Earlier this month, a fundraiser for nonprofits that fight to end factory farming went a little viral — at least in one corner of the internet.

Dwarkesh Patel, the influential tech podcaster, announced on his show that if his listeners donated a collective $250,000 to FarmKind, an organization that distributes money to anti-factory farming charities, so would he. They did — and then some.

So far, Patel and his listeners — including Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, professional poker player Liv Boeree, and popular Substack writer Noah Smith — have raised over $2 million. For the global anti-factory farming movement, which works on a shoestring budget to fix one of the most challenging and neglected social issues of our time, that’s a lot of money.

The movement spent around $260 million last year in its effort to help tens of billions of abused land animals and a trillion or so fish (to put that into perspective, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art spends far more annually to collect, store, and display art). So, Patel helped raise the equivalent of almost 1 percent of the entire global movement’s yearly budget.

His pitch was simple: This is a really big problem, and charities have been able to make meaningful progress on it with little money, so by injecting even a relatively modest amount of extra funds into the cause, you can make a big difference. The organization that will distribute the money, FarmKind, makes the same pitch, but with a twist that Patel only hinted at: If you feel bad about eating meat but don’t want to go vegan, you can have the same impact by donating to charity instead.

This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter

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“It’s like carbon offsets, but for your diet,” FarmKind’s website states. (

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