Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research — Farm Animal Welfare Research (2017)

The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $1 million to the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) to co-fund requests for applications (RFAs) for research on solutions to what we see as two major problems in farm animal welfare: bone fractures in cage-free hens and the painful castration of male piglets. It is our impression that both of these problems are scientifically tractable. FFAR plans to use this grant and at least $1 million of its own funding to fund scientific projects focused on solving these problems.

We are excited about this grant because a) we believe that it is an efficient way to fund research on farm animal welfare, since FFAR is co-funding the research and plans to handle the logistics of the RFAs and distribute the results of its research among industry, b) it is an opportunity for us to learn about co-funding with a Congressionally created and funded 501(c)(3) organization, which we believe could be a useful avenue for funding research to solve other problems in farm animal welfare, and c) it may increase FFAR’s interest in co-funding other animal welfare projects.

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