Biotech for Chickens — Robert Yaman

A dairy cow is worth $1,000 to $2,000 to a farmer, whereas a broiler chicken, raised for meat, generates just $4 of profit. Quantifying animals this way may feel uncomfortable, but those $4 are all a farmer can spend to keep a chicken healthy. And this places some really interesting constraints on how biotechnology must be scaled (in terms of vaccines and other interventions) in the animal welfare space. 

In this episode, Robert Yaman, CEO of Innovate Animal Ag, argues that the way to improve animal welfare is to make farming more efficient rather than less. We discuss in-ovo sexing (which uses PCR or hyperspectral imaging to identify an egg's sex before it hatches, and which could help end the culling of 300 million male chicks a year); why hyperspectral cameras work on brown eggs but not white ones; and electron-beam vaccines, which shred a bacterium's DNA while leaving its surface proteins intact, thus producing a farm-specific vaccine for less than one penny per dose.

Robert also reveals publicly, for the first time, that Innovate Animal Ag is building an "accelerator farm": a commercial broiler facility that doubles as a testbed where startups can trial new technology in an industry that hasn't changed all that much in the last fifty years.

Chapters

0:00 Why animal welfare needs scalable technologies
6:40 How chickens were bred for meat and eggs
12:43 Does farm efficiency improve animal welfare overall?
23:41 How the poultry supply chain works, from hatchery to farm
32:01 In ovo sexing to prevent chick culling
47:12 Electron beams and vaccines
1:01:04 Ozempic for chickens
1:15:30 Precision farming and the Accelerator Farm