McDonald's finally did something right

[mom'sfolly]

If you buy pullets, you must at some level accept the fact that the males of that hatch have been killed. Not facing that fact is just a blind-sided as someone not knowing their hamburger comes from cows. Willful ignorance is a nice way not to deal with things you find disturbing.

I've hatched eggs, and I've bought pullets. I have one roo, every other roo has been rehomed. Some of them had attitude issues, but most were just overflow for my small suburban backyard. When I hatched eggs, I knew I would have to deal with boys.

Personally I think McDonalds switched farms due to bad publicity. They have no moral objections to how their eggs are raised. They do, however, have objections to the people saying the eggs they use are dirty and cruelly produced. Switching to a new supplier will change nothing. Sarbo's eggs will end up in cake mixes, eggnog, and on restaurant menus.

 

[OSUman]

you cant feed the world with chickens on "traditional farms"

 

[Mac in Wisco]

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How did we manage before the past 50 years? Consolidation of egg and poultry farms is something that has happened relatively recently. Yet I see a lot of productive smallholdings laying fallow or used for recreation because the small producer has been driven out of the market place.

 

[Colored Egg Farmer]

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How did we manage before the past 50 years? Consolidation of egg and poultry farms is something that has happened relatively recently. Yet I see a lot of productive smallholdings laying fallow or used for recreation because the small producer has been driven out of the market place.

Only thing I can see wrong with the logic is. The population has grown and that a lot of the population lives in cities where if you have a postage stamp lawn its a blessing. There are small producers. But keeping up with the usda, and trying to compete against 'cheap eggs" does bring any ability to actually survive without any worry to almost nothing. My Family back before I was even around, was actually part of a co-op back in the 70s. I'm not sure if you ever heard of it, it was called Agway. They went bankrupt. Which brought us head long into having to do everything ourselves.

I'm not actually sure what happened to them. But from what I heard my family was doing really well till they went bankrupt. Then the farm had expand, take more work loads, etc just to get by.

 

[chickened]

50 or 60 years ago mass producing eggs meant that all people would be able to buy more eggs than before because they were cheap. Producers seen that the demand would be increasing and adjusted for that with technology. Technology allowed once thought as insurmountable hurdles to be overcome and did it with logical precision and methods. Along came the emotional crowd that began interpreting what a chicken was feeling which is and of itself illogical and against that there is no real solution so in the case with McDonalds they merely threw their egg supplier under the bus and back to business as usual. An easy solution to a really by all accounts an isolated not so common occurrence in the egg industry. It will be forgotten sooner than we think. I asked the manager at the local McDs' and she said "huh?" she never even heard about it. I think these animal snuff films are more valuable for soliciting funds from gullible animal lovers.

 

[Mac in Wisco]

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I don't think there is anything wrong with my logic. The U.S. population has doubled in that time frame, yet productivity of layer hens has gone up greatly while per capita consumption has dropped.

Let's compare to the dairy industry. In 1950, there were 3.5 million dairies in the U.S., by 1970 that number was down to 650,000, currently there are 65,000 dairies. Yet, from 1950 to now, the herd size has declined from 17 million cows to around 9 million now, due to increased productivity.

Looking at the layer industry, egg production was largely decentralized in 1950 with millions of producers. By the mid '80s there were 2500 companies with 75,000 hens or more. Currently there are around 190 companies in the U.S. with 75,000 or more hens (many with millions of hens). These 190 companies comprise about 95% of the egg production in the U.S., mostly consolidated in five states.

U.S. egg production uses about 280,000,000 layer hens, just under one hen for every person in the U.S. Using the 65,000 remaining dairy farms as a baseline number (just for the heck of it), that equates to only 4000 some hens per farm, not much larger than what I keep here using fairly traditional methods. As I said, there are hundreds of thousands of small farms lying fallow or being used for recreational land, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who would like to make a living at farming.

I don't buy the argument that traditional methods won't feed the population. There is more than enough productive land to handle decentralized, smaller operations.

You are right about the economics of such though. It is very hard for the smallholder to compete in today's marketplace. The producer with the cheapest, most efficient production wins. The only way around it is to ditch the free market and practice supply management with producer quotas and regulation.

 

[chickened]

I have one question... if it were possible to make a living with 4,000 layers in a traditional farm why is there not more people doing it? It would seem that there would be more people doing it if the revenue was there. All I hear is attempts to derail large companies with videos of brutality, thier eggs are poison and so on. Never do I hear hey buy from me I can do it for less. I do know that store eggs are not as good for fresh eating but for baking and such they are fine. Not trying to be an antagonist just pointing out some question that I find hard to answer.

 

[OSUman]

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Because that would involve a hard days work, which many people wont do. How many kids do you see that say that they want to be a farmer when they grow up? Also the food market is so subsidized that if you have 4,000 layers you would have to reach a niche market.

I am that kid that wants to be a farmer

 

[Mac in Wisco]

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Because of the economic realities that I mentioned. In a free market the person with the cheapest goods wins. The small farmer farming using traditional methods cannot compete with a factory that has truckloads of feed going in one end and millions of eggs a day coming out the other end. Shear volume makes up for the miniscule profit margins.

I make a fair profit with 2500 hens, but our organic eggs sell for about twice the cost of the national average for conventional eggs. While I make money, I don't make enough to make a living out of it. A person could probably make a fair living with 10,000 hens, which is still a fairly small operation that can still be kept under traditional management.

Traditional farms didn't specialize though... There's something to be said for diverse operations. They are a hedge against market fluctuations or poor production due to unforeseen circumstances such as disease or weather.

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There are plenty of folks around who would put in the work. Most kids don't want to be a farmer because they are not familiar. There are very few traditional "farmers" anymore. While there are many jobs in agri-business, unless they grew up in a rural area and are familiar with the industry, it never crosses their minds.

As far as subsidies go, I wouldn't call the U.S. food market that heavily subsidized. There will be about $10 billion dollars in subsidies this year, with about $5 billion dollars in direct payments. Compared to the shear volume of U.S. production, that's a drop in the bucket. It equates to about $30 per mouth. The subsidies involved in the production of eggs (subsidies on feed grain production) are a fraction of a cent per dozen, not some large percentage of the cost.

 

[chicken_boy_Kurt]

I just gave a persuasive speech on this topic the other day.

But you can't really bash the commercial poultry industry, because not all farms are inhumane. The poultry industry has come a LONG way. Many (definitely not all, though) farms marry productivity and efficiency with fair treatment of the birds.

My two cents.