While this might seem a bit lengthy, it’s worth it to share with you what it means to be apart of such an amazing industry. Below is an excerpt from a story that aired on national radio. It was written and recorded by Trent Loos - a sixth generation farmer, columnist, radio and television host.
The 50th annual Poultry Festival took place recently in Northwest Arkansas and let me tell you, there are certainly things to crow about in that industry. Like the rooster bringing the awareness of a new day, we should adopt his strategy in telling the world what the chicken industry has accomplished in the past 80 years. The efficiency or “greenness” of the chicken business is another one of those well-kept secrets that needs to come busting out of the closet.
I have long said that the only way to know where we are headed for sure is to know where we have been. In 1925, it took 112 days for a broiler chicken to be ready for market. The average market weight was 2.5 lbs and it required 4.70 lbs of feed to put on a pound of gain. The birds had an average of mortality rate of about 18%. Fast forward to today when it takes only 48 days to get to a market weight of 5.5 lbs. It requires only 1.95 lbs of feed per pound of gain and the mortality rate sits at 4%. If you want to talk about improvement in performance, the caloric requirement to put a pound of weight on a chicken in the past 15 years has been reduced to from 3000 to 2600. This is modern agriculture at its finest.
Now if I share that story on an airplane (because that is the best playground we have for mental gymnastics) the first statement from a complete stranger will be that we are able to do this because of all of the steroids, hormones, chemicals, antibiotics and other junk used to artificially pump these chickens up. NO ma’am! The truth of the matter is that it has been accomplished simply with good old-fashioned animal husbandry that American farmers implement better than anyone else in the world.
First off, genetics have played a huge role in these improved efficiencies. Genetic selection, not modification or manipulation, has allowed for phenomenal improvement in chicken performance. But once the correct genetics have been selected, the confinement facilities contribute greatly because the chicken is now in a stress-free environment, as verified by the improvement in mortality rates. Obviously the diet and ideal protein feeding strategies are the third leg of the stool. Of course none of these would mean anything without the human being’s diligence and willingness to find a better way to produce safe, high-quality food for the world.
I was reminded at the Poultry Festival that several if not most of the chicken producers in this country have also voluntarily eliminated the use of antibiotics at a sub-therapeutic level. It truly has been the animal husbandry that has allowed for these improvements in chicken production. All of these numbers, as impressive as they are, probably don’t mean anything to that person sitting next to you on the plane unless you help them look at it this way: it now requires 60% fewer resources devoted to feedstuffs for the animals than it did 80 years ago to produce the same amount of chicken for your table. That means we are making protein available to feed more people and utilizing fewer resources to do so. I don’t mean to sound cocky, but that is something to strut our stuff and crow about.