The Open Philanthropy Project awarded 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 Open Philanthropy sees as two major problems in farm animal welfare: bone fractures in cage-free hens and the painful castration of male piglets. It is Open Philanthropy's impression that both of these problems are scientifically tractable. This grant falls within Open Philanthropy's work on farm animal welfare.
FFAR, a nonprofit established through bipartisan congressional support, aims to help enable scientific research to address challenges in the food and agriculture sectors. It plans to use this grant and at least $1 million of its own funding to fund scientific projects focused on solving the problems of bone fractures in cage-free hens and painful castration in piglets.
The Open Philanthropy Project is excited about this grant because a) it believes that this 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 Open Philanthropy to learn about co-funding with a Congressionally created and funded 501(c)(3) organization, which Open Philanthropy believes 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.