Perpetual Chicken Feed
How do you feel about flies? Do you think we depend on them? Would the world be better with less flies? We can have a look at this, starting with the vegans who simply wish the world was otherwise.
The saving grace for vegetarians, as distinct from vegans, is eggs. Eggs are just about a complete food and, for anyone on a diet of vegetables, they are going to correct a lot of deficiencies. The deficiencies come from a diet full of grains which are all short of key nutrients. When people bring up children as vegetarians, I look first to see how many eggs a child eats to know that this regime is not abusive.
But hang on — what do chickens get fed? Grains and chemicals and pharmaceuticals. What did you think it might consist of? Harvey Ussery says that for his small flock of chickens, more about which later, he cannot produce eggs or chickens that are cheaper than he can buy in a US supermarket. That is how cheap the food fed to poultry is. Where are the chickens supposed to get the nutrients that go into the eggs?
Of course, this is also political right now, with a widespread understanding in the UK of the quite dreadful health and welfare standards of US chickens — that might be about to be forced on us in the name of being able to continue trade with anyone who’ll have us![1]
So where do the flies come in? Wendell Berry has a saying about agriculture taking a natural system that works perfectly and splitting it apart — into two problems. The classic example is keeping cows and beef cattle in enclosed spaces, which denies the soil the benefits of naturally-distributed cow dung and also creates a problem disposing of large amounts of concentrated manure that is toxic to waterways.
Apparently, in older and wiser times, the entrails of animals that are otherwise waste material would be suspended in the henhouse.[2] The immediate result is that flies lay their eggs which hatch into maggots. The maggots, when they pupate ready to turn into new flies, fall to the ground where they would normally bury themselves in soil. In the henhouse they are snapped up by the hens, and maggots are a simply brilliant form of food for hens: far superior to the aptly-named chicken feed. Clearly, they are using waste that otherwise has to be disposed of and in that sense are both free and saving cost elsewhere. Real economics.
Grades of chickens
Many people, I guess, would consider buying free-range chickens and free-range eggs. It means very little, the regulation referring only to how much space there is per chicken and having access to the outdoors. Certainly, a welfare benefit which might have some refection in meat and egg quality. Aidan’s daughter did a project (which bored the life out of her at college), putting numbers on whether free-range chickens actually range. Only about 10% of them venture outside the ark, and most of those don’t go very far. Not much of a premium.[3]
Of course, there are hens that actually roam and actually forage and find all sorts of things to eat — grubs and insects and carrion and grit amongst them. Hens, by descent, are forest birds that find all their food by foraging. One can forage grain in the right environment, but it is the diversity of foods that as ever is the source of health. Especially if you have vegetarian tendencies, that diversity is going to be important to you too.
You can buy organic chickens and eggs, but that does not imply or guarantee any of that diverse diet. It just means organic feed and less gratuitous pharmaceuticals. Only by searching it out and seeing for yourselves the nature of the flock and the enterprise can you buy proper healthy chickens laying proper healthy eggs. The industry simply doesn’t default to working that way.
Interestingly, if you merely cross the channel you will find much better chickens and much better eggs. I can only put this down to the French knowing what food should taste like…
Grub production
If we follow Wendell Berry a little way, we find some people know how to farm better. On Amazon in the US you can buy a BioPod for the production of soldier fly grubs. You put food waste, like the entrails above, into the pod and it crawls with the maggots of the soldier fly, an innocuous black fly we do not usually notice at all.[4] In a more contained way than the maggots just falling to the floor, a bucket fills with soldier fly grubs which are full of fat and protein and exactly what hens like to eat.
These soldier fly grubs don’t hang about — imagine the carcass of a cooked chicken, reduced to skin and bones overnight. They will eat just about anything and concentrate the nutrition from it for the chickens to concentrate again for us. Fat and protein for free.
Let’s just review briefly. Flies, which we tend to disparage if not spray with biocide, can in short order improve our human nutrition for free, in a way that improves the health and welfare of our hens. And disposes of waste that is otherwise a problem. Not magic, just being sensitive to what is and working with it.
Plant pests and soil building
Instead of going to buy something for a chicken to eat, we can extend the potential for natural foraging behaviour. If there are trees — and chickens like trees as a protection from birds of prey — there may well be chestnuts, acorns, hazelnuts, beechmast.[5] Left undisturbed, this bounty will be eaten by various insects, some of which are pests such as the weevils which burrow into chestnuts before they are harvested. Chickens will eat the nuts and the pests, too. Nuts that are a bit big to be tackled by chickens can be coarsely ground up or left for turkeys to devour.
Once we get the idea that most foodstuff that a chicken needs can be foraged for, providing far higher diversity of food than any commercial approach, then we can spot trees like the Siberian pea tree that are nitrogen fixing to boost the fertility of the soil for everything around them and brilliant food trees for chickens. The world opens up into all the things that chickens can do that limit the need to feed them seriously deficient food which, simultaneously is expensive.
I want to come ‘round again to Harvey Ussery’s statement that he cannot, even using all these approaches, produce chicken and eggs at a price to beat the supermarket. If you are trying to make a buck or two producing proper chickens that would be good for people to eat, then forget it. But the converse is true too: if you want decent food you are going to have to produce it or get a mate to produce it for you. Forget being a healthy vegetarian — there are too many layers to that lie.
The reductionist view of saving the planet
We have rehearsed before the George Monbiot and EAT/Lancet simplicities of “don’t feed agricultural produce that humans can consume to animals”. The claim is that it is inefficient and that the available agricultural produce will go further if we all become more vegetarian. And we have rehearsed what is wrong with this reductionist claim: It doesn’t recognise the ecological paths and in particular it does not reckon with the way agriculture is destroying our soils. It is just wrong.
Now we can see courtesy of flies, that there are various ways for humans to destroy the planet. Being vegan is one of them. Vegans are not healthy, and the things they need to supplement their diet with are basically eggs and meat. Many social media prominent vegans have taken their health back in hand by doing so: I have seen estimates of 80% of them. If they need to eat eggs, and I mean NEED to, then it would be better if those eggs were properly nutritious.
That brings us full circle because we are going to feed those chickens to produce those eggs and we are going to feed them grains which fall within this reductionist human edible food mantra. We can eat crap food ourselves and get ill. We can feed crap food to hens, eat the eggs and be slightly healthier ourselves, our we can let the ecosystem work its magical stuff and accept that scaling food production is a disaster no matter how we cut the data.
When people typically had a small vegetable patch, a pig in a sty and some chickens there was not a problem. Big agriculture, promising solutions, has brought us a raft of interconnected problems which Wendell Berry would recognise as all stemming from something that worked just fine. Brilliant.
Notice how this fits the mould of our thinking about efficiency. Maximise this, improve that, build huge companies to sell solutions, all without ever looking at what is being destroyed — in this case human health itself. And if you think anyone in this global system of big agriculture and its suppliers of fertilisers, biocides, pharmaceuticals, growth hormones, machinery, and whatever actually understand what they are doing to human health or care what they are doing to human health then be prepared for a lifetime of searching and for disappointment at the end.
Aidan was looking at a long list (hundreds!) of things he might be able to get a government grant for when he moves to a smallholding. But we don’t believe that any of those carefully designed incentives would help the land he will own — they too are reductionist in their nature and have more to do with civil service thinking than with the health of his grandchildren. What is the chance of a grant that enables us to integrate the role of flies in health?
Closing the nutrient cycle loop
To talk to most people in agriculture, and they’ll say that fertility comes from inputs. Of course, that is a nonsense from an ecological perspective. Fertility comes from life recycling absolutely everything without exception. Nutrient cycles need to be cycles.[6]
What the flies remind us is that the bacteria, the fungi, the worms, and a million species of bugs that we don’t understand, are doing our recycling for us. There are making available to each other, to the chickens, and eventually to us, more nutrients than we understand, across a very wide spectrum and in a balanced way. It is nothing short of miraculous.
Of course, we think we know better and we take short-cuts that result in crap food. We think if the wheat grows green on the prairies fed only with chemicals that were literally developed to make bombs in the war, that must be OK. We neither know nor care about the destruction of the soil and everything that lives in it. Glyphosate is only the logical tip of an ecocidal industry.
When it works right, every life form in that web is extending the reach of life to find the minerals and make the organic chemicals that allow health. Fungi are actually boring into bedrock to find new source of mineral. Toxic chemicals are being broken down and made harmless. As creatures eat each other, an amazingly complex filtering and building operation takes place. To think that human health can exist without it, well, we are in a global experiment to see that it can’t be done, that everyone gets sick and dies early.
Let’s do the read-across into education. By analogy we need every child to be engaged, engrossed in the world, bringing back what they find into a web of learning. A curriculum is like an NPK fertiliser, making sure that learning cannot be healthy, restricting it to a form of growth that is starved of many, many essential things. Learning too needs to have a nutrient cycle and in the name of efficiency we make sure it doesn’t. No wonder we can’t understand food and no wonder we are so malnourished that we can’t understand education.
It turns out that only closed loops are open to what matters…
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[1] Once Brexit is ‘delivered’, of course.
[2] Don’t fret, dear reader — there are tidier (and less smelly) modern equivalents of achieving exactly the same end!
[3] And a nice parallel to humans — being free to roam and being prone to roaming are different!
[4] Unlike, say, house flies, adult black soldier flies (BSF) are mouthless, living only long enough to breed.
[5] Beechmast is the name for the nuts of the beech tree, mast being the fruit of forest trees, particularly if fallen.
[6] The clue, as ever, is in the name. Though in this case the name describes what it needs to be in order to work, not what was destroyed or what’s being falsely claimed.
