There’s little chance that the statement is true. Chickens kept in a backyard can live on bugs and kitchen scraps and there’s no delivery cost for eggs or eventual meat.
A negligible fraction of chicken production is backyard operations. Any quote talking about chicken production is referencing how they are actually produced, which is generally huge industrialized farms (often hundreds of thousands to millions of birds a year).
Back of the envelope, for a family of 4 eating US quantities of chicken... you need to be slaughtering ~100 chickens per year. In a homesteading setting it usually takes a chicken about 12 weeks to reach slaughter weight, so you need to be raising a minimum of 25 at any time.
That's... Not too bad, actually. My grandmothers used to have maybe 8 chickens and 12 ducks or so. They were very low maintenance, and had very minimal pastures, with the only difficult to reproduce part of the process being that the houses were in fairly wild surroundings.
They would probably need more pasture in monoculture hellholes that have cornfields for 100km in each direction.
Yeah, the real question is whether they can forage enough food in this kind of scenario. Without supplementary grain, they are going to need a whole lot of insects to grow that quickly...
Well, no, they won't be able to forage enough if it's a small pasture. They do need extra feed.
I'm guessing that the more you do to get them forage the better the meat and eggs will be, for instance larger pasture and making sure your other animals leave plenty of dung around.
If everyone had backyard chicken operations on that scale, I suspect we'd have a lot more disease problems! Decentralized isn't necessarily better for disease, if the overall scale stays the same.
At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.
I did ~100 chickens last year, and more like 85 this year.
12 weeks is incorrect, you can buy the same Cornish crosses that the big farms use. So they can be ready in as little as 6-7 weeks but I usually stretch it to 8 or 9; my time to process them is fixed so I might as well get a little bit more meat for my efforts.
I use a chicken tractor that is big enough to let me hold about 33 at a time.
So it’s an operation that needs to run for about half the year. If you time it right, you can work around vacations and stuff. Daily operations are actually pretty minimal in terms of time spent, but you do lose three weekends a year to process them if you don’t outsource that.
All of that to say: I’m not sure if I want to agree with your characterization. It’s less of a time commitment than you think. But there is a substantial cost to it all: capital costs are notable and the cost of feed and birds is such that you basically break even against high-end organic products for sale. You’re always going to look at the Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it. I treat it as a “touch grass” hobby that kinda breaks even.
No real point, just excited to have something to say about this haha
>> You’re always going to look at the Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it.
It depends. My friend's dad has chickens and the meat is tough and grey-dark, very much not like the supermarket white and soft meat. Also the meat tastes of... chicken; I guess. And you can see even the bones are significantly harder (I can't snap them with my fingers like the supermarket chickens' bones). I always assumed this is because of the way they're raised, allowed to roam freely (within an enclosure, but it's a big one) and feed on scraps and everything they can forage for, in addition to grain.
What does your chickens' meat look and taste like? If it's the same as supermarket chicken then, I don't know, but if it's the other kind then it's definitely worth it. Although it takes a couple hours cooking to soften it :)
They're simply completely different breeds. Factory-farmed supermarket broiler breeds are optimized for producing as much bland, white meat as possible in as short time as possible. Everything else, like the ability to walk, is secondary, they're never getting enough space to walk anyway in their two-month life.
Breeds optimized to egg-laying are an entirely separate category, and they don't produce much meat, and the meat is… different, as you described. Apparently some hybrid breeds are also available for backyard meat+egg co-production. I don't know what their meat is like.
People didn't really eat that much chicken meat before the 70s, at least in the West. Wouldn't have been even possible to consume this much chicken meat, before these fast-growing breeds and industrial-scale farms.
It looks like supermarket chicken. I tried something more like a heritage breed once but I have young children who want massive white meat chicken breasts, so that’s what I’m doing for now.
But I will say, when you buy chicken at the grocery store, the quality can vary. Mine has always been good.
>> I tried something more like a heritage breed once but I have young children who want massive white meat chicken breasts, so that’s what I’m doing for now.
Heh. Over here (UK and the rest of Europe I reckon) the kids love chicken thighs. Acquired tastes eh?
Note that in the scenario I was responding to, they are arguing for input-neutral chickens, so they can't just buy in feed, and have all the complications of maintaining their feed source as well
Average household probably isn't going to produce enough food scraps to feed 25+ chickens (we've done it in the past, but we had a restaurant kitchen to supply the food scraps)
In commercial operations they are also raising chickens much faster - maybe only 6 weeks for a meat chicken, so you only need half as many at any one time
Chicken used to be a very expensive meat when they were treated like this. It didn’t become the cheapest meat until the 1990s, and that’s because of the massive efforts that were put into creating the Cornish cross breed and raising them at scale.
Americans simply need to release chickens into the urban environment the way they released domesticated pigeons. Soon any swift child will be able to catch a feral chicken and break it's neck on the way home from school, providing protein for the whole family.
