Feeding with mealworms as the only protein source

[U_Stormcrow]

Indeed. But they add up. One of my 4 year old Swedish Flowers laid 126 eggs this year, and there are a variety of other people's experiences here https://www.quora.com/How-many-eggs-will-a-free-range-chicken-produce-in-each-year-of-its-life

So, if you live on a subsistence level, is 90# of feed worth 126 eggs per year to you, and fewer still next year, and the year following? Or are you better off investing the feed into raising a replacement bird to maturity which is likely to produce 180+ eggs in its first year, perhaps 150+ its second, 130+ its third - and thus net a bonus of at least 90+ eggs over the coming years for the same feed investment?

Even 126 eggs a year is near the average of that 1919 competition of top layers - and those were NOT old birds.

 

[Canina]

Without factory farms we cannot feed the worlds population.

I oppose artificial famine.

We throw away 900 million tonnes of food a year and it can be argued that a lot of people eat far more than they need. Half the chickens in those farms end up in the trash anyway. It is pure paste and cruelty. The people starving in Africa because of a lack of infrastructure, sanitation and unfavourable weather conditions aren't going to be helped by e.g. overweight Americans tossing out half the contents of the fridge every week and donating their $2 a month to going to some charity board member's back pocket. What helps is enabling people to sustain themselves and a family of 4 is only going to need to slaughter a bird once or twice a month.

We live in a society where nobody knows how to produce or identify their own food anymore (grown adults don't know where milks comes from and can't identify a blackberry bush!), the diversity of what we grow and eat is shrinking (thousands of species of apple that would readily grow in the UK yet they import over 60% of apples, anyone would think they needed to) and it is down to megacorporations to mass manufacture it for the people who have largely had their land and any means of acquiring their on land stripped from them.

This reliance on supermarkets and farms that treat animals like inanimate objects are disgusting. You'd think the idea of being more self reliant and conserving resources would be more popular on a forum like this!

 

[JacinLarkwell]

We throw away 900 million tonnes of food a year and it can be argued that a lot of people eat far more than they need. Half the chickens in those farms end up in the trash anyway. It is pure paste and cruelty. The people starving in Africa because of a lack of infrastructure, sanitation and unfavourable weather conditions aren't going to be helped by e.g. overweight Americans tossing out half the contents of the fridge every week and donating their $2 a month to going to some charity board member's back pocket. What helps is enabling people to sustain themselves and a family of 4 is only going to need to slaughter a bird once or twice a month.

We live in a society where nobody knows how to produce or identify their own food anymore (grown adults don't know where milks comes from and can't identify a blackberry bush!), the diversity of what we grow and eat is shrinking (thousands of species of apple that would readily grow in the UK yet they import over 60% of apples, anyone would think they needed to) and it is down to megacorporations to mass manufacture it for the people who have largely had their land and any means of acquiring their on land stripped from them.

This reliance on supermarkets and farms that treat animals like inanimate objects are disgusting. You'd think the idea of being more self reliant and conserving resources would be more popular on a forum like this!

Lots of us process birds ourselves (one of our birds a month for a family of 4 would mean just one meal of chicken a month for my family, even without stuffing ourselves). But not everyone is as lucky to be able to raise their food. I have close to a hundred birds between all my flocks, and even if I used them just to live off of, my flock would be wiped out in a year or less.

 

[Canina]

While I appreciate the moral arguments you are making, and that you have suffered first hand the consequences of a lifestyle closer to what you advocate, I submit to you that a lack of factory farming would result in a collapse of the world human population on a scale unimaginable.

Your prescription (and you are not alone in it, by any stretch), would make you the worst mass murderer in history, on a scale orders of magnitude above any number of citizens deliberately starved by Stalin, Pol Pot, or a host of others. That's before the secondary effects of all that death (disease, primarily, but then the technological collapse and associated loss of readily accessible knowledge) begin to make their way thru what remains of civilization.

Moral arguments don't move me. I'm not wired that way. Purely on a lives lost comparison, I judge the "cure" worse than the disease.

When we stop wasting so much food and overeating in developed countries that would make more sense. We produce way more food than we need. As for those in developing nations they have less massive industrial scale farming. If you shut down the factory farms the whole of Europe will not starve overnight, they will learn they don't need a steak or 30 piece KFC bucket every night of the week. Do we really need 14-16 chickens per person per year in the US? It's not like we have a population problem or anything anyway. Thanks for recognising I am not above my own ideology; I include myself when I say that, I told y mother it would have been better if she'd aborted me because objectively speaking, it would have been the best decision for both of us.

If I am to be compared to mass murderers when talking about slaughtering less animals needlessly, that's fine. I will shut the door behind me on the way out.

 

[3KillerBs]

a family of 4 is only going to need to slaughter a bird once or twice a month.

A. Me eating a bare subsistence diet will not feed the hungry in other countries.

B. It is not for you or any other would-be dictator of others' lives to decide how much food I should eat and what type of food that should be.

I will NOT be shamed for enjoying prosperity.

 

[Canina]

Lots of us process birds ourselves (one of our birds a month for a family of 4 would mean just one meal of chicken a month for my family, even without stuffing ourselves). But not everyone is as lucky to be able to raise their food. I have close to a hundred birds between all my flocks, and even if I used them just to live off of, my flock would be wiped out in a year or less.

I am aware of this, so does my family. Once a month or so they will get the slingshot out and crack a junglefowl. Once every couple of months they will drive around in a pickup truck for a sheep or goat. And they eat meat dishes almost every day, just not huge portions. I'm not living in fairy land having spend many nights scraping the fat off of goat hies and tanning them with leaves and shit for extra cash.

Are the 4 of you really eating an entire bird? That's at least 4 meals or a small chicken. If the average chicken is about 5.5lbs and the recommended portion size of chicken for an adult is 3-4 oz, so at the upper end wouldn't that be 22 servings of chicken overall, so 5 meals for the 4 of you?

A. Me eating a bare subsistence diet will not feed the hungry in other countries.

B. It is not for you or any other would-be dictator of others' lives to decide how much food I should eat and what type of food that should be.

I will NOT be shamed for enjoying prosperity.

I did not say you eating less would help anyone in other countries. I said that in response to being told that without factory farming everyone would starve which i simply not true you would just learn to live with less and I was refuting the notion that countries where people are liable to starve to death are not doing so for want of factory farms, but other aspects of development. Progress, technology and efficiency is fine in farming but factory farms are the EXTREME end of the scale. I did not say you tightening your belt would help the Africans. What I actually said was 'What helps is enabling people to sustain themselves and a family of 4 is only going to need to slaughter a bird once or twice a month.' You think we need factory farms because you think you/humans in general need to consume as much as you are comfortable consuming or enjoy consuming.

I an leaving my replies to make clear my argument to anyone coming to browse because I don't want to be misconstrued, seeing as I'm being compared to a war criminal. I won't be checking for or responding to any more replies because I've already repeated myself because you missed the point I was actually making.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

When we stop wasting so much food and overeating in developed countries that would make more sense. We produce way more food than we need. As for those in developing nations they have less massive industrial scale farming. If you shut down the factory farms the whole of Europe will not starve overnight, they will learn they don't need a steak or 30 piece KFC bucket every night of the week. Do we really need 14-16 chickens per person per year in the US? It's not like we have a population problem or anything anyway. Thanks for recognising I am not above my own ideology; I include myself when I say that, I told y mother it would have been better if she'd aborted me because objectively speaking, it would have been the best decision for both of us.

If I am to be compared to mass murderers when talking about slaughtering less animals needlessly, that's fine. I will shut the door behind me on the way out.

No, they will starve.

The land needed to sustain a population like London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome, Istanbul, Barcelona, etc is massive absent factory farming. Displacing those populations destroys the industries made possible by the concentration of those skills and KnowledgeBase, while decentralization massively increases the carbon footprint of almost everything.

Fortunately for the rest of us, not your choice to make for the world.

 

[NatJ]

Are the 4 of you really eating an entire bird? That's at least 4 meals or a small chicken. If the average chicken is about 5.5lbs and the recommended portion size of chicken for an adult is 3-4 oz, so at the upper end wouldn't that be 22 servings of chicken overall, so 5 meals for the 4 of you?

The "recommended portion size" of 3-4 ounces is for boneless meat.

To get 22 servings from one bird, that "average chicken" who weighs 5.5 lbs must be really impressive: no bones, no feathers, no guts!

There is also the question of how many "portions" of meat a person should eat each day. The guidelines I see call for more than one portion of food from each category every day.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

Are the 4 of you really eating an entire bird? That's at least 4 meals or a small chicken. If the average chicken is about 5.5lbs and the recommended portion size of chicken for an adult is 3-4 oz, so at the upper end wouldn't that be 22 servings of chicken overall, so 5 meals for the 4 of you?

Our homebrew mutts are on average between 2 and 2.5 lbs roughly once gutted, but that still includes bones which are not eaten.

But we have lots of males that won't get to 2 lbs live period as well

 

[3KillerBs]

I said that in response to being told that without factory farming everyone would starve which i simply not true you would just learn to live with less

Yes, they would starve.

Without modern, efficient farming the land cannot produce enough to feed the modern population. There is no question of this. We have the production records from the past and we know what was produced -- such as the book I referenced, where farmers were taught the latest 1921 science for producing 100 eggs per bird per year -- from LEGHORNS.

Additionally, that inefficient farming used vastly more land because productivity per acre was so poor. In the US we have far more woodland and natural areas than we did before the advent of factory farms because producing more food per acre through the use of modern high-yield crops and high-feed-conversion animals requires less land be dedicated to agriculture.

Those who are determined to anthropomorphize animals see the life of a Cornish X broiler as terrible. But for the chick itself -- and Cornish X broilers harvested at 8 weeks are simply very large chicks kept in very large brooders -- they hatch and are taken to a place that is warm and comfortable, that has abundant food and water, that has plenty of other chicks to snuggle with, and where all their needs are met without any effort required.

Then there is one bad moment at the end.

Compared to a chicken that must scratch for itself in the wild, being provided with marginal shelter while continually needing to evade predators, before finally being hunted by humans, a Cornish X broiler lives a life of pampered luxury.

There is no moral superiority to the position of dictating that others should deprive themselves to relieve your feelings of guilt.