
Why is chicken so cheap? [video] - open-source-ux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiYVoHEV5hs
======
arendtio
Maybe Farmers should be required to print a photo of the actual living bird
and their habitat on the packaging. When consumers would see those scruffy
chicken for $2 compared to the healthy $7 they might choose the organic ones
more often.

Killed and unfeathered they all look the same.

~~~
erikig
This reminded me of the "Colin the Chicken" skit on Portlandia where a couple
ordering chicken gets to see its birth certificate, diet, emotional profile,
heritage and family...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__PVLB8Nm4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__PVLB8Nm4)

~~~
arendtio
Unavailable in my country :-/

Probably the same as this one?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAlWrT5P2VI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAlWrT5P2VI)

~~~
nchase
yeah

------
RandallBrown
Wow, 39 is much shorter than I expected.

I guess it makes sense, because how else could you keep up with demand, but my
view of animal lifecycles only has stuff like bugs fully maturing so quickly.

Interesting stuff.

Now my question is why are bananas so cheap? They come all the way from like
Brazil, but they're still cheaper than the apple that is grown just a couple
hours from me.

~~~
781
Apples are also more expensive than oranges, which I too find strange.

~~~
toasterlovin
Cheaper by what metric? Also, it depends on the variety. FWIW, my experience
is that oranges are usually more expensive than apples, except for the few
weeks that oranges are in season.

------
rasengan0
Breeding a "product" with a small gene pool, churning out monoculture:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana)
or a more imaginative corrective:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H7N9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H7N9)
makes a plant based diet a very good hack indeed.

~~~
evgen
You don't know what the word monoculture means until you stand in the middle
of a soybean field in the midwest and see nothing but more soybeans (from the
same small handful of varieties provided by giant seed companies) as far as
the eye can see. Please do not imagine for one second that a plant-based diet
increases biodiversity.

~~~
ictebres
The fact that we have so much monoculture soybean fields is that they make up
the feed for the animals in Factory farming.

Here is one link I just found that point out to the fact ‚70-75% of the
world’s soy ends up as feed for chickens, pigs, cows, and farmed fish.‘:
[https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/stop-
deforestation/dri...](https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/stop-
deforestation/drivers-of-deforestation-2016-soybeans)

~~~
evgen
You could pick any plant humans consume and it is inevitable that the vast
bulk of it would be produced in large, efficient, monoculture operations. The
delusion of small farms producing 'heirloom' vegetables in copious variety is
a bourgeoisie fantasy of the western middle-class who has come no closer to a
real farm than the local Whole Foods. The soy in your tempeh and tofu comes
from those same farms, the same operations produce the feedstock of your kale
chips and organic lentil puffs.

We have monoculture farming because it is efficient and people (not)
surprisingly have decided that they have no interest in paying more for
alternative production processes.

~~~
ictebres
We can’t conclude that this is the only way, especially with advanced
automation or subsidies for ecological and sustainable agriculture.
Furthermore animal farming must be the least efficient way to provide
calories. So I don’t understand how you can talk down solid alternatives like
tempeh or tofu.

(BTW in the link i posted above it says human products take up 6% of soybean
production.)

~~~
evgen
You can imagine any fantasy scenarios you want if it makes you feel any
better, but nothing in the past century of agricultural progress has had a
significant impact on the economic factors motivating the industry.

Animal farming is not the most efficient way to provide calories, but humanity
does not lack for calories. Livestock (excepting ruminants that graze on land
that is unsuitable for farming) is a caloric aggregator, turning a large chunk
of calories into a smaller volume that is easier to transport and more desired
by the market. If you want that to change you need to meet the market's
demands (c.f. the unicorn valuations of a few new fake meat companies...)

~~~
conjectures
"Animal farming is not the most efficient way to provide calories, but
humanity does not lack for calories."

Actually, a lot of humans do go hungry. The inefficiency of using land for
crops to feed to livestock means that the price of staples is higher than it
otherwise would be.

While meeting market demands is a large part of what will change things I
think you're missing a piece on how this will come about. If there were no
vegans, the chance of vegan unicorns succeeding would be much smaller. If some
people did not harp on about the inhumanity of industrial farming, others
would be less motivated to try alternatives and the chance of vegan unicorns
succeeding would be reduced.

~~~
DuskStar
> Actually, a lot of humans do go hungry. The inefficiency of using land for
> crops to feed to livestock means that the price of staples is higher than it
> otherwise would be.

I'll posit that even if you made grain free at the docks in the US, there
would _still_ be people in the world going hungry. (Fewer people, certainly)
Transportation and distribution is just as large a problem as production at
this point in history.

------
Reason077
Chickens are one the most successful animals on earth! By evolving to become
fatter, more succulent, and delicious, they have convinced humans to feed and
house them, and in doing so have multiplied to vast numbers and spread their
genes almost everywhere across the globe.

~~~
perfmode
black people, too! we were so strong and resilient and good at labor that
humans paid for our travel across the seas and gave us the opportunity to help
build America! we were fed and housed and everything, oh my! gosh

> Shadow with me while I'm steppin' on my own resentment

> Life scatter in all directions, I was overzealous

> Overcurious, Momma worry her days get better

> I know she heard me, a timid voice in her stormy weather

> And Poppa taught me our ancestors were tarred and feathered And brought
> across the sea, bodies swinging from poplar trees

> I wore a modernesque version, my burden haunted me I cautiously approach the
> rather daunting sea

> By nightfall I face the man I'm 'sposed to be All this grief, been eatin'
> away my stomach lining

> It's hard to eat when my poppa image stuck inside me

> I wore his death mask,

> smilin' through the trauma

> In his honor,

> I'm expounding

~~~
toasterlovin
Animals are not people and they do not occupy the same moral category.

~~~
perfmode
blacks weren't people then, either.

back then, blacks didn't occupy the same moral category as the humans who bred
and traded them.

afterwards, blacks were upgraded to 2/5ths human.

now, we still struggle for acceptance and parity.

morality is a process.

~~~
toasterlovin
Animals are categorically not humans. This is a scientific fact which you can
quantify and measure. Blacks are humans. That is another scientific fact which
you can quantify and measure.

~~~
perfmode
blacks being humans didn't stop us from slotting them into an inferior moral
category. and back then, we asserted as scientific fact that they were
inferior. the apparatus of justification is something which changes over time.
it is interesting to me to observe your invocation of our present day
apparatus of justification. :)

~~~
toasterlovin
Yes, but we came to see blacks as equal _because_ they are, in fact, humans,
just like whites. Animals will never be humans, no matter what. They will
always remain a separate moral category. Here's a simple thought experiment
that should illustrate this:

Imagine a scenario in which you can save one of two lives: a human or a dog.
You can't pick both. Just one. The question is not, "Which would you save?",
but instead, "Would you final moral fault in a person who chose to save the
dog?". Almost everybody would hold a person who chose to save the dog morally
culpable for the death of the human. But they would not hold them morally
culpable for the death of the dog if they chose to save the human.

That will never change. Because animals are not humans.

~~~
perfmode
that's post-hoc rationalization.

we came to see blacks as humans because lots of people shed blood and fought
for their rights. nothing was handed to anyone for free.

~~~
toasterlovin
So you'd find no moral fault in a person who chose to save a dog instead of a
human?

~~~
perfmode
It is disappointing to observe you argue so strongly from a position of deep
and profound ignorance on this topic. have you no doubt?

Recommended reading: [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-
animal/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/)

~~~
toasterlovin
Why would I be persuaded to change my mind when you A) won't answer a simple
question, and B) think it's reasonable to take the position that I am wrong
because I won't spend several hours digesting some link you've provided, which
you can't be bothered to spend three sentences summarizing?

My premise is simple: almost every single person would find a person who chose
to save the life of an animal over a human morally culpable for the death of
the human. Whereas they would not find a person morally culpable for the death
of the animal if they chose to save the person instead. That asymmetry
directly speaks to the different moral stations that animals and humans
occupy.

You have yet to level a single actual argument against that premise.

~~~
perfmode
I am not responsible for your education. Take responsibility for yourself and
have a nice life.

------
hombre_fatal
I always found it a bit tacky to call it an "achievement" for the animal/plant
that humans farm it. Same with "evolutionary" changes due to selective
breeding. Both said in the video.

Always feels like someone is trying to spin reality on me. "What? The birds
love it! Instead of living in nature in a part of Africa, they are suffering
worldwide to the tune of billions!" Their hard work paid off!

~~~
avar
What sort of lives do you think birds living "in nature" in Africa have?

Instead of being painlessly gassed to death like farmed chickens they'll be
eaten alive by some predator, or instead of being provided with antibiotics as
hatchlings perhaps worms will eat most of their siblings alive before they
leave the nest.

Romanticizing factory farming is ridiculous, but so is romanticizing the lives
of wild animals.

From a species interaction perspective the farming of animals could be
described as mutualism, but humans tend to break all the rules in traditional
species interaction models:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_interaction#Mutuali...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_interaction#Mutualism)

We're not unique though:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism)

~~~
nsomaru
Can’t say that comparing the appalling conditions in bird factories with a
life lived in the wild really compares here.

At least wild birds get to make a go of it, the factory birds never had a
chance. Some of them are too fat to even walk and never even get to leave
their cage.

If I was given the choice I’d choose the life of the wild bird over the caged
one any day.

~~~
toasterlovin
Just playing devils advocate here, not actually arguing either way, but with
the following you have actually described the life that some people choose to
live (by some definition of the word “choose”):

> Some of them are too fat to even walk and never even get to leave their
> cage.

------
_hardwaregeek
Whenever I travel outside the US, I'm always struck by how different the
chickens look. Chickens in the US have a pale appearance, with flabby, almost
mushy meat. They look as if they were grown on a tree, never alive and
running. While chickens in say, Italy or Mexico tend to look like they were
alive at some point. There's color in the meat, often a yellow tint. Their
skin and muscle look used and not atrophied.

I wonder how these differences extend to nutritional value?

~~~
13of40
I've noticed the same thing with tomatoes and apricots. I've got a good friend
whose family have an apricot farm in the Kurdish part of Turkey, and their
apricots are amazing, but the same variety grown in Western Washington tastes
like plastic. There's something seriously pathological with the "terrior" in
the western part of north America. (Luckily it doesn't extend to wine.)

~~~
captainredbeard
I’ll push back on that a bit.

(A) The _terroir_ for wine is probably the pickiest of all mass produced
fruit, at least according to White’s _Understanding Vineyard Soils_.

(B) The soil of the Western US is extremely varied but it’s hardly the only
factor involved in the taste and cultivation of fruit. The most obvious wildly
differing factor is climate. The high deserts of E. Oregon would produce very
different fruit compared to Washington’s coastal region even if you used
identical soil, due to rainfall, mean/median temps, diurnal temp variation,
etc.

------
jawarner
Land usage per chicken, difference between free-range vs. intensively reared:

1/12 m^2 vs. 1/17 m^2

Consumer cost, difference between free range vs. intensively reared:

4 euros/lb vs. 2 euros/lb.

Does the difference in production costs explain the drastic consumer cost
difference between these two methods? Why can't free-range farming be
automated like it is in the intensive rearing model?

~~~
Someone
Chickens do not eat in the dark. That’s why the light in stables for
intensively reared chicken is on way longer than the sun is up (I’m not up to
date on what’s considered optimal today, but I think 24 hours a day was
abandoned because it caused too much stress (and stress harms growth, or even
kills chicken) for weird things such as “40 minutes on, 20 minutes off”)

Some of the large factors that affect production costs are feeding the chicken
and e.g. capital costs of the stable, but optimizing production per dollar
more or less boils down to getting the “feed conversion ratio” down.

It is about 1,6 for intensively reared chicken in the USA, meaning they have
to eat 1,6 kg of food to gain a kilogram of weight
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Poultry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Poultry))

For comparison, you need two kg of feed to get a kg of eggs, so eggs are about
20% more expensive per kg than chicken meat.

You can’t keep chicken that grow that fast to an age of 80 days, as they would
break their legs from excessive weight.

Free range chicken are different breeds that have a higher FCR.

~~~
jawarner
Thank you for an interesting comment.

------
lostjohnny
because chickens are cheap to feed and breed

you don't need automation to make it cheap

My family used to breed any sort of livestock, from chickens to lambs, from
cows to pigs, from rabbits to pigeons

High quality meat, just for the family

chickens are by far the cheapest and easiest

(rabbits get sick easily, pigs eat a lot, cows need a lot of work to keep them
clean etc. etc.)

~~~
toasterlovin
Right, but _why_ are they the cheapest form of meat? There’s probably some
biochemical or energy utilization reason. Perhaps it has to do with chickens
being fairly lean meat. I don’t know, but have often wondered.

~~~
Creationer
Contrasting against Pigs and Cows:

1\. Small animal which requires less bone structure to support (bone scales
non-linearly with mass for land animals).

2\. Shorter lifespan and use of eggs allows simpler and quicker sexual
selection.

3\. Less intelligent animal so less energy and nutrition spent on growing the
brain and maintaining its function.

Its a smaller animal, basically. Fish and insects are more efficient than
chickens.

[https://ib.bioninja.com.au/_Media/feed-
conversion_med.jpeg](https://ib.bioninja.com.au/_Media/feed-
conversion_med.jpeg)

~~~
avar
The main reason has little to do with any of that, but just historical
inertia.

There's a lot of species that could have potentially replaced the chicken if
we unwind human history and started anew, but it's not a competition between
wild species of birds today, but chickens with at least 5000 years of human-
guided domestication v.s. most other species.

The same can be said about pretty much anything people eat and farm. Most
modern fruit and vegetables were pretty much inedible in their primordial pre-
domesticated forms, it's only through thousands of years of effort that we
have what we've got today.

In terms innate qualities making chickens suitable for domestication over
other birds, some of those are probably:

1\. They're pretty much flightless[1], even in the wild. This excludes most
bird species right off the bat. Hard to domesticate something that'll just fly
away.

2\. They're comfortable in groups, and have a group hierarchy. This tends to
be common among species humans have domesticated. Good luck domesticating e.g.
birds of pray productively, they'll constantly be fighting each other for
territory.

3\. They're not picky about food, and don't require humans to actively feed
them in the context of pre-industrial village life. Some birds only eat say
insects, chickens can eat pretty much anything, even other chicken.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl)

~~~
toasterlovin
I think your #2 is a pretty good insight.

Separately, I’m more interested in why chickens are more economically
efficient than, say, pigs or cows than why they’re more efficient than other
birds. Any thoughts there?

~~~
lostjohnny
#2 is pretty obvious, birds of prey are predators, you don't put predators
together in the same space

But the same happens if you put two roosters in the same hen

chickens are not much more efficient than many other birds though

just more common

------
arendtio
This reminds me of this 'In a Nutshell' video:

[https://youtu.be/NxvQPzrg2Wg?t=163](https://youtu.be/NxvQPzrg2Wg?t=163)

------
feld
I feed my dogs almost exclusively chicken leg quarters and can get them for as
low as 39 cents per pound (USD).

Chicken is insanely cheap.

~~~
hollerith
I'm curious: do you remove the bones or are the dogs able to eat the bones
with no ill effect?

~~~
feld
They eat bones. Raw bones are safe, cooked bones are not.

------
miguelrochefort
When I went to America, I couldn't believe how cheap chicken was. I once found
boneless chicken breast for $1.99/pound. Eggs were dirt cheap as well,
sometimes less than $1.00/dozen.

I don't remember ever seeing prices like these in Canada.

~~~
froindt
My record for a dozen eggs was $0.37/dozen in summer of 2017 at an Aldi in a
town go about it 30,000 in Iowa. It was roughly that price the whole summer.

From my understanding, that was below the price of production. 2017 was a very
tough year for chicken farmers, with a huge oversupply. The chicken rendering
(killing) operations were backlogged by many months. Farmers often had no
choice but to raise the chickens they already bought, knowing full well
they're going to be sold unprofitably.

~~~
eden_hazard
My record for chicken is $.35/lb for chicken drumsticks. It was however from a
wholesale store and came in a 40lb box. To me that's more frightening than
anything. Like how is that chicken so cheap...

------
vbuwivbiu
That man and his automatic shed. How depressing. I'd much rather pay 3x as
much, eat chicken 1/3 as often and actually enjoy it instead of eating it
every day and hardly noticing it.

All those cheap chickens may as well have stickers on saying "1/3 the
enjoyment"

~~~
hombre_fatal
> eating it every day and hardly noticing it

Our distant relationship with where meat comes from is one of the most bizarre
things about humans. Especially next to our psychopathic relationship with our
own pets.

I've seen people freak out with disgust because there's a tiny feather or some
dirt in their carton of eggs. Or disgusted by the hanging, swinging corpses
behind the butcher when they go to order something that's sliced off the
corpse.

~~~
781
There are quite a few (relatively) famous pigs on Instagram.

Try suggesting to someone that maybe they should be turned into bacon this
Christmas. I'm not talking about vegans, but regular meat-eating people. Study
reaction.

~~~
a1369209993
That's a entirely reasonable position; those pigs are more useful as
entertainment than food, by a rather large margin too.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
As someone with a rack of ribs currently slow cooking in the oven, I beg to
differ!

~~~
a1369209993
Unless you mean that you don't find the pigs on Instagram entertaining, I
don't see your point. Clearly there is no grave shortage of food pigs if
you're eating one, so the marginal benifit of having a few extra food pigs is
much less than the benefit of using those few pigs for entertainment. Kind of
like how it's better to use marble for statues or architecture than for
landfill, because there's plenty of landfill rock already available.

------
jolmg
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743006)

