3 ms·
Not scalable to 7b people, but maybe applicable to a few more millions of people in North America, for example, where meat consumption per capita is very high.
by blisterpeanuts 7y ago
Not scalable to 7b people, but maybe applicable to a few more millions of people in North America, for example, where meat consumption per capita is very high. Imagine the impact on the meat industry if one million more households in North America decided to keep chickens in the back yard, for example.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoThey'd buy 1 or 2 fewer chickens per year. I don't think it'd register. You vastly underestimate the Big Ag chicken infrastructure. E.g. when McD's started serving chicken McNuggets years ago, they contracted for Every Chicken In Canada to supply the demand. Currently Americans eat 8 billion chickens a year, not to even mention egg factories. A million chickens from back yards is literally 'chicken feed'.
- blisterpeanuts 7y agoLOL, maybe so. But some of the homesteading videos on Youtube show people receiving shipments of anywhere from 30 to 120 chicks, which they raise as meat chickens, then after 8 weeks they slaughter them and freeze them. That's a lot of meat. Probably not for everyone. But imagine going through about 15 chickens a year, out of your own freezer, totally separated from the industry except for a breeder.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoThen there's the freezer. Opting out of the (very efficient) chicken distribution system and choosing your own less-efficient freezer from whatever power grid, is arguably not going to be a smaller carbon footprint or whatever. Its hard to beat big Ag for efficiency - that's cash-money to them and they've been at it for a century. Cottage industry agriculture is generally orders of magnitude less efficient.