The meat workers who became vegan entrepreneurs

In 2016, Andy Shovel was feeling rudderless. He and his business partner Pete Sharman had sold their UK burger business, and had a niggling feeling that they should create a more sustainable company next. They considered recycling waste management and electric sports cars.

Then the conversation turned to alternative proteins. The pair realised that this was a growth industry where they could put their food industry experience to use. They got to work on research and development.

Some months later, Shovel's girlfriend showed him a graphic video of chicks being culled in the egg industry. "I thought it was some kind of extreme snuff video that I shouldn't be watching," he says. "I think like most people, I had what's known as cognitive dissonance." This psychological bias happens when people try to hold two or more contradictory beliefs at the same time – in this case, "I like animals" and "I like meat". (Read more from BBC Future about the hidden biases that drive anti-vegan hatred.)

"So I basically had a kind of deliberately self-inflicted ignorance when it comes to what happens behind the scenes in our food industry," says Shovel. He found the video was a turning point. As he was working on plans for the new plant-based business, "personally I went on a journey in that period as well" – from a KFC lover and former McDonald's worker to a vegetarian, then a vegan, who was passionate about animal welfare.

The parallel professional and personal journeys took several years. Eventually Shovel and Sharman founded THIS, a plant-based protein brand aiming to be relatable for meat-eaters through cheeky, non-judgemental marketing. "I determined at the very beginning that basically the best way to disarm people's defensiveness…is by trying to make them laugh," Shovel says. 

Shovel is not the only vegan entrepreneur who comes from a meat-industry background. The plant-based chicken company TiNDLE was founded by a German, Timo Recker, whose family business was meat processing, and by a Brazilian, Andre Menezes, who had previously worked for meat distributors. The Vegetarian Butcher and Those Vegan Cowboys were founded by the ninth-generation farmer Jaap Korteweg, who decided to give up on livestock after swine fever and mad cow disease hit the Netherlands.

Nor are these entrepreneurs the only people reassessing their work with animals as food. Some livestock farmers are also changing their minds, for instance – such as the dairy farmer who switched to growing crops with entirely vegan production methods. But it takes support, financial and social, to take the plunge toward so-called "humane jobs" – those that benefit people and animals alike.

From farming animals to plants

"Oftentimes I feel like change happens from something traumatic," says Morgan Salis-Deany. That occurred in her family, when a combination of addiction, suicide, and another death meant that they faced difficult choices about what to do with their 800 acres (around 3.2 sq km) of farmland in Texas.

Salis-Deany's grandfather and uncles had been raising cows and chickens on an industrial level: almost 1,000 head of cattle, and 12 poultry houses with over 55,000 chickens each. "It's almost unfathomable," she says of the scale.

The sensory memories from her childhood remain vivid. "I can remember walking into those chicken houses, and it would be hard to breathe because of the ammonia levels, and seeing the birds on the ground not able to stand up because their body weight is so heavy," Salis-Deany says. Moving to California and attending university there felt like a world away.

After the passing of her grandfather, the workload became impossible for her uncles to manage. There were also financial difficulties. So her mother, and then Salis-Deany herself, decided to move back to Texas between 2017 and 2019. But they wanted things to look different.

The family had long considered themselves animal lovers, but there had been a divide between their love of their dogs and horses and the work that they did. Salis-Deany and her mother had travelled and spent time doing animal rescue work. The combination of their convictions, the financial pressures, and the hardships of chicken farming meant that the family decided to stop this type of farming. They had to take out a loan, but they also had allies.

Along the way Salis-Deany has received help from the nonprofit Mercy for Animals, which has a programme called Transfarmation, providing financial and technical assistance for transitions away from industrial livestock farming in the US. There are other such projects. In Switzerland, for instance, farmers are helping each other to switch from dairy farming to oat growing. However, farm transition programmes tend to remain small scale, and often have found it challenging to attract enough interested farmers or to make the economics work.

The company has worked with 12 farmers over five years, reports Tyler Whitley, Transfarmation's director. "We work with a small number of farmers very, very deeply," Whitley says.

This includes carefully managing expectations. "When you're transitioning from a business that you've run for 20 years and you're doing something brand new, change can be a very scary situation," Whitley acknowledges. Switching to an entirely different type of farming is complex.

Farmers generally contact the programme after growing tired of what they're doing and talking it over with their families. They have diverse motivations, Whitley says, including financial stress; wanting a better of quality of life; seeking more autonomy relative to contract-based farming, in which large corporations deliver livestock; and concerns about environmental impacts or animal conditions. Transfarmation provides information on different livelihood possibilities and help with piloting different uses for farmers' existing infrastructure, such as growing mushrooms in poultry houses. The programme often also provides small grants of US$10,000-20,000 (£7,854-15,708) to aid with the transition.

While the absence of debt relief is an issue, and though it can be tricky to find a market for specialty crops, "all of the farmers we’re working with are making a profit on their enterprise", Whitley reports. And he believes that continuing to produce food allows farmers to retain a sense of pride tied to this identity.

Salis-Deany is clearly proud when she describes the various new activities on her family's farmland. She's now an animal rescuer at Let Love Life, a rescue centre primarily for dogs. The hemp they've started growing is now being dried in former poultry houses, to be turned into CBD oil. Salis-Deany is converting another poultry house into a flower-growing operation. She also has a longer-term vision for farm stays.

There are risks to such diversified plans, Salis-Deany acknowledges, including limited profitability. But there would also have been risks to continuing to run the farm as it was previously. She's trying to take it one day at a time. And each day on the farm, she smells honeysuckle, sage and other plants instead of ammonia from concentrated chickens; she sees more birds and butterflies around. "I can just see nothing but possibility," she says.

Lessons for overcoming barriers to change

In Shovel's case, the switch from the meat industry to founding a plant-based company was accompanied by a radical shift in his ideology – and this has helped him to understand the psychology of his customers, too.   

This is part of the reasoning behind THIS's irreverent approach, which Shovel believes may help to break through people's defences about eating meat. "Maybe we all are very accepting of terrible behaviours in our in our food system because we think it's normal," Shovel says. In his opinion, normalisation has enormous power, and "it's important to put a fresh pair of eyes on and just reassess our norm."

However, one lesson from these plant-forward transitions is that a person's ethics are rarely enough. It often helps if there is a practical reason to make the change too. The reasons may be financial. The hardship of chronic debt among contract farmers "makes our job of trying to come up with a competing alternative much easier", says Transfarmation's Whitley.

Shovel says he was initially attracted to move into meat alternatives by the enormous market potential of this space.

Another takeaway is the importance of maintaining a sense of community after a major transition. A radical change involving farming, where identities are so intimately bound up with ways of life, can be especially unsettling. Salis-Deany says that she's part of a great group of volunteers and staff at the animal rescue, but also a larger community that manages to find some common ground. It hasn't been easy. She never felt like she belonged in East Texas, as she feels "there's still a lot of old way of thinking here, a lot of conservative ideals".

Yet in the US, even politically polarised groups can unite around protecting pets. During her farm's transition away from farming livestock, Salis-Deany has taken comfort in the sense of community she has found elsewhere – such as rescuing dogs.

This helps to avoid the risk of burrowing too far into a niche community, which entrepreneur Shovel is conscious of. "Veganism is one of those areas where I think echo chambers are extremely rife," he says.

Like many other vegans, Shovel gets criticised a lot for his views an animal products. "I feel very isolated at times when it comes to my ideology" around avoiding animal products, he explains. "It's a very jarring adjustment going from plodding along with relatively mainstream ideologies about things to suddenly feeling like an alien," he says.

But there are spaces where Shovel can feel a bit less alone. He estimates that about 10% of THIS staff are vegan – more than the overall UK figure of around 4%. He's also recently started an animal welfare nonprofit.

As part of the small network of farmers who have worked with Transfarmation, Salis-Deany has also found a community which can help her to feel less isolated – though participants are scattered around the US. 

"Farming communities can be very small," Whitley says. So for the participating farmers, the Transfarmation team "try to ensure that they have the ability to access other conferences and opportunities for networking so that they don't feel quite so alone". 

The social element is critical, emphasises Anne Toomey, a conservation scientist at Pace University in New York. "If there are ways that the environmental community can show that being an environmentalist is part of being a social community, I think that can be really powerful." This can happen online, such as in internet-based networks of organic farmer support. Toomey believes that "if people feel like they're part of something and they have others to check in with and test stuff out with", that will help them to overcome barriers.

This involves listening across divides and suspending judgement, though that's not always easy to put in practice. Whitley says: "This is a time of great change, and so it's really helpful if we lean into each other and seek more understanding so that we can navigate that change together."

-bbc