Poultry plant tour

[glatt]

Do you think the chickens know any better? Do they seem unhappy? I know it looks like a hellish place to live to us, but we've seen the outside. If a chicken grows up there and doesn't know anything else, is it unhappy?

[Griff]

First wash thoroughly. A friend of mine was doing environmental testing in a kosher chicken processing facility and picked up our little friend campylobacter.

I do eat factory chicken and I do find it repulsive. Eventually I'd like to work out a more humane system for my families food. Our gardening is improving, we're adding bees this Summer, and I'd like to come up with a pastured poultry system that works for me. Humanity in general? I don't know if they can keep breeding and expect to eat.

[orthodoc]

Originally Posted by Griff

Our gardening is improving, we're adding bees this Summer, and I'd like to come up with a pastured poultry system that works for me. Humanity in general? I don't know if they can keep breeding and expect to eat.

I also hope to add bees and pastured poultry. I'll get a donkey to defend the poultry.

As for humanity - the answer is that we can't expect to eat, at 9 billion by 2050 (or before), unless we drastically change our eating habits.

Why should we let Agribusiness/Big Food dictate our future? They certainly don't have our best interest in mind.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by glatt

Do you think the chickens know any better? Do they seem unhappy? I know it looks like a hellish place to live to us, but we've seen the outside. If a chicken grows up there and doesn't know anything else, is it unhappy?

This reminds me of an encounter my friend's brother had with their uncle.
The kid was pulling wings off of a fly and the uncle told him to stop. The kid responded with this intellectual argument about how flies don't feel pain the way we do and how it isn't hurting the fly.

The Uncle said, "I'm not worried about what it is doing to the fly, I'm worried about what it is doing to you."

[glatt]

I heard a really interesting story on NPR a couple weeks ago. It was all about the financial picture of one of these chicken farms. The entire industry uses a contract system. Perdue supplies the chicks and the feed to the farmer and then pays the farmer to raise the chickens. The farmer has to provide the farm and barn and labor and can expect to earn $200K per year for 4 big chicken houses. Except the barns have to meet a standard spec, and cost about $1 million. So the farmer takes out a loan. After making payments on the loan, and operational costs, the farmer can expect to clear about $60k per year in profits on average. Except the "on average" part is key, because Perdue pays some farmers a bonus and gives some farmers a penalty, based on how efficient they are compared to the other farmers. Perdue is turning it into a competition to get economic efficiency to constantly improve. Sounds good from Perdue's viewpoint, but for the farmer, it means that you can be doing everything right, and even improving your efficiency from year to year, but since you are compared to other farmers, they might be doing even better, and you will be assessed a penalty while they get a bonus paid for with your penalty.

So you get some farmers who end up not making any profit at all, but they are stuck because they took out a loan to build the barn, and the bank will take their land if they don't keep making payments. So they can't get out of the business.

Anyway, all these financial pressures are directly responsible for the conditions of the CAFO places. They are going to cut costs any way they can.