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Agricultural systems exploit, harm and kill sentient beings at a scale that is hard for the human mind to comprehend. They are also inherently wasteful, environmentally destructive and present a range of serious risks to the health of human sentients.

A transition to a Sentientist agriculture would work to end this exploitation and to reduce incidental harms caused to sentient beings. Ideas include switching to plant-based, vegan-motivated diets, helping farms transition (transfarmation), introducing and scaling alternatives to animal-derived products made without needless exploitation or harm and veganic agriculture systems that look to reduce or eliminate the incidental harms to sentient beings caused by plant agriculture. These solutions and transitions would be based on good quality evidence and reasoning, rather than the misinformation and disinformation often produced by agriculture industries with vested interests.

Information Resources:

• Our World In Data: Agriculture Land Use and Environmental Impacts
• Plant Based Treaty‘s Safe and Just – Vegan Donut Economics report
• (Australia) Farm Transparency Project’s Animal Exploitation Map
• See following tags on OpenStreetMap (use the OverPass Turbo link to run queries – here’s an example that shows a range of animal exploitation locations. Zoom to your chosen map area and click “run”): slaughterhouse, butcher, aquaculture, seafood, seafood processing, pet shop, poultry processing, horse riding, horse racing, meat byproduct processing, aquarium, zoo, dog racing, animal breeding, pasture… I will have missed some – and we can create and map more on this open source map)

Plant-based Diet and Vegan Resources

Veganism is a philosophy, not a diet. However, it is a practical philosophy so does have direct implications for our product choices and for our agricultural systems:

• The Vegan Society
• Veganuary (you can start their helpful emails any day – not just in January!)
• AfroVegan Society (including Veguary to follow on from Veganuary!)
• Happy Cow (find and review places to eat out globally)
• Animal Advocacy Africa – empowering African advocates for farmed animals

Veganic Agriculture Resources:

It’s not enough to transition to end animal agriculture. We also need a future agricultural system that reduces and ideally avoids the incidental harms of current arable agricultural systems. Those systems also need to meet the needs of a projected 10.4 billion human sentients and radically reduce the negative impacts of agriculture on our climate, environment and sentient health.

• Biocyclic Vegan International
• Vegan Organic Network
• Veganic Agriculture Network
• North American Veganic Certification
• Jimmy Videle‘s “The Veganic Grower’s Handbook” – see my conversation with him here
• Veganic Agriculture (wikipedia)

Transfarmation Resources:

Transfarmation is about helping animal farmers transition to livelihoods that don’t involve the exploitation of sentient animals. Their motivations may be a combination of ethical, environmental, psychological, social and financial factors (many animal farmers are already losing money, in serious debt and heavily reliant on public funding for survival). There is no single approach that will work for every farm – we need thousands of different transition paths each with their own challenges. These can include growing plants and funghi as food and products for human consumption (see veganic agriculture above), animal sanctuaries (as part of the transition or longer-term), agritourism, ecotourism, storage services, renewable energy generation and environmental stewardship (e.g. low suffering density re-wilding / reforestation). Given the catastrophic inefficiency of animal agriculture (see feed conversion ratios) ultimately we will need a lot less agricultural production and land. The organisations below help support farmers in various ways with strategy, business planning, agricultural (e.g. crop rotation), legal, financial support and with general guidance through the process:

• (USA) Mercy for Animals’ Transfarmation Project (see also their FarmerToolkit)
• (UK) Stockfree Farming
• (Switzerland) TransFARMation Switzerland at Hof Narr
• (USA) Animal Outlook’s Farm Transitions (see also their FarmerToolkit)
• (Australia) Farm Transitions Australia
• (Switzerland and UK) Refarm’d
• (USA) Rancher Advocacy Programme
• (Germany) TransFARMationDE
• (USA) Miyoko’s Creamery’s Dairy Farm Transition programme
• (Netherlands) RespectFarm – transitioning on-farm to cultivated meat production
• (USA) Brave New Life – helping workers transition out of the animal agriculture industries
• A collection of farmer transition stories by Free from Harm
• BBC Feature on Transfarmations – of course to “help the climate”
• Quitting Livestock Farming paper by Nicolas Salliou reviewing 27 example transfarmations. Summarised here by Faunalytics
• (UK) Vegans Support the Farmers – this isn’t about transfarmation, but about a compassionate outreach to farmers

Systems Change and Lobbying Resources:

Animal agriculture industries often wield enormous political power that shapes regulations, laws and drives often substantial subsidies. These organisations work, often using misinformation and disinformation to persuade political systems to shift those regulations and subsidies towards encouraging a transition to agricultural systems that don’t exploit sentient beings:

• (India) Samayu (see my Sentientism conversation with Varda Mehrotra)
• (USA) Agriculture Fairness Alliance
• (Global) 50by40 – an international network aiming to reduce the production and consumption of animal-derived products by 50% by the year 2040
• (USA) The Vegan America Project
• (Global) WePlanet‘s Reboot Food

Alternative Protein Resources:

• Good Food Institute – “Reimagining Protein”
• The European Union’s FEASTS initiative (Fostering European Cellular Agriculture for Sustainable Transition Solution)
• RethinkX’s report on Rethinking Food and Agriculture