Joey Tuminello

While Effective Altruism helps influencers do good by supporting farmed animal causes, it has been woefully inadequate in guiding strategies within the farmed animal advocacy space. Moreover, Effective Altruist funding has generated troubling consequences. Focusing on short-term incremental improvements, advocates are taking their eyes off the prize: the end of factory farming. The farmed animal movement has more investments than ever going into corporate campaigns, but meaningful returns have been diminishing. While advocacy groups receive significant funding for incremental improvements, other promising strategies tied to a bolder vision for systemic change remain underfunded. We don’t need to accept the factory farm as an inevitable evil and content ourselves with making it “more humane.” Funders can do enormous good within their lifetimes, but only through a willingness to confront complex social challenges. The movement needs funders with fearlessness, an entrepreneurial spirit of experimentation, and the moral imagination to end industrial farming.

In this chapter, I adopt the lens of environmental justice to shed light on the human, animal and environmental dimensions that create tension within industrial animal agriculture, or "factory farming". Interpreting the agricultural crisis as a cluster of environmental justice issues underscores the interconnected nature of the myriad inequities that are created and exacerbated within this system. In addition, the current trajectory of factory farming illustrates the need for approaches that include more-than-human communities within the paradigm of environmental justice, while also not losing sight of the ongoing human injustices that launched the movement, and which are also perpetuated through agriculture.

In this chapter, I examine the philosophical and ethical views undergirding Farm Forward, a nonprofit animal advocacy group focused on reforming agricultural practices and ending factory farming. Specifically, I frame Farm Forward as an organization that embodies key dimensions of the pragmatist philosophical tradition. I begin by providing a brief overview of existing pragmatist work within animal ethics and describing the pragmatist concepts of pluralism, particularism, and amelioration. After placing Farm Forward’s general vision for agricultural reform within this philosophical context, I review a number of the organization’s recent projects to illustrate their commitment to the above pragmatist principles, as well as the progress that they have attained through particular advocacy strategies including education initiatives, public engagement, negotiations with multinational corporations, and building coalitions with other advocacy groups. Farm Forward’s pragmatist approach to advocacy in agriculture, I argue, serves as an exemplary model for achieving positive change in concrete and inclusive ways.