How many chickens would you need to keep to supply all the meat and eggs your family eats?

[ChocolateMouse]

Ridge, unfortunately, all of that "extra" stuff was presented in the first post too like needing broodies or 100 breeders. Or the conclusion that trying to raise your own is just self righteous delusion. All of it was presented as accurately run numbers for a smallholding dealing with a western situation too which some people have taken it for, which is unfortunate.
(And apparently Shad thinks his impractical conditions are important enough to refute that too. Shame, cause you gave him an out.)

I definitely agree that the rest of the stuff after "what does it take" is designed exclusively to favor an argument that supports a presupposed conclusion (that people who try are delusional) and present it as fact, though.

Hence, it's pretty easy using real numbers to determine what you need and that you don't need to maintain a flock of 100 breeders to feed a family of four to disprove that conclusion. But real numbers are unwelcome here, so it's being presented as if it's an accurate case we can draw conclusions from (and people HAVE drawn conclusions from it) because the arithmetic is correct even though the model's not good.

(Also, just sort of as a note, I was trying to figure out why my number was so close to Shad's... It's because Shad's initial model covers only half your daily protein from chicken. The 200ish model I presented covers twice that. Which means using Shad's model you'd need to keep 1000 chickens to generate the food that could - in reality - be generated by 200ish chickens.)

 

[Ridgerunner]

No it wasn't.
This was the question.
How many chickens would you need to keep to supply all the meat and eggs your family eats?

I was using your number of 208 carcasses. Which clearly you need three chickens to reach. Not about 500. 500 was your number for 208 carcasses so I was trying to match your target so we could realistically compare. 3 versus 500. Pretty clear comparison to me. I presume your 6 egg layers were included in your 500? Not sure but since you said "about" I figured it was in the margin of error.

Since we don't only eat chicken meat but also eat fish, shellfish, pork, beef, turkey, and other meats and I don't keep track of how many total grams of meat or protein we average each week that's hard to answer. We also eat legumes and other protein sources, some of those dried beans that I grow but your question is specifically meat, not protein. I don't have a good answer for the mythical mystical question of how many chicken would it take to replace all those. It's far from reality but I'll run some quick numbers for you.

There are two of us so 14 evening meals a week. We don't eat much meat for breakfast or lunch. One pullet-sized chicken covers 4 of those meals. A cockerel just means I get leftover chicken for lunch. 14/4 = 3.5 per week. 52 weeks per year. So 182 chickens a year, with half pullets. So the minimum I'd need for the meat portion is one rooster and two hens.

We don't eat many eggs. Out of six to eight hens I usually get enough dirty ones that I wash and refrigerate for us to eat. Even them I sometimes cook up the excess for lunch just to get rid of them. The good eggs I give away to friends, relatives, or a food bank. I'll say two hens but that would give us a lot of excess for what we really eat. A little less than your number of 6 hens for 4 people but within the margin of error.

Asking it this way is really an apples an oranges comparison with anyone else. We are not the average family and we don't eat the way many other families do. That's why I was using your 208 carcasses, to give more of an apples to apples comparison.

 

[Shadrach]

I shouldn't really need to point this out but Ridgrunners assertion that you only need 3 chickens, one rooster and two hens and two incubators is such nonsense given the question. At some point you need more chickens and for a period of time you will need to keep them.
ChocolateMouse's model which gave 236 chickens is at least a sensible conclusion.
For the sake of debate how the chicken carcasses are arrived at isn't important but at some point you have to have the carcasses to eat them. Even using an incubator and killing the pullets or cockerels at say three months you will have kept these chickens in any fair definition of the word.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Yes, but then you will have "kept" 100 chickens at any given time with my 236 model. Not 1000.

And you will have "kept" 71 chickens at any given time on Ridgerunners model (assuming 3 hatches a year, all incubated which is pretty reasonable for most of the world). Not 1000.

I think if your model comes up with figures that are 10Xs off the mark, a literal order of magnitude, that's a really wonky model and something's VERY wrong with it.

 

[Ridgerunner]

(And apparently Shad thinks his impractical conditions are important enough to refute that too. Shame, cause you gave him an out.)

I sure wasn't trying to give him an out, just showing the power of assumptions and how they can skew the analysis to give ridiculous answers. I think that's my post you are talking about.

 

[Shadrach]

This getting a bit like asking the question how high can you jump and someone coming along and say 200 feet with a jet pack.

 

[Shadrach]

I sure wasn't trying to give him an out, just showing the power of assumptions and how they can skew the analysis to give ridiculous answers. I think that's my post you are talking about.

I/we know about the power of assumptions. I believe I've mentioned it on a few occasions.

Contesting my model is fine. It's just a model. Having a bit of a dig is fine. If I find it irritating I just switch off the computer, you all go away and I can talk to some chickens.
Misquoting, adjusting my numbers from 500 to 1000 for example, and not understanding the question isn't.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

This getting a bit like asking the question how high can you jump and someone coming along and say 200 feet with a jet pack.

Except it's not. It's not unreasonable to hatch a lot of chicks at once, lot of breeders do it. And even if you use broody hens the number still fall an order of magnitude shy of your numbers.

It's more like your model asking the question how high can you jump and saying "You can't jump more than 2 inches with a bunch of bowlingballs taped to your legs it's delusional to even try jumping."

 

[Kazzandra]

Also;
"If EVERYTHING was chicken, it'd be 221 pounds of *consumed* (not carcass) weight."

Also not true. It says the average US citizen will have ACCESS to 221lbs a year.
Given the amount of food waste in the average household and what gets thrown out at grocery stores, ACTUAL consumption is going to be notably lower. If you account for 15% food waste it's more like 187lbs a year. The average chicken is 75% meat and presumably a good chunk of that 'consumed' chicken is bone-in. So again, tolerances are built in.

I just read this and I'm flabbergasted how food waste would account for less needed pounds of meat. As food waste is a contingency of life and storage of food, there is only so much you can do to reduce that waste. Therefore, if anything it would *add* to that number, not subtract from it.

 

[Shadrach]

I just read this and I'm flabbergasted how food waste would account for less needed pounds of meat. As food waste is a contingency of life and storage of food, there is only so much you can do to reduce that waste. Therefore, if anything it would *add* to that number, not subtract from it.

I've looked for reliable food waste figures for Spain but haven't found any yet.
The US waste rate is pretty frightening as are their food consumption figures.