Ooooh…that makes a lot of sense! Unfortunately.
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We hired several. Got the company in a peck of trouble.
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The notion of the “small sustainable (farm)” is an oxymoron. OK, perhaps not when taken to refer to a single farm. But the idea that by chopping up the big farms into smaller ones makes then more able to be (or more likely to be) “sustainable” is kind-of silly. The most efficient food and sustainable food production comes from industrial-scale operations. That’s why food from those is also the least expensive. They simply use fewer resources on a per-unit of food production basis. If we all moved to eating only from small-scale farms, the inherent inefficiencies would ensure that whatever small amount of non-farmed arable land that is left would vanish faster than it is currently being cleared (which is pretty damn fast). Food would also become very expensive. Might not matter to those who can afford it, but many would suffer.
(OK, I know that you only stated your own personal preference without opining that we should all do the same.)
Don’t hens lay for only a few years? What then becomes of your anthropomorphised clucklets?
Hmmm… As I recall (grew up on a farm), the hens laid for most of their lives. Of course, you may be right, perhaps once they stopped laying, other uses were found for them.
For that matter, all chickens look alike to me, so it’s hard to keep track…
The most LABOR/COST efficient and LEAST sustainable food production comes from industrial-scale operations. They use MORE chemical and petroleum and water resources on a per-unit of food production basis, and at the cost of soil depletion, reduction in bio-diversity, and reduction in nutritional density of foods produced. High density small scale farming can produce over twice the food density as high density mono-cropping, and greater nutritional density of foods, and produce in the same location longterm, granted at increased labor and cost.
I understand your points about scale of economy and food prices, but there are many aspects to the word sustainable, from feeding the worlds ever growing population, nutritional value per kilo of crops produced, resource usage, distribution, prices, crop yield consistency, impact on the environment, pesticide and fertilizer requirements, bio-diversity, soil depletion, required planting and crop rotations, water usage, watershed runoff impact, even the percentage of crop harvests that go to industrial usages or animal feed, and the percentage of farms paid by governments not to grow crops at all. It is a complicated issue and while you raise some valid points of discussion, It isn’t nearly as simple as you make it out to be and some of your assumptions are incorrect. So, um, yeah, I’m in partial agreement, and I do think certain crops have some advantages to being grown large scale…
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[quote=“winkybber, post:167, topic:42936, full:true”]
Don’t hens lay for only a few years?[/quote]
Yes, but “a few years” can be more than a decade. Hens do slow down in egg production as they age, and they may run out of ovarian follicles if they live long enough. Lifespan for laying breeds, when they’re allowed to live it, averages about 6-8 years and maxes out at 15+.
They’ll keep living their lives, just as our dog, cat, and parrot do. They’re family, “pets with benefits” (not that kind of benefits - get your mind out of the gutter). Three of our hens are over five years old and have slowed down in egg production, but they continue to provide affection, entertainment, and education as well as pest control and fertilizer for the garden. Should the consequences of quantity of life diminish quality of life beyond reasonable limits, I’ll do the responsible thing and allow our vet to put a quick, humane end to the suffering.
In return, please answer this: Why do you think they’re anthropomorphized? Because we gave them names?
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They lay at their most commercially viable rate for around two years, particularly breeds like ISA Browns which are specifically bred as layers, who will knock out an egg a day for two years and then slow down markedly.
Commercial farms “turn over” their laying flock every couple of years.
However if you just have a small backyard flock, say around 4 like me, when they are all laying at capacity you are getting a dozen eggs every 3 or 4 days. We struggle to use half that many, so I don’t mind when they slow down, and they’ll lay at slower rates for years.
I plan to just let any that grow old enough to stop laying live out their natural lives, but to be honest the little dears tend to drop dead of natural causes at a surprising rate. Plus we had a fox in last year, so I’ve got a completely new flock now.
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Sorry about the fox. Our only mortality so far was my favorite hen, who was taken by a coyote when she found a gap in the fence and wandered outside. It’s a dangerous world out there for poultry.
My fault, I left the coop open. We’d never been bothered before but knew they were in the area. Nasty animals though, took one hen but killed the other two and left them there.
The best sauce for chicken or steak are the tears of a militant vegan. I’ll cheerfully eat at the same table with the tolerant variety and we can just stay off the subject of where our protein comes from.
The temptation to walk up and just stand in front of her, while gnawing on a chicken drumstick would have been immense … 
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Thank you very much for making this clear. I can only hope that some of the constitutionally misinformed will read it.
I am so tired of reading the claim that the First Amendment is justification for verbal and written dumbassery.
The logic escapes me. If the farming practices of the small-scale farmers are so superior, why don’t the large-scale producers just adopt them? Why are they seemingly so adamant that lower production, lower quality and inherent unsustainability are the roads to profits?
Well, there was this…
“Our six laying hens all have names, distinct personalities and voices, and a complex social hierarchy. Living with them is like being the token human character…”
I might be playing fast and loose with the term, admittedly. Hey, no problems with it. We anthropomorphise the hell out of our dogs.
In other words, they considered themselves the ONLY human in the group. That’s the opposite of anthropomorphizing.
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Yeah, that’s what I meant by playing fast and loose with the term. I was not being precise (worse, perhaps just plain wrong). My point was that the chickens were ascribed a consciousness and intent in the context of human experience. That isn’t the same as thinking they are people (or even like people). We don’t think our dogs are really like people, but we ascribe them people-like thinking and motivation all the time.
Would have been better for me to just shut up, or to perhaps observe that there appears to be a level of attachment to the chickens beyond one that would be consistent with considering them simply to be egg providers.
Now that you’ve explained your thinking further, I can understand the distinction you’re making.
Yes, you might, but it’s a common problem. The issue here isn’t so much anthropomorphically ascribing “people-like thinking and motivation” to nonhumans as it is anthropocentrically assuming that there’s something uniquely human about those thought processes and motivations. Claiming that your dogs think that squirrels are terrorists or that your old smartphone is afraid of being traded in on a newer model is anthropomorphism. Acknowledging that neurologically complex nonhumans can form social hierarchies (“pecking order”) and exhibit individualized behavior patterns (“personality”) is not.
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as explained…reduced COST & LABOR…lower production per acre does not mean lower production as they increased acres farmed by using more land for farming. do you think they care about nutritional density? environmental impact? chemical and petroleum and water usage? runnoff? soil depletion? biodiversity? nope, not as long as the bottom line is served. that is why chemical fertilizers and pesticides are so prevalent…cheap as hell. planting in such a way that large machines can harvest…not space efficient, but cheap as hell labor wise. etc. etc. etc.
yes, in almost every type of production or manufacturing business. especially when the impact isn’t born by the company doing the production, ie. environmental impacts. do we have more durable quality goods or cheap churnable goods in modern society? double especially when they can just pick up and start again at new location or label at very little cost or impact to their bottom line. slash and burn cattle ranching is cheap, and so long as there is more rainforest to slash and burn they keep doing it for obvious financial reasons…sustainable? absolutely not. petroleum is the primary fuel because it is a cheap energy source…longterm sustainable? no. dumping toxic waste into the river is cheaper then proper disposal, sustainable? not at all. i think you probably get the picture by now. The cheapest option in anything is very seldom if ever sustainable as hidden costs are often occurred and corners cut in numerous aspects.
many larger companies, say McDonalds, want to buy unfathomable amounts of the exact same potato from a few mega-farms that they have exclusive contracts with. they don’t want to deal with the added cost of a consolidator’s fee and hundreds of different types of potatos from thousands of farms. sustainability be damned, industrially produced food is all about economics at the direct cost of most aspects would make production sustainable. it isn’t about sustainability, it isn’t about feeding the world, it isn’t about the environment, it isn’t about nutrition, it isn’t about providing jobs, it is about profit and only profit at the expense of everything else.
Fanatical vegans /are/ nut cases. That’s pretty much what the ‘fanatical’ part means…
