So there I was randomly looking up food dishes on the interweb, as you do (tikka masala, of unspecified protein) when up pops this helpful little message from our good friends at the United Nations, lest I make the dire, climate combusting choice of putting my neighbour’s pasture raised beef, or even, my own home raised, 100% grass and heather fed, mountain reared on the land I live on where not much else will grow, lamb in my curry (actually, it would probably be aged mutton which I’m sure is much worse, having lived all those methane belching years).
Hmm. My threat sensing whiskers prickle. My immediate reaction to the unsolicited intrusion on my scrolling is incredulity, quickly followed by repudiation. But the audacity of it keeps niggling at me. I am triggered.
I won’t go into numbers, how overly simplified and misleading the figures shown here are, or try to explain the natural carbon cycles of which cattle, sheep and their methane emissions are but an ancient and innate part of, or even the human nutrition factors on which beef is much superior to poultry. Others are fighting those good fights far more intelligently than I can—dietician, farmer, and author of Sacred Cow, Diana Rogers, of Sustainable Dish and Global Food Justice Alliance, does a great job of breaking down figures on various forums, as does environmental lawyer and rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman in her excellent book, Defending Beef, and many others. I’ll just share some of my own experience of raising ruminants (sheep and goats) and poultry (ducks and chickens) for food (meat, eggs and dairy), over the past couple of decades, albeit on a minimal scale, that I hope might explain why simplistic yet challenging statements like this around food, farming and sustainability really get my hackles up. Why I feel driven to defend my beautiful, woolly and milky beasts of benevolence and their most sacred gift of all, their meat, made from the soil beneath my feet.
My bias for my beloved ruminants may be strong, but, it’s well founded. Years ago, our vice was poultry. We had hundreds of birds for a time, a mix of geese, ducks, chickens, muscovies, guinea fowl, you name it. We hatched and reared batches of rangers and broilers to fatten, and heritage, dual purpose breeds to lay and rear. We had pens with little breeding trios and pens full of poults. Weak chicks were lap warmed and hand fed and our favourite hens and roosters had names. Our freezers were full of ducks, geese, chickens and all the wonderful pâtés, stocks and broths I made from all parts of them. We sold eggs and live birds. We even hosted a poultry sale on our farm. And our wallets were empty. Our birds ranged over 26 acres of good pasture, shared with a couple of goats, a handful of sheep and horses that were fat on grass and grass alone, while our poultry feed bill was astronomical.
Poultry (chickens, ducks, turkeys, etc.) are simple, mono-gastric, omnivorous (veering on the carnivorous side, except geese that are adapted to eat mostly plants) creatures that can’t synthesise their own protein from plants any better than we or our dogs can, and therefore need to have high levels of high quality protein supplied in their diet in order to grow, fatten and put it in their meat. That either means feeding them meat (you can see the conundrum there) or coming up with enough digestible, complete protein from plant sources. Hello highly processed, imported from afar, soy feeds. I’ve seen chickens hunt down and tear mice apart. Our ducks free range and hunt for frogs, bugs, slugs and spiders on their forays through the bogs and wetlands, but it’s not enough. The ravenous little dinosaurs still need their extra protein and grains.
Ruminants (sheep, goats, cattle) have, in my experience of raising sheep and goats for well over a decade now, required little more inputs than the grass and heather under their hooves to produce high quality meat and milk (and bonus wool and hides) in such quantity that we have surplus to sell, without really trying—selling meat has never been the aim of our game. Ruminants, by way of a fermentative gutful of fibre consuming bacteria, have the alchemistic ability to make protein out of cellulose—they turn human inedible fibre, often from land like mine that cannot grow human edible crops (or poultry edible crops), into highly nutritious meat. Where grass and greenery grows, ruminants too can grow and thrive and feed us in symbiotic relationship with the land they live on. As we and many others are proving on our lands, managed “holistically”, “regeneratively” or whatever other buzzword you want to use for an integrated, ecological grazing system, ruminants can help to restore vibrant and diverse ecosystems while producing nutritious food. We do not feed grains or soy to our goats or sheep, with rare exception (like when a young, early-weaned, under-grown buck that I’m in a hurry to breed needs a boost of oats to bring him on, or a ewe is struggling to raise twins through a hard year on the hill). Living on the land, they eat the plants that grow there, the grasses, heathers and herbs that thrive on regular pruning and disturbance, and give back in return the impacts and alchemy of their hoof prints and manure. They drink the rain that falls, giving most of the water they consume back to the land, loaded with nutrients, to filter back through the soil, also voiding any figures we’ve been fed on water usage per kilo of meat.
We now have around forty sheep and ten goats on our small, non-commercial, mountain farm, plus around twenty-five ducks. Which translates very roughly to around 3,000kgs of ruminant to 60kgs of poultry, live weight. It’s early winter so our laying ducks are not in full lay: we get one or two eggs per day, but we’re still feeding them a 20kg bag of organic, soy based, layers feed per week (at over €20 per bag), plus their organic, Irish grown grain mix soaked in sour milk. Our ducks forage freely, but they still need their grain and protein feeds year round, even through the seasons when they’re not in lay. As well as our layers we have a handful of meat ducks growing on. They grow fast to double the weight and eat double the quantity of our layers. I am continually looking for ways to cut out/down their soy feed, but, with a gaping lack of available alternative, Irish grown, organic protein source like peas and beans, have so far not been able to keep their protein up at a level to keep them in condition, laying and growing on productively without it.
Our sheep and goats eat the forage that grows on the land they live on—land that will not support any other type of food farming—supplemented in winter with grass hay we buy from the lowlands (coincidentally from within our thirty-five mile local food radius), fodder beets (also grown locally), and a token amount alfalfa pellets that come from across the Irish Sea (UK grown) which is really just a crutch while we improve our poor pastures that, at a push, they could do without.
Our return on our ruminants per year is a couple of large chest freezers full of sheep meat (we eat sheep meat at least four days per week, year round), maybe half a freezer of goat meat (that’s a bit more special), enough sheep meat to sell to cover the cost of the flock’s winter hay, more milk than we can drink (hence the ducks getting their grains soaked in soured milk), and stacks of wool and hides that are, once up-valued as traditional, artisan crafts, a significant contribution to our livelihood.
Our ducks, by far the most costly inhabitants of our farm, give us back a glut of eggs through spring and early summer, that we can either sell to cover around half their weekly feed costs while they’re laying (while keeping enough eggs for our own daily eating and hatching replacement ducks), or preserve to see ourselves through the seasonal lulls in their production. And a few surplus drakes from time to time to fatten up (requiring more feed) for the freezer. Our surplus drakes, even of relatively heavy dual purpose breeds, will never bulk up to the weight of a commercial table duck, or as fast. Even the few hybrid meat ducks we’re raising now will not make the weight of a commercially reared duck in our widely free-ranging, minimally fed, outdoor system. (But they will be so much tastier and healthier, and we will make full use of every part of them, from their feathers to their feet).
Commercial meat poultry are bred and raised for unnaturally fast weight gain, to unnatural proportions, and a very short life. They are usually sexed as day olds and the male chicks disposed because they just don’t plump up quite like hens do. Broiler hens grow big and fat, unbelievably fast, requiring a lot of high protein (soy) feed to do so.
On our very first foray into intentionally raising fowl for meat (rather than just eating the occasional feisty cockerel that pushed his luck too many times), we purchased broiler chicks from a commercial hatchery. They were such sweet birds, the most docile and amenable chickens we ever had, they’d eat out of your hand and sit on your lap. They became such pets that when the time came, we couldn’t bring ourselves to do the deed. Not all of them. We decided we’d keep a couple to see if they’d lay, and we’d cross them with a heritage rooster for a fast growing ranger type table bird (in our green naivety we didn’t know those highly hybridised, commercial broiler hens are sterile). One quickly developed a pneumonia-like sickness and died, I believe from the pressure of her own weight on her lungs. The other grew fatter and fatter, got slower and slower, until her legs began to buckle and her chest got sores from sitting. We couldn’t watch her suffer. I don’t think she reached twenty weeks. We kept to much slower growing rangers and heritage, dual purpose chickens after that. Our birds always foraged freely, and we fed them our own kitchen and butcher scraps and fermented local grains as well as their compound feed, anything to keep our feed bill and our reliance on imported, processed soy feeds down.
A sustainable food system is a sovereign, local food system, one that enriches soils and communities. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to have a local, biodynamic or regenerative poultry farm that raises their birds on pasture, and local grains and protein, but that’s not how most poultry is raised. Commercial scale poultry operations that can grow the colossal weight of poultry meat to supply our supermarkets in grain fed indoor or “free-range” systems are made possible only by the global commodity crop trade. And that is precarious, dependent on fossil fuelled global trade, and monopolised by giant, profit-driven corporations.
A food system based on commodity soy is not sustainable, and it threatens local food security. For poultry to be a substantial part of a sustainable, sovereign, localised food system, they would need to be fed human food waste: kitchen scraps, butcher’s waste. Which isn’t possible on commercial scale within our current industrial food system with its regulations on feeding food waste and animal byproducts to livestock.
But I can raise my ruminants entirely on local feeds grown in local soils, from the grass that grows under their hooves to the hay, beets and straw bedding I buy from my neighbouring farmers, in a hand to hand exchange of cash and gratitude, while enriching the soils on our farm and the substrate of our community. It’s not a comparison of cost; it’s about where that cost goes and who profits from it. Sure, if we’re talking tonnage of feed consumed, of course a cow takes a heck of a lot more than a chicken, but the cow gets the vast bulk of her feed from under her feet, while potentially improving the ecosystem she is part of; my sheep live on land that cannot be cropped, foraging naturally and feeding us from the land we live on. While the chicken needs her feed shipped in from someone else’s fertile, arable lands across the globe.
Poultry is only viable at scale by cashing into the global crop commodity market—we can’t feed them enough protein to grow and fatten (or cheaply enough to line our supermarket shelves) without large quantities of processed, imported soy. Sure, we could plough up some land, crop our own peas and beans and set up our own bean processing facilities to keep our chickens “vegetarian fed” (which is not an ideal, species appropriate diet for a semi-carnivorous, mini dinosaur). Or we could lay our lands in permanent, species rich pastures grazed by ruminants and feed our free-ranging poultry on some local grains plus kitchen and butcher’s waste, finish them on whey left over from ruminant cheesemaking (that makes for delicious chickens, I tell you). Pretty much how our grandparents or great-grandparents might have raised their chickens.
It’s worth remembering that our grandparents or great-grandparents would have eaten chicken sparingly: a surplus, rowdy rooster might find his way to the kitchen table, and he’d be lean, with dark, dense meat rich with the oxygenation of his days spent foraging and fighting in the pastures, nothing like the pale, bland and pumped-up chicken meat that comes today in sterilised cuts wrapped in plastic; or an old layer past her sell-by date would end her days as a nourishing soup. A plump bird specially fattened for the table would be a treat indeed. And if we really want to talk sustainability, every part of that bird from its bright red comb to its yellow feet would be rendered into nourishment and relished with gratitude.
But my sheep, I can raise, feed, fatten, process and trade locally, with absolute provenance, circulating local wealth and nourishment on home soil. Call me a cynic, but I wonder whose commercial interests might influence UN policy decisions and those helpful little messages that pop up unsolicited on a Google search. A sustainable food system is a local food system, and we grow great pasture in Ireland, not soy.
Books of interest:
Sacred Cow by Robb Wolf and Diana Rogers. A great little primer.
Defending Beef by Nicolette Hahn Niman for a deep dive that cuts through all the bull.
The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is a relevant and stunningly written manifesto calling for a more ecological and just food system.
A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje takes apart our current food/farming systems and lays out a compelling roadmap for a sustainable, localised future.
Saying No to a Farm Free Future by Chris Smaje is a response to the ultimate industrialisation of food—manufactured meats—but is still very relevant.
Holistic Management by Allan Savory. The classic treatise on the role of large herbivores in restoring ecosystems by the original pioneer of regenerative agriculture.
Now I am really curious how you use the combs and feathers of your harvested birds!
There are several "quotable" bits in here, but I did laugh out loud when I read this: "The ravenous little dinosaurs still need their extra protein and grains."
There has been a steady drumbeat on Scottish BBC, at least that I have noticed, to cover the way Earht requires to phase out eating meat. I am not sure what to make of it. But, when the meat is part of a "sovereign" life, as you aptly called it, then with all due respect, the UN should piss off.
Here's an article that might be of interest to you:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/american-agriculture-farming-climate-change/