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Greetings,
We hope you’re well. And welcome to our Q1 quarterly updates: our longer, more comprehensive, and (hopefully!) more skimmable newsletter.
This issue includes the following:
- FWI By The Numbers—our key metrics from the first quarter.
- Envisioning our Farmer Work at Scale—our thoughts on scaling to enroll thousands of fish farms.
- Welfare Standard Update—the refinement of our welfare standard.
- Farmer Engagement Update—our efforts to recruit and retain farmers.
- Farmer Cost-Benefit Survey—the results of our recent small-scale farmer-reported cost-benefit analysis.
- China Update—our work in China, including our development of welfare standards for grass carp and large yellow croaker.
- A new team member, job openings, and more!
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback on our work, feel free to reach out by responding to this email.
Lastly, if you’re planning to attend Effective Altruism Global London in May, come say hi! FWI will be there at the organization fair and community office hours, represented by Jennifer, Tom, Siddharth, and me.
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All the best,
Haven King-Nobles
Executive Director
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FWI By The Numbers
The following numbers pertain to our first quarter:
- Fishes helped: 0* (total: 1.13M)
- Farmer compliance with our corrective actions: 88%
- Current number of farmers in the ARA: 78**
- Welfare trial results published: 1
- Corporate trial run of higher-welfare fishes completed: 1 (see below)
- Farmers surveyed as part of target population study: 505 (see below)
- Species-specific welfare standard drafts submitted to ICCAW for Chinese priority species: 2 (see below)
* Though we continued our programming as usual, we estimate that we didn't helped any fishes in the first quarter. This is because our field measurements showed that water quality was more frequently in range than usual (in range 87% of the time), and when we did prescribe corrective actions, we didn’t feel that the improvement was significant enough to satisfy our criteria for fishes helped. We believe that water quality was in range more often than usual because of environmental conditions—specifically, winter in Andhra Pradesh means more moderate weather, causing fewer water quality issues.
** We experienced some farmer dropouts lately, the majority of which was because of farmers who enrolled in the ARA and soon after decided to stop farming fishes altogether.
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Highlight: Envisioning our Farmer Work at Scale
We’re currently working with 78 farms, a number which has led to the 1.13M fishes we estimate we have helped thus far. While we’re relatively happy with these numbers, they are far smaller than we ultimately aim to reach, and they speak to our conscious decision to be currently in a program development stage, not a scaling one.
Lately, we’ve been thinking more about how to transition to a scaling stage. This involves both a) gaining a greater understanding and greater confidence in our welfare standard (see more below), and b) determining logistically what a scaled up farmer program would look like.
This section discusses these logistics:
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Chandu, our data collector, sanitizes probes used to measure water parameters like pH, salinity, and dissolved oxygen at a farm in Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, India.
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Our Plans for Helping More Fishes
Our recent shift in focus to more farmer-centric work is a testament to the impact we have already achieved through our farmer program, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA). In joining the ARA, farmers implement lower stocking densities and improved water quality. Our ground team visits all our 78 farms each month to perform free water quality measurements (one of the main incentives for farmers’ participation) and to recommend corrective actions when there are welfare issues.
From our rough estimates, and assuming (perhaps generously) that we won’t face any major bottlenecks once we begin scaling, we think a refined version of this program could improve the lives of hundreds of millions of fishes over the next 10 years.
Enrolling Thousands of Farms
If our plans go as intended, the scaling will formally begin in Q3 and Q4 of this year, with the planned addition of 150 farms to the ARA in 2023. The main bottleneck we face to getting there sooner is the refinement of our welfare standard—it’s important for us to get this right before scaling.
Provided we do succeed in adding these 150 farms in 2023, they will serve as a trial run for a much bigger scale-up in 2024 and onwards. All of this will involve a larger program—more data collectors, more program coordinators, more (and ideally more reliable) equipment. Yet, from our aforementioned estimate we believe we can still run the ARA at the level of thousands of farmers on a program budget of about $1 million USD.
If successful (and of course there are still many things to be addressed!), this would put us at a cost-effectiveness of about 100 fishes helped per dollar.
The Case for Farmer Work
Given the theoretical cost effectiveness of this approach, we think farmer work in lower/middle-income country contexts like India has been historically undervalued by the animal movement, and that it is an avenue for impact that our movement should explore further.
In addition to the numbers mentioned above, there are other arguments in support of farmer work: It gives us significant leverage with local governments and industry stakeholders in ways that we expect will pay off later— for instance, by enabling policy change. Farmer-centric work also enables us to collaboratively build models for better farming systems in the industry—in our case, ones that are less chemically and suffering-intensive, and where practices are improved and mortality rates are lowered.
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Welfare Standard Update
The Welfare Standard Team had a fairly successful quarter. We have been refining Version 2 of our welfare standard, as well as exploring new directions for increasing our overall cost-effectiveness (namely, focusing on "problem ponds" and considering working to help juvenile fish).
We are hiring for a Fish Welfare Officer and Welfare Standard Lead (application deadline now rolling), both roles that will be directly involved in the planning and execution of our research in Andhra Pradesh. If you are interested, please consider applying. You will have the opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research and will be significantly increasing our capacity to understand how best to help fishes.
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Fish Welfare Expert Vivek Rachuri holds up a bag used to release fish feed into the water.
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We have published a blogpost outlining our findings from our mini-test into weight-based feeding systems. Since publishing, these findings have been reinforced by our periodic surveying of new farmers who are already practicing a weight-based feeding similar to the system we tested.
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Vivek, our Fish Welfare Expert, led the establishment of six research ponds in collaboration with Adikavi Nannaya University, an Andhra Pradesh government university. In our first test we will investigate the effects of different feed quantities with a focus on the growth rates of fishes and on water quality. We expect findings from this test to directly advance our revised welfare standard.
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Farmer Engagement Update
As part of our recent restructuring, we launched our farmer engagement department and gave it the mandate of increasing enrollment and retention in our Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture. This department now includes some of the work that was previously executed under our (previous) corporate and policy departments—the thinking here being that, unlike how we previously thought of most corporate and policy work in India, we now believe that the primary purpose of engaging with these institutions should be simply to incentivize farmers to participate in our program.
The farmer engagement is the youngest and most experimental department at FWI, and it is thus still determining its internal operational structure as well as assessing which projects it will undertake. In Q1 it began work on the following projects:
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Corporate Market Linkages: The idea here is that if welfare-mandating corporations establish direct market linkages with farmers, farmers will be incentivized by either a higher price or more stable procurement to meet the procurement conditions of the corporation. We’re excited to share that this week we conducted our first such trial run with a corporation (Captain Fresh)—more details coming soon.
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Government Partnerships: We recently signed a partnership agreement with ACIC-KL, an incubation program supported by the Government of India’s leading policy think tank, the NITI Aayog. We aim for our collaboration with ACIC-KL to link higher welfare practices with entrepreneurship, such that entrepreneuring farmers see animal welfare as a critical part of any aquaculture business.
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Farmer surveys: See more below.
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FWI India Managing Director Karthik Pulugurtha (centre, in blue), Associate Director Abhishek Pandey (on Karthik's left), and Corporate Outreach Manager Deb Subrata (on Abhishek's left) meet the ACIC-KL team to finalise our partnership.
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Surveying ARA Farmers to Assess Costs and Benefits
One project our Farmer Engagement Team conducted last quarter was the surveying of a small group of ARA farmers to better understand the costs and benefits of their participation in the program. This is important because our welfare improvements are all voluntarily made by farmers, and though many farmers have some degree of ethical motivation, there need to be concrete economic benefits to farmers in order to implement our welfare improvements at scale.
The survey involved 10 ARA and 10 non-ARA fish farmers, all of whom operated in Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, India. Though the sample size was small and there was the possibility of survey bias, the results seem favorable:
- Water quality analysis occurs at ARA farms 75% more frequently, and at a lesser cost, than at non-ARA farms.
- Farmers considered our corrective actions more effective (85% efficacy) than any of the other alternative corrective actions they could access: those of feed-selling companies (71% efficacy) and of the government (46% efficacy).
- The feed conversion rate (FCR) was lower in ARA farms.
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China Update
Our partnership with the International Cooperation Committee of Animal Welfare (ICCAW) has catalyzed encouraging developments for fish welfare in Chinese aquaculture:
- Together with ICCAW we performed a review of literature on the current status of fish welfare in China. This review of 280 peer-reviewed papers investigated current welfare improvements in China and identified areas with the potential for highest impact in the short- and long-term.
- The literature review also contributed to shortlisting 8 freshwater species and 4 marine species for our now-complete priority species assessment— a process designed to identify aquaculture fish species in China with the highest potential for welfare improvements.
- We conducted field visits and consulted with experts from Shanghai Ocean University and Zhejiang University to better understand the context of welfare interventions in China.
- Finally, together with ICCAW, we identified two fish species to prioritize, for which we will develop standards:
- Grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella), a freshwater species, pictured below on the left, and
- Large yellow croaker (Larimichthys crocea), a marine species, below on the right.
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New Team Member: Siddharth Solanki
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Siddharth joins FWI as our International Generalist. In this role, he will support our China programming while also supporting our on-ground work in India through the ARA. Before his passion for animal and environmental protection led him to work for fish welfare, he spent many years in sports analytics and studied psychology at the University of Sheffield. With Siddharth’s help, we hope to elevate our scope and impact—welcome, Siddharth!
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Other News in Fish Welfare
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Know of other upcoming events? Feel free to send them over, and we’ll include them next time!
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Costs and Benefits
Here’s one thing the FWI team is reading right now:
Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes to Animals by T.J. Kasperbauer
Why We Love It: This book has as much academic value as it does knowledge for the average reader, activist, and animal protector. It's a great read for anyone looking for a sweeping but comprehensive view of the philosophy, psychology, and expanding morality behind helping animals live better lives.
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