Re:Open-sourced food production – the future of urban diets?
by saalweachter on Thursday November 12, 2015 @07:05PM
(#10557124)
Yeah, different values lead to different conclusions.
If married to proper waste management, a chicken factory -- with chickens packed into tiny little boxes, egg production per calorie maximized, chickens discarded the moment their egg production drops, bred to mature as rapidly as possible -- is probably to most environmentally friendly way to produce eggs. You minimize land and energy use and human labor as well (humans have environmental costs, after all).
On the other hand, if you care about animals more than the environment, it's probably the worst possible way to raise chickens for egg production. Instead you want to maximize chicken happiness, you probably want small flocks free-ranging in a safe pasture-land, with chickens allowed to live out their dotage after the egg production has waned. This, of course, will require far more land and other inputs. You'll even have higher transportation costs, since you'll need to accumulate eggs over a larger area.
So would you rather have a chicken factory, a hundred acres of corn, and a thousand acres of wilderness, or 1100 acres of happy chicken pastures?
If married to proper waste management, a chicken factory -- with chickens packed into tiny little boxes, egg production per calorie maximized, chickens discarded the moment their egg production drops, bred to mature as rapidly as possible -- is probably to most environmentally friendly way to produce eggs. You minimize land and energy use and human labor as well (humans have environmental costs, after all).
On the other hand, if you care about animals more than the environment, it's probably the worst possible way to raise chickens for egg production. Instead you want to maximize chicken happiness, you probably want small flocks free-ranging in a safe pasture-land, with chickens allowed to live out their dotage after the egg production has waned. This, of course, will require far more land and other inputs. You'll even have higher transportation costs, since you'll need to accumulate eggs over a larger area.
So would you rather have a chicken factory, a hundred acres of corn, and a thousand acres of wilderness, or 1100 acres of happy chicken pastures?