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There’s little chance that the statement is true. Chickens kept in a backyard can live on bugs and kitchen scraps and there’s no delivery cost for eggs or event
by shrubble 10mo ago
There’s little chance that the statement is true. Chickens kept in a backyard can live on bugs and kitchen scraps and there’s no delivery cost for eggs or eventual meat.
- truekonrads 10mo agoThis is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions
- asterix_pano 10mo agoThat is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).
- Certhas 10mo agoIf all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your backyard , that's environmentally perfect. In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per year.
- johanvts 10mo agoThats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.
- tdb7893 10mo agoA negligible fraction of chicken production is backyard operations. Any quote talking about chicken production is referencing how they are actually produced, which is generally huge industrialized farms (often hundreds of thousands to millions of birds a year).
- exe34 10mo agohow big is your backyard?
- swiftcoder 10mo agoBack of the envelope, for a family of 4 eating US quantities of chicken... you need to be slaughtering ~100 chickens per year. In a homesteading setting it usually takes a chicken about 12 weeks to reach slaughter weight, so you need to be raising a minimum of 25 at any time. That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.
- lm28469 10mo agoWell that's how we lived for thousands of year, we only eat so much meat now because of the insane industrial processes we developed around animals.
- _dark_matter_ 10mo agoWild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times
- swiftcoder 10mo agoIn commercial operations they are also raising chickens much faster - maybe only 6 weeks for a meat chicken, so you only need half as many at any one time
- vintermann 10mo agoIf everyone had backyard chicken operations on that scale, I suspect we'd have a lot more disease problems! Decentralized isn't necessarily better for disease, if the overall scale stays the same. At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.
- a96 10mo agoIf every yard in a town or city was full of chickens, I wouldn't call it decentralized. Just one very broad centre.
- 10mo ago
- jrjeksjd8d 10mo agoAmericans simply need to release chickens into the urban environment the way they released domesticated pigeons. Soon any swift child will be able to catch a feral chicken and break it's neck on the way home from school, providing protein for the whole family.
- Brendinooo 10mo agoChicken used to be a very expensive meat when they were treated like this. It didn’t become the cheapest meat until the 1990s, and that’s because of the massive efforts that were put into creating the Cornish cross breed and raising them at scale.