This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.
Is that what's happened here? It looks to me more like the billionaire/PE class's drive to capture rents through monopolies is a more accurate lens to view the situation through. Especially as it's the trope namer for chickenization
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...
Every step you take that makes food more expensive, some use cases of food are no longer possible (say, free eggs in all elementary schools or something).
How many of these uses are we ok eliminating so the wealthier population has a more consistent/resilient supply?
Free range birds are able to interact and spread the disease more easily than the caged birds which can be quarantined. At least in my location all the cage free inventory is totally wiped out.
I think framing it as an either/or is a bit of a mental trap. They are sometimes in opposition, sometimes not.
For example, those farms which were not resilient are not maximizing their profits, since they've had more than a year of warning of avian flu. They were operating to minimize work and costs, not maximize profit, and they are losing out on a ton of it right now.
Those operations which built with resilience, or got lucky, are swimming in profits right now.
Edit: I guess also the birds are indoors much more anyway, given the winter. It's 11 F here today, so probably they're huddled up inside :)
For critical services like food production, that's a problem. "Well, we don't have food, but it's okay because screw production went well" doesn't make sense socially, but our system makes it so monetarily.
Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully. Those who did not take risks into account lost their bet. Eggs are priced higher for some, but are pretty much available everywhere still, and have not dipped below some sort of minimal level of availability. In California, past shortages were far far worse than this one, and even then the egg shortages were in no way catastrophic to the economy or health of humans.
Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine. Instead, our abundance of high calorie food is the biggest risk to the health of Americans.
So I would like to understand your point a bit more if you have the time to elaborate.
Food budgets would have to go back to the 1940's or earlier - where they were a significant fraction of take home pay. Now they are almost a rounding error comparatively.
I don't necessarily think that would be a bad thing. A lot of the asset price inflation like homes can be tracked to food and consumer goods taking an increasingly lesser portion of the family budget. Re-balancing this seems wise to me.
We spent 2 years building and designing a AI / smart coop and it's been a fascinating company to be able to build. We've trained our computer vision model on around 25 million videos and have gotten extremely good at doing specific predator detection, egg alerts, remote health monitoring, specific chickens in a coop and behaviors etc. We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback. If you're interested in seeing what we're doing we're at www.TheSmartCoop.com
In any case where are talking about a virus which an antibiotic won't touch at all.
Modern large farms have very strict bio controls. Things like: You shower before entering the barn (there is a shower in the barn entrance). Then you wear only approved clothing. Your shoes are disinfected as part of this process. then when you leave you reverse the process. If you enter one barn you are not allowed in a different barn for a week.
Avg hen lays about 250-270 eggs a year depending on breed. So 6 chickens (our coop is designed for 6) throws off about 1500 eggs a year. Avg American eats around 291 eggs + egg products per year (which is crazy!).
Most people build their coops or buy one from Tractor Supply or Amazon for $300 and day-old chicks are around $4 each and feed is inexpensive (50lb bag at Tractor Supply is $21). You can make the economics work super well if you want to but as most backyard chickens are treated as pets (I am leaving out large farms and homesteads, etc) a lot of people pamper and spend $ on their hens because it's more than just getting a lower cost egg if that makes sense.
What’s worse for the community, eggs from factories going way up in price due to supply shocks, or rapid and pervasive infection in the community?
Access to cheap food would be wonderful if it were healthy! Unfortunately the cheapest food is typically the worst food for your health.
As you mentioned, most treat them like pets which means they get to learn how long-lived chickens can be, and how egg production levels off in the later years.
But even then, if you're buying less than half the feed needed, you can probably break even for quite awhile (especially now).
There is no infrastructure to protect there – only infrastructure to build (irrigation), for better resiliency.
Sure. My point is, what optimizes for average production and profits doesn't necessarily optimize for worst case production and profits. There is a level of care that doesn't pay off most of the time.
I don't know why you're saying this. Imagine I'm investing.
If I "take risk into account" and select stocks anyways, I may lose a bunch of money one year. But I expect to make more on average than bonds.
Looking at a year where bonds excel compared to stocks doesn't mean that I failed to "take risk into account."
Likewise, a conventional producer of eggs that has now had a significant downturn in production may be having a bad year, but this doesn't mean that they're not following a profit maximizing strategy or not taking risk into account.
> Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine.
I think this is making the same kind of mistake: looking at today's outcome and assuming that reflects the risk picture.
We're not observing too much famine right now. But we could certainly have a more of a risk of the most catastrophic possible famines now because of things like monoculture, critical links in production, climate risk, etc. Just looking around and saying "all is great today" or "conventional egg producers are having trouble today" or "stocks are down 15% for the year" does not capture the picture of risk, particularly for rare events.
The best we can do is try to interpret sentinel events like this one and think about what else can happen.
I really hate throwing food away now, really pains me!
That's a theoretical problem that could occur, but is extremely unlikely. The worst we'll see is what we have now (eggs are spendy) or a certain type of food disappearing for awhile (tomatoes one year were gone from almost all fast food places).
If we have to substitute one food for another for a year or two that's an inconvenience. But preventing famine by trying to guarantee that the price of eggs doesn't go up is likely far, far down the list. Better that money be spent on improving the supply chains and if necessary bulk storage of long-lasting caloric sources (cheese and flour reserves, perhaps).
This isn't true, some types of antibiotics are routinely used as a preventative measure on chicken farms.
> Both FDA and the World Health Organization (WHO) rank antibiotics relative to their importance in human medicine. The highest ranking is “critically important.” Antibiotics in this category are used sparingly to treat sick birds. Antibiotics in other less-important classes may be used in chicken production to maintain poultry health and welfare, including for disease prevention, control and treatment purposes.
https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/questions-answers-ant...
The passive voice is disingenuous. Do you buy local farm products? You vote with your wallet. Make your choice, like everyone else.
That's generally what happens in Africa. It doesn't work as well in North America because consumers here are too rich to switch to barley and oats when wheat is expensive.
I'd love to get some chickens one of these days. Four eggs a day would be enough for us to regularly give away dozens while supplying all of our own egg needs.
Part of it is also that "cheap" tends to lead to monocultures and other patterns that are more easily disrupted.
An example being the Cavendish banana, which for most of the western world is the only thing they know of when the word "banana" is mentioned. And now the banana supply of a large part of the world is in danger of going extinct [1]
And there's also ecological health. "Cheap" tends to promote mass production in certain areas and shipping everywhere. "Cheap" tends to promote less sustainable farming practices. That sort of thing.
They're essentially clean rooms with animals living in them. It's kind of amazing. We only see the ones that are bad.
But like I said. No animal deserves to be crated all day every day for its life.
The fun thing is - nobody knows exactly why this happens. There's a bunch of hypotheses, but they're exceptionally hand-wavy.
That's a little deceptive. The antibiotics widely used by the industry are used for growth promotion. I don't know how it works, but I don't believe it's because they're keeping the birds healthy--i.e. treating infections. Some sources suggest part of the mechanism is by suppressing otherwise healthy or benign gut microbiota that compete for calories. Antibiotics have been used this way for nearly a century. There have been attempts to phase out subtherapeutic antibiotic use, but the practice is standard operating procedure in the US, and the US is a major chicken exporter. It's banned in the EU, though.
Not only do you have reduced waste, you have reduced packaging (no need to put the eggs in cartons if you're just carrying them to the kitchen).
People usually thing you need pigs to eat waste, but most farm animals will take some or all (the biggest risk is accidentally giving an animal something it shouldn't have).
I generally agree with you about centralization and monocultures, just in this case I don't think it's really going to change things.
Most people don't get that eggs usually are 30-60 days old when you buy them at the grocery store and they have to travel up to 1000 miles to get there in cold storage.
Want to know how old your eggs are? On every egg carton there's a 3 digit number from 1 to 365. That is the day of the year the producer of eggs handed them off to the distributor. Producers have up to 30 days to hand it off to distributor and the distributor has an additional 30 days to hand off to retailer. Kinda wild!
Still works fairly well as long as capital owners are smart and use insurance (who in turn advise their users on how to reduce their risk).
Rarely ever, IMO, are worthwhile goals entirely profit optimized or resiliency optimized. Some blend tends to be best, and sometimes you can even have both simultaneously (they’re not always inherently mutually exclusive, although those taking in the winnings may want it to be).
Years ago I worked on Farmforce that is basically this. In America we have centralized agriculture. Over the ocean, small-holder farmers in Africa provide lots of food to lots of markets. Keeping track of all of these farms, their herbicide and pesticide usage and weather-based yield projections is already a solved problem.
You are demonstrating your privilege. I am pretty frugal and my INDIVIDUAL food cost is like $100 a week, or 10% of my take home pay, and while I make peanuts compared to most in tech, I make more than the average adult.
USDA stats say the average numbers are closer to $500 a month and 11% of gross salary, and also:
>households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $5,278 on food (representing 32.6 percent of after-tax income).
I posted that, not because it is an unbiased source, but because if even that biased of a source admits it, then it's hard to dispute.
People used to spend ~30% of their income on mass produced basic staple foods with very little meat they cooked at home. You can live like that on like 1$/day. Median household income is over 80k today so we are talking more than an older of magnitude price reduction.
Get regular meal delivery etc and sure you can spend crazy money but it’s not really spending that money on food itself.
[1] https://www.hobbyfarms.com/black-soldier-flies-free-self-har...
You’re not just paying for food here. One possibility is you’re talking things you buy at the grocery store here, but laundry detergent is’t food.
So what’s the actual deal here.
Even assuming you’re spending twice as much on eggs it just doesn’t add up to over 20$/day. Flour is 0.50$/lb, lettuce is 3$/lb, butter is 5$/lb, etc. Even a 3,000 calories per day you’re well under that.
The biggest exception was in the case of disease, which we managed with fire. Burning diseased bird coops along with the corpses of dead birds was very cost effective on our small scale.
Nobody is going to pay you anywhere near the amount of money you'll need for the energy and equipment to do this.
"Well shit, coyotes got one of the chickens" and then...just go get another chicken for...about $5 each. There's no data you could possibly collect that would interest people enough to buy your company.
The whole point behind chickens is that there are some manageable startup costs but then they're cheap to "run" - if you have a big enough property and free range 'em or use a 'tractor', even your feed costs are cut.
> I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables.
It's not decentralized if everyone has to use your app (I'm guessing your plan is to get a cut...) This stuff already exists. They're called "farmers markets."
It's also called "talking to your neighbors." That's been going on for hundreds of years.
> build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture
Hammer, meet nail that does not exist.
I don't dine out, I don't drink, and I have some lifestyle + allergy restrictions for some things, but I tend to believe those restrictions actually make it more expensive than not.
I am also not in a VHCOL, but still quite high since I'm quite close to a major hub in an expensive suburb.
That number is insane to me. I would have to go high end on every single meal to get to the same number. I don't think I debate quality all that much either. I don't feel I cheap out either generally. Food is a fair bit less than 5% of what I make annually too.
Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition). They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture) that is often incredibly wasteful (except when it comes to paying their laborers a living wage).
"Modern farming practices" mostly translates to "use a tremendous amount of energy and really bad wages to produce a respectable surplus in calories and large profits for a few actors within the supply chain".
And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving. In 100% of cases lack of food is due to it not being made available by choice, i.e. because nobody is willing to pay for it, or it is actively withheld in war, etc.
Source: degree in development studies and more hours on African (and European) smallholder farms than I can count.
I've found, in my own life, that when I'm hyper focused on optimizing things for cost I often get far less "out" of things. I end up not eating my whole dinner because I don't like it. But if I let go a bit, things are actually in aggregate more financially efficient when I'm getting more of what I pay for, if that makes sense.
It only works for people who are built this way though. Not hedonists.
>There’s a reason antibiotics are so widely used
Yeah, for bacteria that's in their gut biome. Not pandemic viruses.
It's expensive to be poor and this is why. It's not just hedonists, a chronically empty stomach changes the way you think and how far and wide you're seeing.
As if this isn't known?
No, I'm telling you that your examples, the "strategy" of getting financial efficiency, and calling it "hedonism" are disconnected from the reality of the people who suffer from this the most. Unlike you those people don't leave dinner on the table because it was too cheap.
> As if this isn't known?
It doesn't sound like you know know. You're telling a blind person how to get around better by just "looking around".
Your perspective above is the modern version of "let them eat cake" [0]. "You don't have enough money? Try to live like you have enough money".
The world does not have caloric food insecurity. We might be insecure in terms of specific nutrients or specific foods, but the modern world is not insecure in terms of human food calories.
Regarding this smart poultry startup, where I'm from I often hear from poulty farmers chicken should be able to roam free and have a wide space to lay around eggs and reproduce. I'm curious how this limitation is addressed to backyard herders?
But muh efficiency!
This sounds intelligent, but is extremely wrong perspective.
For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high). This severe under capitalization is already a reason why we shouldn’t imitate their example. Anyway, all the development agencies run very active program to promote use of fertilizer, with very limited effect.
If you consider insufficient fertilizer use, then yeah, maybe they get good yields in the context. But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.
> They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture)
No. Their yields are horrible, and in no way comparable to modern industrialized agriculture.
> And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving.
This is true if you define “starvation” as “literal famine involving mass death”, but if you are trying to say that there has been no severe, persistent, widespread malnutrition due to insufficient caloric intake, then you are extremely wrong. Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector. It was only alleviated (and only in some places) by modern, western style development.
My advise is that many not I'm that situation, maybe you, act and think as if they do need to, but in reality don't.
Others are straight hedonist.
I'm saying don't be either.
Were focused on cutting coupons and not growing food in victory gardens.
We do a performance, a performative version of cost savings that is veiled in corporate marketing tactics and such.
If you were truly focused on minimizing cost you would learn to be self sufficient. Sometimes that's costly, but pays off.
We now frame things in terms of corporate marketing and our whole economic "complex"
It's like you think you are saving money by buying generic soda, then you realize you don't even need soda.
Logic yourself there.
Calculate a cost of your time, maybe it's your salary, maybe you come about it a bit differently.
Then if you spend 10 mins saving 8 cents on Ramen, and you like the cheaper Ramen less, you have a paradigm within which you can objectively (not emotionally) determine if you are wasting your time (therefore money) on a false optimization, or actually doing good for yourself.
First thing you'll notice is much lighter they are than they look.
Second thing you'll notice is how hot their feet are.
A tangible lesson in the importance of surface area vs volume wrt mechanical, thermo, aero systems.
> For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high).
Capital constraints are an extremely common problem for African farmers, not "a small amount of cases". It could easily be remedied with the right support. Or simply by regulating international trade in a way that does not allow excessive subsidies in the E.U., U.S. and elsewhere completely destroy the local market for agricultural products on the continent.
At the same time, fertilizer overuse is extremely well documented in "modern agriculture" across the world. It has extremely bad externalities, from CO2 emissions to over saturating local water reserves, which of course Big Ag usually does not have to pick up the tap for.
If you internalize the costs of fertilizer use, "modern" agriculture quickly becomes uncompetitive. You can see this in many European countries (i.e. Netherlands, Ireland), where the enforcement of nitrate regulations has basically put whole sectors of the agricultural industry out of business.
> But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.
No, but we should learn from it what we can. Especially with climate change rapidly leading to less availability of water and restrictions on using fertilizers.
> Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector.
Again: both the calories and the nutrition to adequately feed the entire population of the world is easily available, including in most cases locally or regionally. If it doesn't reach specific people, it is not an availability problem, but a distribution problem.
Most emergency aid organizations have long since started sourcing both calories and nutrition for disaster relief regionally because they can.
Is Africa's agricultural sector terribly inefficient? Yes, of course. Is there nothing to learn from African smallholders? Hell no!. Will "modern agriculture" have to change radically, including by incorporating lessons and practices from smallholders from around the world if we want agriculture to stop messing up the climate and literally killing the lion's share of natural diversity? You bet!