This is why Corporate Agriculture Sucks

Run time: 02:01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1AMHh2mnJ4   Posted on YouTube: May 14, 2011 By YouTube Member: goldsparks1 Views on YouTube: 2   Posted on DU: May 14, 2011 By DU Member: votesparks Views on DU: 2288

 
Beats the hell out of this:

And none of the number two.

I love driving around the back roads, watching the animals interact. I never understood what "horsing" around really meant till the day I saw a group of horses conspire to drive the cows out of the shady area of their pasture - and then I watched them doing it!

they are very stressed, and get sick very quick. Plus, they don't eat the kind of diet they are supposed to. In the video they are munching down on fresh greens, worms, and delicious bugs of all kinds.

compared to those insipid things sold in the Big Box stores.

the yolks NEVER break.

for Secretary of Agriculture!

I wouldn't want him for Sec of Ag. He's a libertarian and evangelical Christian. Again, I admire him - he's a smart man - but I think he's making the biggest difference just doing what he's doing and showing how it can be done.

Didn't know of his fundieness.

I sure do like the way he runs a farm though.

Now the words "Free Range" actually mean something to me. (and they will forever).

Weak, pale yellow, anemic Store Bought eggs can't compare in taste or nutrition.

that the shells are harder to crack...(if you consider that a down side)
Those factory farm eggs you have to be careful with or you can put a finger through one the shell is so thin.
I get my eggs from a guy that takes good care of his flock....has Aracana chickens and the eggs are quite tasty with nice dark yokes.

I swear they look like Cornish Crosses, but they aren't

Kudos to you and that fine flock.

That Hatch rooster looks very happy.

Hope you are doing well, our property is transforming daily, and we are getting ready to plant in a new area. 1/2 mile of fence is up, and the boundaries are secure.

Good times, unless one realizes the fallout from fukushima loves green leafy vegetables and cattle. When radiation was found in the milk at a local dairy on the Big Island of Hawaii, I realized how lucky I am to focus on tree crops and not Taro. Otherwise, all the Taro is contaminated, especially the leaves.

Of course, the EPA no longer reports any of this radiation mumbo jumbo, even though the Fuku disaster is hundreds of times worse.

I guess my funk was that I invested my entire life into farming, and in an instant, some technogical assholes 3000 miles away, can taint the most isolated archipelago on Earth because it made them money for a few years.

All the best to you.

Kind of hard to post on DU anymore, and even the cheerleaders seem to have packed up after looking foolish for the umpteenth time. Now all we have are shills and paid cheerleaders, and any dissent is quickly erased by the moderators. Thats the trouble with taking advertising money.. It taints everything.

That photo was taken when they were very young.
We don't dare turn our backs on that rooster (Elvis) now.
He is very protective of his hens, and has a frightening set of spurs.
If we had children, we would have to get rid of him.
We keep him because he does his job well.
We haven't lost a hen to predators in over two years.
He keeps the hens rounded up and stands guard, attacking anything that approaches them....even us.

We originally got the chickens as a source of food,
but we quickly came to love them.
They are much smarter, and much more social than we knew.
They have become a much appreciated part of our daily life.

We also spent the early Spring on fencing,
and expanding the growing area.
The Strawberries are peaking now, and are to die for,
but a late freeze and vicious windstorm seems to have stripped any Peaches, Plums, or Apples from the trees.
Oh Well....such is nature.

Glad to hear you and yours are doing well.
I absolutely agree with your last paragraph.

:hi:

Getting mine within the week. Keep getting set back on finishing the details on the coop, with the damn weather we've been having. At least i've amply proven it is water-tight!

We are planning for a small coop - hope to have 4-6 hens roaming around the back garden in a few months.
Thanks for posting the video.

I was raised on super market eggs. I never had any idea they could be different.

My wife raised chickens before we met. For a while we had to live without our own but we had fresh eggs from *definitely* free range chickens (since we could stand there watching them strut about pecking at the ground. They were so much better.

One morning as an unusual (for us) experience we tried visiting Denny's for breakfast. The eggs (now that I knew what good eggs were) were terrible, pale yellow things that tasted gross.

Right now we get eggs from my mother-in-law and we've got 26 chanteclers that are about half a month old.

If you haven't had fresh eggs from real free range chickens you don't know what you're missing.

One more thing.. don't trust the labels at the grocery stores. If it says cage free it just means they have access to the outdoors like a little pen on cement which may only be open for a few hours a day if at all. Sometimes they say free range for the same thing.

You can get them at farmer's markets, co-ops, nearby farms, you can raise a couple yourself.

There are actually worse pictures of how chickens are treated, try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_cage

Just asking, okay?

If you need a quarter of an acre for 20 free range chickens, is there enough land available to raise the chickens that we consume annually?

Americans eat about 90 pounds of chicken annually per capita http://www.foodreference.com/html/f-chick-consp.html and there's 300,000,000 of us. At about 3 pounds per chicken, that's 9 billion chickens per year. If my math is correct, that's about 112,000,000 acres needed just for chickens. We have about 1 billion acres of total farmland, of which 406,000,000 is used for production. About 9% of that is "pasture" or 36,000,000 acres. So, we'd need to use 4 times the available pasture land in the country to raise just the chickens we consume. http://www.ers.usda.gov/statefacts/us.htm


What's the solution?

but I would bet that our massive over-consumption of shit corn figures into the mix. Chickens and cattle can free-range on the same land (and are complimentary). And do we need to be eating this much chicken? Also, are these mass produced chickens worth it if they are pumped full of antibiotics and who knows what else and fed shit corn.

Check out the documentary King Corn.

We are a sickly, and malnourished society because of the way we produce our food.

Sorry.

Cities are slowly overturning the no chicken bans. Brother has some at his small farm. They have no bugs or fleas to be seen. Once the plants are a certain size-they keep the garden insect free too. He had 2 roosters for a time but the best one won. Brother said he wanted to get rid of him because he can be mean. I told him he was doing his job of protecting those hens. It is so funny to watch them. When a storm comes up or a dog or other animal comes around, he crows an alarm and all the hens flock around him. He has also increased the flock size. He is a classic alpha male. I could watch them all day, along with the other animals.

They are better than any other reality show and you get great tasting eggs too. What a deal.