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Certainly chickens fed on waste and kept on arable land would be an ideal form of self-generating protein, but I don't think that reflects the reality of free range poultry farms, although I may be wrong about that.
I’m currently in the middle of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma which has a lot to say on this very subject.
Though he doesn’t make a direct comparison of free range farming and battery farming, Pollan does note that, in order to operate on a larger scale, ethical farming methods increasingly incorporate industrial practices to remain competitive, and that accordingly (in a section where he’s indirectly quite scathing about the reality of portions of the American ethical food industry) there’s significantly less difference environmentally between (for example) organic and non-organic methodology than one might have hoped for. To qualify for free range status might mean slightly larger cages, or hens which a limited period of access to the outside from where they’re held, rather than the more benign pastoral image of them roaming around freely, to qualify for “organic” status might mean the restriction but not elimination of synthetic elements.
At several points he mentions Whole Foods – which I believe is primarily a large chain of expensive American ethical/organic supermarkets – any U.S. ‘lithers want to confirm what it’s like shopping there? The point being, that to exist as a national chain there’s a need for national distribution which offsets a great deal of the original environmental benefits to the products, and that appears to be a much greater environmental benefit to local and seasonal, as opposed to say organic, produce. I imagine that there’s at least to some degree a similar story with somewhere like Tesco.
One of Pollan’s counter-examples to the above, rotational farming, has exactly what’s described above, chickens being kept whose excrement is used as fertiliser for pastures in which livestock grazes, and who in turn help to keep the livestock healthy by picking parasites out of the livestock's droppings. Even in the reductive summary I’m giving you: better for the chickens, better for the livestock, better for the land, better for the consumer. There are so many variables as to determine whether it’s overall better for the environment as a whole that I’d struggle to offer a conclusion, certainly the impression I got was that it’s sustainable, in that the land doesn’t need to be supplemented by lots of fertiliser, more efficient in that the animals don’t need as intensive a programme of antibiotics to keep them healthy/tasty, and more economical in that the consumers are potentially passing on the benefits of eating healthier food by being, well, healthier. The fact that this type of farming is labour-intensive, small scale and localised would be the most obvious disadvantages to why its produce is not more popularly available.
Another factor that I’m interested in is how these different methods of farming effect the movement of information: the rotational farming above is all about knowing exactly where your food comes from, organic farming uses that but idea not always perfectly, industrial farming is invested in there being as little movement of information as possible. That said, some people will not want to know that their eggs taste so good because the chickens that hatched them had access to the juicy grubs found in cowshit.
Also, what still hasn't been addressed is the relative numbers of people fed via each farming method or other, alternative, uses of the land.
I’ve a feeling that to answer that we’re going to start moving away from inquiring into the limits of one’s personal stance and into the sustainability of ethical farming at a national or global level. Would there be interest in a new thread on economics / agriculture in the Switchboard or Lab? |
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