and the planet.
How we pick our top animal charities:
All our charities are rigorously assessed and recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), who are an independent organization that spends thousands of hours interrogating charities' operations to understand how much good they do with each donation. Their evaluations are fully transparent and publically available, as is their evaluation methodology.
We also work with expert grantmakers to hand-pick the ACE recommended charities that best meet the needs of donors like you.
Our funds
Don't know which charity to give to? We've got that covered too:
Our Impact Fund allows you to support all of our top animal charities at once by distributing a portion of your donation to each of them. Together, our top animal charities are making holistic, systemic change to the way we farm. They work with farmers, scientists, corporations, policymakers and governments to fix factory farming for good.
Our Climate Fund allows you to support those of our top animal charities with programs that reform our food system to be more climate friendly, for example by promoting the development of alternative proteins or helping big organisations to make low-carbon plant-based options more available to their staff.
If you'd like to pay it forward, you can contribute to our Bonus Fund. 100% of your donation will still go to charity, but it will motivate others to donate to super-effective charities along the way. You can indirectly generate more support for the charities working to fix factory farming than if you donated to them directly. Learn more about this option here.
And, of course, supporting one of our super-effective charities that appeals to you in particular is an excellent choice, if you'd like.
Get to know our top animal charities
All of our top animal charities are included in our Impact Fund, while the subset of charities with programs that make a particularly big difference to combatting climate change are in our Climate Fund.
= Climate fund
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It is hard to be precise here. The Battersea Dogs and Cats Home — one of the UK's oldest and best known animal shelters — says it costs them £46,000 per day to look after their animals and looks after around 7,000 new cats and dogs per year. That’s ~$21.5 million USD per year, which is just over $3,000 USD per animal. Meanwhile, our recommended charities can spare a chicken from a life of confinement in a battery cage for just $0.85. You can explore how far your donations can go with our super-effective charities using the impact calculator below.
See the following links to our "Farming's broken: Let's fix it" blog series, where we present just some of the evidence that pigs, chickens, cows and fish feel pain in the footnotes
How far can your donation go?
Notes:
This illustrative estimate is based on real-world past performance. Future impact could be higher or lower depending on a wide range of factors.
Where reasonable estimates aren’t possible for a particular charity, we estimate their impact based on the most similar other recommended charities.
We have generally estimated the impact of charities' main programs only, meaning they may also help other types of animals or have other climate benefits which aren't reflected in this estimate.
Learn in detail how the calculator works here.
How much should you donate?
What does it cost to help animals through donations as much as the average diet harms them through factory farming?
Learn in detail how the calculator works here.
