Tech for farmed animal welfare

format: Project scoping and preparing grant applications · Research and writing · Creative project, product design, and entrepreneurship · Field-building, outreach, and coordination
topic: AI’s nearterm impact on animals · Neglected and emerging animal groups (e.g. fish, insects) · Post-AGI transition/Transformative AI
open to mentee proposals: Yes, with the right mentee

mentored by

Excited to mentor projects on

I'm most excited to mentor projects that try to steer the next generation of intensive animal agriculture — "Factory Farming 2.0" — in a more humane direction, rather than writing industrialisation off as a lost cause. As farming becomes more automated and data-driven, the same technology being deployed for yield and efficiency could be turned toward welfare, and I think that's one of the highest-leverage and most under-explored opportunities in the field. Two threads especially interest me:

Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) for welfare. Sensors, computer vision, and machine learning already monitor animals at scale for productivity and disease. I'd love to mentor projects that repurpose or extend that toolkit toward welfare ends — continuous, individual-level welfare monitoring, early detection of pain and distress, or automated welfare auditing that could underpin certification and regulation. My AI background means I can help someone reason concretely about what's technically feasible, not just desirable.
Defining and measuring welfare outcomes. A lot hinges on moving from input-based standards (space, enrichment) to robust animal-based outcome measures — and on frameworks that make suffering legible enough to track, compare, and trade off transparently, in the spirit of intensity-weighted, Welfare Footprint-style approaches. I'm keen on projects that sharpen these definitions and metrics, because getting measurement right is usually the bottleneck to everything downstream: audits, standards, corporate commitments, and law. More broadly, I'm at my best helping a founder take a promising-but-fuzzy version of one of these ideas and turn it into a concretely scoped project with a credible first step.

Who I'm looking for

Must-haves:

"On-it-ness" — you follow through, close loops, and don't need chasing.
Genuine care about impact, and a willingness to change direction when the evidence points elsewhere.
Enough independence to run with a problem, paired with the self-awareness to ask for help early rather than late. Nice-to-haves:
Some entrepreneurial or founder instinct — comfort with ambiguity and building things without a clear template.
Relevant domain knowledge (animal welfare, a specific neglected group, or a technical/AI background), though strong generalists are very welcome.
Clear writing and thinking — a lot of early-stage project work is just getting the reasoning legible on the page.

Support offered

Shaping direction
Drafting
Facilitating connections
Domain expertise

Aaron Boddy

Ambitious Impact

Co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project, now running the animal welfare incubation programme at AIM. PhD in AI, with past work on AGI risk — so I care a lot about where emerging tech meets animal advocacy. As a mentor I'm at my best helping people turn a fuzzy idea into a concrete, well-scoped project.