3 ms·

Is organic chicken also 1.8-to-1?

• saalweachter 9y ago
  There are a lot of variables in chickens (although most chicken you find in stores or restaurants will have been produced in the most efficient way possible, so the 1.8-to-1 number is pretty fair). Grain-fed organic chicken (where the grain inputs are produced "organically") will be basically the same as regular-old industrial chicken . The effective calories-per-acre of the chickens may be different, but the 1.8-to-1 factor should still hold. "Free range" or "pastured" chicken is where it becomes more complicated. Chickens running around eating grass and bugs and mice are burning more calories than chickens standing around a feed lot, and you can't really pasture chickens that densely - on the order of a hundred chickens per acre, while grain-raised chicken is the equivalent of like a thousand chickens per acre. On the other hand, you can pasture chicken on land that is difficult to use for agriculture, both in large, rocky, hilly pastures and in very small spaces. A backyard chicken given sufficient pasture and free access to feed will eat about half as much feed as a confined chicken; you are plausibly getting more calories out of them than the feed you put in, with the balance made up by the crickets and grass you weren't eating anyway. Of course, many backyards are suited to other types of agriculture, the soil being neither particularly rocky nor poor and the climate not being particularly intemperate, but backyard chickens are actually a reasonably viable way to raise chickens, as a civilization. You recapture wasted land and calories, individuals can ensure their meat comes from healthy and well-treated animals, and you can decentralize the meat processing (using either local butchers or butchering your chickens yourself), which has historically been an industry rife with human suffering.