My parents live in a village in Eastern Europe with less than $2 a day (I also chip in to financially help them), and they do indeed raise chickens, they've being doing that for the last 15 years or so, since they moved out to the countryside.
Bill Gates is correct in his assessment, it's way more profitable to raise chickens than, say, cows. You need to have a bigger barn for cows, you need to do all the hay thing, which is very time consuming and demands a lot of extra work just for feeding said cows, you need to pay someone to take care of the cows when they go out to eat in the summer on the communal field. It's easier to just barter your chickens' eggs for some milk or cheese, that's at least what my mom does.
It's also quite profitable to grow beans and cabbage. They preserve well over winter well into spring and you can also use them for bartering.
This immediately makes me think that, as the supply of chickens goes up, their value goes down. You won't be able to sell a chicken for $5 anymore if everybody has enough. But the point is taken that they produce a lot of food for how little upkeep they require.
On the other hand, they also have a pretty clear floor on their sale value, because if the price drops too low, the farmer could just eat the meat/eggs themselves.
This is why the whole bureaucratic nightmare that is the EU Common Agricultural Policy exists: your profits as a farmer are dependent on a number of random factors including how many other people are doing well in your industry.
It's very easy for an agricultural industry to go through cycles of overproduction which drive people into bankruptcy (and sometimes suicide), then shortage resulting in high prices.
Having poor transport links (often the case in rural Africa) makes the problem worse, as this instability plays out in each little isolated market.
> it's way more profitable to raise chickens than, say, cows. You need to have a bigger barn for cows, you need to do all the hay thing, which is very time consuming and demands a lot of extra work just for feeding said cows, you need to pay someone to take care of the cows when they go out to eat in the summer on the communal field.
This is surprising to me. Of course a cow should be more work to raise than a chicken. But it has so many times more meat on it than a chicken, and is more energy efficient per calorie consumed too.
Similarly with beans and cabbage. They might be easier to grow, but in terms of calories they seem much less efficient than, say, potatoes.
If this was addressed in the article, sorry. It's just a blank page on my browser.
> They might be easier to grow, but in terms of calories they seem much less efficient than, say, potatoes
I agree about potatoes, but that only works for relatively cooler climates, i.e. places like Poland or Ireland. It can easily get to 35-37 degrees Celsius in the summer at the place where my parents live (not to mention places like the Indian subcontinent or Africa), at which point storing potatoes becomes a challenge.
> But it has so many times more meat on it than a chicken, and is more energy efficient per calorie consumed too.
It's all about the return on investment. Raising cows only becomes financially viable once you pass a certain number threshold (meaning big farms), otherwise you're pretty much doing voluntary work. It's a lot of work in order to feed a cow, I mean, lots and lots of work, and said work is pretty effective in burning calories. A lot of farmers in the European Union who are in the cow-raising business (I'd say most) wouldn't make it without financial help from the EU and from their governments.
I'd say that goats are a lot better option if you really need meat. They feed practically on everything (cows are a lot more picky) and they're smaller, so they're easier to "store" and protect at night. This is why I think they're so widespread in the poorer regions of the world.
It is important to remember that if you kill a chicken, you can consume it entirely in the same day with no need for refrigeration and electricity.
Also, chickens reproduce, grow faster and lay eggs that you can also consume.
I grew up in my grandma's backyard (literally) with chickens, cows and porks. Cows were mostly used for milk than meat.
I'm going to provide an entirely uneducated guess regarding cows. I would bet that the average person without any training or resources is capable of raising chickens, whereas the average person would have their cows die before maturing. I'm not commenting on the "average African". I'm talking about my own first-world Caucasian self. I bet you I could raise chickens with very few resources. I also bet I couldn't do the same with cows, which seem to be resource hogs and in need of more maintenance.
It's like having a dog vs. a cat as a pet. A cat just needs to be fed and given a box where they can place their waste. A dog needs to be walked, socialized with other dogs, etc. Do you need to travel for a 2-day weekend? With a cat, while not ideal, you can get away with leaving behind plenty of food and water along with an extra litter box. You simply cannot abandon a dog on its own for 2 days.
In addition to the other points people have made, with beef you have the problem of preservation. Unless you coordinate so everyone slaughters their cows at a different time and you can share the meat (which presents problems as well), you end up with a glut of meat for a short period of time, rather than the continuing output of a chicken.
> Of course a cow should be more work to raise than a chicken. But it has so many times more meat on it than a chicken, and is more energy efficient per calorie consumed too.
Wikipedia says quite the opposite:
"Two kilograms of grain must be fed to poultry to produce 1 kg of weight gain, much less than that required for pork or beef."
> ...and is more energy efficient per calorie consumed too.
I've read studies in the past that found entirely the opposite, and by a very large margin. If I remember correctly, I believe that raising chickens for meat was many times more efficient, and among common meat livestock cows were the worst.
>You need to have a bigger barn for cows, you need to do all the hay thing, which is very time consuming and demands a lot of extra work just for feeding said cows, you need to pay someone to take care of the cows when they go out to eat in the summer on the communal field
Depends where you are, of course. Some places you just leave your cows out eating grass for years until it's time to slaughter them, then you hire some dudes with helicopters to round 'em all up.
That only works in places like the US or Australia, where land is cheap and safe. In Europe you wouldn't find enough land for that, and in many other places you couldn't keep cows unsupervised for a day.
> Are they $2/day because they don't have jobs, or because they work but they only make $2
It was, let's say difficult, for them to find a steady job in their early 50s after the steel works factory that was feeding my hometown and where they had worked for almost all their life closed down. They had to sell the city apartment (because bills have a nasty habit of showing up at your door each and every month) and moved out to the country-house, where at least they were able to put some food on their table.
I shared these personal details because I think that my parents' story happened to a lot of people in Eastern Europe in the '90s-early 2000s (Russia saw its average life expectancy actually go down in the '90s), I'm talking about people who fell hard through the social safety net's very large holes. Things are better now, of course, but there are entire generations who saw their entire life's work go to nothing. I think a similar thing is now happening in places like Greece.
>it's way more profitable to raise chickens than, say, cows
But you are pretty much comparing to the worst possible option there with cattle. Almost everything else is easier and has a better feed conversion ratio: chickens, turkeys, ducks, rabbits, pigs, goats, sheep, etc.
Re: many people wondering why this hasn't happened organically, it is easy to underestimate how much cultural attitudes can affect common practice.
As an anecdote, when I visited rural China a couple of years back I asked my friends who grew up there why, if most people had one chicken, they didn't simply grow a few more?
The response was "you don't know what it was like back then. In the Mao attitude people would say ... 'who are you to have two chickens when everyone else only has one' " ... which was enough social pressure to keep everyone to one chicken, no matter how much that contributed to malnourishment.
I'm not proposing the same social attitudes are at play in these regions, but there may be other non-obvious contexts discouraging people from getting started with a flock.
For some scenarios I could imagine an initiative like this helping to break through inertia and change norms.
This seems very accurate. When I was younger it was a social taboo for middle class families in rural area to raise animals in out country. Then the government started blasting propaganda about how farming fish and raising chickens/goats was a noble "entrepreneur" like thing, and now it does not seem like that much of a taboo any more.
There is a campaign in West Africa right now to grow 'grasscutter', aka greater cane rat, as an entrepreneurial alternative to bush meat and as a noble poverty reduction measure.
The biggest argument for micro livestock in extreme poverty areas is the barrier to entry. You can run a large chicken, rabbit, cuy, or grasscutter farm for less than it costs to own a single pair of cattle, and nobody in the area has high amounts of saved wealth.
http://www.nap.edu/read/1831/chapter/1#xv is an attempt to explore the options for getting the world's subsistence farmers (mostly growing crops that have already been heavily automated) into livestock production (which still require lots of human care).
> If you read this article, watch the video above, and answer one question below, I will donate—on your behalf via Heifer—a flock of chickens to a family in poverty.
Giving a flock of chickens to desperately poor families sounds like a great idea that will pay dividends for many years. However, I can't help but be reminded of the many charitable programs that sound great but end up having very unusual unintended consequences that often defeat the purpose or make it worse. Anyone care to speculate as to some unintended consequences this project may have?
1. Family ends up homeless because there is no legal framework to raise small anymals in urban environments, and the flock is framed as "unruly pets" by abusive landlord/neighbours. Family ends up worse than how they started without help.
2. Family receives the flock, but not any training/resources to tend them properly. Chickens die of illness, malnourishment, or get killed by urban predators (i.e. semi-feral cats). Purpose of the program is defeated.
3. Family just eats the chickens right away, which would be a relief from their situation, but still defeats the purpose of the program.
[Edit: I posted this prior reading the article, and assumed this would be about helping the urban American poor, not the Global poor. I simply could not imagine rural poor people in 3rd world countries not knowing chickens are a good source of income/food. They may still forego the option if they lack other resources to raise the chickens.
So, you may say I stand corrected. Thanks for your polite feedback]
You forgot risk of salmonella and other diseases from not properly handling chicken products (meat, eggs, cleaning up after handling them, etc.), and subsequent lack of medical help because of lack of money and/or lack of insurance.
That said, you have to break some eggs to make an omelette (ok, I guess the pun was intended). These are things you can help educate about in the process and shouldn't stop something like this from being rolled out.
My family has raised chickens in the backyard for decades.
Getting them killed by predators isn't difficult but I wouldn't worry too much about a cat - it is unlikely to take more than one or two adults and the young chickens would likely be more secure/with an adult hen and they are quite good at keeping their young safe. Regarding malnurisment, you can literally just let the chickens walk around and eat grass, insects and whatever you throw in your compost - chickens have been eating that for centuries.
Chickens are some of the easiest animals to raise and they provide both eggs and meat. I think this is a great idea.
Regarding 1: Property rights and records are always a problem in the developing world.
> Less than 5 percent of Haiti's land is officially accounted for in public land records, according to the United Nations, compounding the difficulty in establishing who owns what land. [0]
Regarding 2: Another difficult problem as conditions unique to a market are often not known by outsiders. Outsiders have a different assessment of how to properly care for resources or best practices that may not be applicable to the local market or may even be counter-productive.
Regarding 3: Always a possibility you underestimate their utility curve in regards to current and future consumption
Regarding #3, I've heard that one reason cows were made sacred in hinduism is so that people wouldn't slaughter all the dairy cows for meat during times of famine. Not sure how accurate that is though.
This is a relevant question to ask. This stuff is hard and it takes a lot of oversight to make it work. But that doesn't mean that we should assume every charity is producing negative consequences which outweigh the good they do. That would be just as naive as assuming charities have no negative consequences.
For what it's worth, Heifer International has released quite a few detailed reports on their projects which you can review here: (http://www.heifer.org/ending-hunger/our-impact/reports.html). If you're satisfied, maybe consider giving. If not, and you're qualified to offer a contrary explanation, please share it.
But assuming a negative impact without reviewing their approach is a perfect example of what has come to be known as "middlebrow dismissal". "Charities can have negative consequences which outweigh their good, this is a charity, therefore it has negative consequences which outweigh its good" is not a valid argument. The propensity of charities to produce negative unintended consequences is a sign to be careful, but not sufficient proof to dismiss charities outright.
If i had to pick two charities that i trusted to understand the consequences of giving animals to impoverished african families, it would be Heifer International and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.
That's not to say it won't have unintended consequences, but this is kind of what they do. I'm sure they've studied the ramifications of the programs they run more than any HN commenters have.
Heifer generally does not perform a 1-to-1 action with your donations.
That is, donating a flock of chickens through Heifer is actually making a monetary donation to the entire organization. It is unlikely that your donation will be directly linked to a specific flock donation to a particular family (if it results in any animal donation at all).
According to the latest filing I have seen, less than half of a donation to Heifer will make it into a grant, or other assistance to an external entity (my guess is that salaries and benefits at these legally separate entities will consume a good chunk of those grants).
Unintended consequences are one thing to consider, another is opportunity cost. Gates should have two control groups:
A) Gets a bunch of chickens
B) Gets the money the chickens would cost (including all project overhead)
C) Gets nothing
My guess is that B would in-fact have the best outcomes for the simple reason that Africans probably know what they need to improve their lives better than do foreign central-planners.
Better visual than watching the women throw out handfuls of bugs and worms (which chickens LOVE). Actually, you can feed chickens nothing but grain, but it isn't good for them -- they need more protein.
However, you have a point. If poor urban families do not have access to fairly priced chicken feed, they will face the choice of feeding them pet food (at a net economic loss) or cutting their losses and eating all the chickens right away.
This is at least in part an editorial choice. Woman throwing grain to flock of chickens running around her feet is a much more interesting visual that chickens walking around foraging...
They lock you at home like any pet, difficult to move house and also keep the chickens, need a big garden, unless you have a huge garden they prevent social use of it, don't reliably lay, people work long hours and don't have the time for cleaning out pens and ensuring water/food is available, cost of keeping them far outweighs the fiscal benefit, they attract rats, you can't be keen on gardening and have free range chickens as they eat flowers.
Lock you at home? Get an automatic waterer and feeder, throw in some feed and go on vacation. I've got 25 hens and a rooster and they are good for a week or two on their own. Only problem is if nobody gathers eggs you'll have some broody hens.
Don't lay? I get a dozen eggs/day. Use lay crumbles not lay pellets; doing so doubles the output.
Enclosure? I used a horse stall for boxes/roosts and have big outside enclosure. Works great.
Your comments make sense for a pet like a dog, those do tie you down, but they make no sense for chickens in my experience.
Some interesting reasons there for first world chicken raising, but I'd disagree with most of them from my experience:
- lock you at home: with an automatic door on the coop (ours free range), waterer and multi day feeder, you can leave them for a week, possibly longer. If we moved we'd just give them away (or well, I'd probably eat them, but I'd be voted down)
- huge garden and social use: We don't have a big garden. They happily co-exist in the garden with our kids and friends running around with them.
- reliably lay: for their laying period chickens that are bred for laying are incredibly reliable. We have four chickens and get four eggs a day like clockwork.
- don't have the time: I spend about an hour a week taking care of the chickens. Collect the eggs once a day and clean the coop on the weekend.
- rats: They do attract rats if you keep their food easily accessible. This is definitely a problem. There are feeders that make this harder, we have one and it seems to work.
- gardening: The gardening thing could be true I guess, but my wife is an avid gardener and she seems to make it work. I think you just change your gardening practices a little. She does like their manure for compost.
- cost of keeping them vs fiscal benefit: this is an interesting one. I haven't done the numbers, but I know people who raise small flocks specifically to make money. I doubt I'm making money on them, but they seem incredibly cheap to raise to me.
>I can't help but be reminded of the many charitable programs that sound great but end up having very unusual unintended consequences that often defeat the purpose or make it worse.
It might be that such stories are interesting and more likely to make the media/top of HN. I mean 100 charities could work just fine, and no one really cares. But a single story about unintended consequences is interesting and gets on the top of reddit and facebook etc.
I just signed up today but I was sad to see the promotion has already finished.
> Thank you Gates Notes Insiders! For our Coop Dreams giveaway, I partnered with Heifer International to donate more than 100,000 chickens on behalf of the Gates Notes Insider community. The campaign is now closed, but we may do something like it again.
If you include a rooster, he can be real bossy and bites too! Maybe some traditions use the animals for magic or some weird religious function though? Also stealing them might lead to problems? Just speculating.
Seriously though, chickens are very easy animal. The next step would be goats.
I heard some criticisms of big charity in regards to uncertainty for local businesses. When Tom can show up at any time and dump hundreds of thousands of shoes in your market, it kind of hurts all the long term planning and investment you made into your shoe business.
Chickens aren't afraid of people and like to use human structures as coops, so they aren't likely to go completely feral. Even if they did, it is likely they would be fairly easy prey for hunters as domesticated chickens don't have the camouflage and skill at flight their wild progenitors had.
Bird flue is a big drawback - poultry and humans living in close contact, typically because they live in poverty is how the disease usually ends up jumping to humans (when it doesn't go the normal route via pigs first.)
Anybody else surprised by how much a chicken costs in Africa?
$5 is £3.45[1] and I can buy a (dead, plucked, gutted, packaged, delivered to my door) chicken in the UK for £2.95[2].
I realise the local supply's much lower because my Sainsbury's chicken is grown in a cage in a factory somewhere, but nonetheless, I didn't expect that.
[1] I presume USD is the currency in the video, since 5 of the local currency is £0.006
$5 seems to be the price for a carcass. In the video, dead chickens are tied together and draped over a bike for transport to wherever they are being sold.
one of the funny things foreigners notice when they come to my country(Kenya) is that there's chicken & chips shops EVERYWHERE. People absolutely adore chicken over here and are willing to pay over the odds for it, so the supply has adjusted their prices accordingly.
I started raising chickens 2 years ago. A few things I have learned: If you have a yard that they can run free in, they don't need a coop. Chickens will happily roost in the trees. I live in southern Arizona, so the winters are mild, but I know of people that do the same thing in much colder climates. Chickens are tough. An added benefit is they are actually safer, if they are locked in a coop, and a predator gets in, it's going to kill them all. Outside, they can hide (good luck finding a scared chicken, they are really good at bolting to a hideaway) or fight. Chickens make all kinds of commotion if there's a predator around. They will make their nests in secluded shady spots and unlike a coop, they do not poop in their nests so the eggs are very clean. I supplement their foraging with chicken feed, but it's not necessary, there's enough critters and plants, they often just ignore the feed. What they really want is your compost, no need to separate out what they eat and don't eat, they do that. The rest attracts their favourite food of all: bugs. Going coop-less also removes the chore of cleaning the coop. In AZ their poop dries up very quickly and if they are free range it's not really noticeable since it's so spread out.
They need lots of water and shade, so make a continuous drip somewhere in the shade.
Domestic cats don't mess with full grown chickens, and in my experience they leave the chicks alone too if they are fully feathered and about pigeon size. The cats eat pigons on a regular basis, but they let the chicks run around and seem to enjoy them. In the daytime it's common to see the cats and chickens laying around in the shade within a foot of each other. Racoons like chicken, and they are good climbers, but the chickens just make lots of noise and fly off if one gets too close. By then I have my paintball gun out and the Racoons learn quickly to get dinner elsewhere. I'm constantly surprised about how smart they are, if they know they are not allowed in a spot they will wait for you to go away and then rush over. If you catch them in the act, they freak out and run off back to their allotted area. I find small firecrackers a good way to tell them "stay away". They learn quickly.
Most of my chickens are good flyers, they can easily jump up to a perch 5ft above the ground and then into a tree from there. They could also easily fly over my fence and exit the yard, but they _never_ do.
I wish I had started years ago, the eggs are fantastic.
I have 2 Yellow Brahma (big bids, very nice temperament, cant fly far so they need a way to get to their perch, one is still too young to lay), 1 New Hampshire Red (she's the alpha, pretty good at flying too), 2 Leghorn (well one might be a Blue Maran), one grey/blue one white (smaller, really fast, great flyers, practically impossible to catch), 1 New Hampshire (still growing and not laying yet, super sweet temperament) and 1 Belgian Bantam (also not laying yet). They hang out in groups by age.
The Bantam/Leghorn/Maran hens have a celebration every time they lay an egg which can be a bit annoying if it's 7am, but usually it's mid morning.
Other random tips, to pick them up, especially fast chicks, place your hand under their belly and let the legs hang down, don't come at them from behind or above or too fast. Laying chickens often will assume a mating pose if you go to pick them up which makes it easier and you can just grab them with 2 hands around the folded wings. They like being pet under their chins, but generally not on top of the head. Be sure to wash your hands even though they look perfectly clean.
They are all pretty spoiled, if it was a harsher situation I would stick to the small fast breeds.
Also, I give them the eggshells back, they love em and need the calcium anyway. Some folks say that encourages them to eat the eggs but I have never seen that. It's only when one gets broken by accident.
Ha. Yep, I had a similar experience. Tossed a chick (they love getting air and get all excited when they land) at my most friendly cat once without thinking and he instinctively reached out and caught it, but immediately let go and gave me the "oops sorry" look. I suspect the domestic cat/chicken/human triangle goes way back.
I don't get it. As mentioned in the article, chickens are incredibly easy to bootstrap (ie, it's not like they require a huge capital outlay to get started, and they literally pay dividends in further chickens), and have been present in the area for centuries. What has been the obstacle that has kept them from already being common enough to drive the expected benefit of further investment to ~0? And how is that obstacle going to be overcome?
They're giving away vaccinated chicks. I suspect that the vaccines are the main problem they're addressing. It's certainly possible that it's easier and cheaper to give away vaccinated chicks than it is to give away vaccinations.
The author mentioned the low cost of vaccines (the one that prevents the deadly Newcastle disease costs less than 20 cents). I suspect the reason that this is not already being done by the locals is that there are some other costs or factors that are specific to the local market that outsiders have no way of assessing.
Gates is very addictive with vaccine stuff, I think you are right. This could be the trigger. But could be cultural and educational stuff too, maybe people must learn how great breed a chicken could be.
I'm completely speculating, but based on the article it could have something to do with chickens being a "women's animal". Perhaps women aren't confident or allowed to show entrepreneurial spirit to start a flock. The men in the community are saving up for cows and goats.
Varies by culture considerably. Consider cockfighting - very male oriented, involves a lot of chicken raising, can be a side gig for your egg or meat producers
I know a older couple that have spent the last year or so traveling around Africa doing 'chicken projects' where they help build chicken coops and teach poor families how to raise chickens (pretty simple to do, actually, but there are little strategies one can use to increase profits- hardest part is keeping predators from eating them!) Cool stuff, glad to see Bill Gates onboard!
Some idiot in my neighborhood tried raising chickens, and they got loose. Some days I've had 16 chickens in my front yard. There are at least two roosters, so the flock is self-sustaining. They hide in the creek gully where they're hard to catch. This has been going on for two years now.
Readit News
Bill Gates is correct in his assessment, it's way more profitable to raise chickens than, say, cows. You need to have a bigger barn for cows, you need to do all the hay thing, which is very time consuming and demands a lot of extra work just for feeding said cows, you need to pay someone to take care of the cows when they go out to eat in the summer on the communal field. It's easier to just barter your chickens' eggs for some milk or cheese, that's at least what my mom does.
It's also quite profitable to grow beans and cabbage. They preserve well over winter well into spring and you can also use them for bartering.
It's very easy for an agricultural industry to go through cycles of overproduction which drive people into bankruptcy (and sometimes suicide), then shortage resulting in high prices.
Having poor transport links (often the case in rural Africa) makes the problem worse, as this instability plays out in each little isolated market.
This is surprising to me. Of course a cow should be more work to raise than a chicken. But it has so many times more meat on it than a chicken, and is more energy efficient per calorie consumed too.
Similarly with beans and cabbage. They might be easier to grow, but in terms of calories they seem much less efficient than, say, potatoes.
If this was addressed in the article, sorry. It's just a blank page on my browser.
I agree about potatoes, but that only works for relatively cooler climates, i.e. places like Poland or Ireland. It can easily get to 35-37 degrees Celsius in the summer at the place where my parents live (not to mention places like the Indian subcontinent or Africa), at which point storing potatoes becomes a challenge.
> But it has so many times more meat on it than a chicken, and is more energy efficient per calorie consumed too.
It's all about the return on investment. Raising cows only becomes financially viable once you pass a certain number threshold (meaning big farms), otherwise you're pretty much doing voluntary work. It's a lot of work in order to feed a cow, I mean, lots and lots of work, and said work is pretty effective in burning calories. A lot of farmers in the European Union who are in the cow-raising business (I'd say most) wouldn't make it without financial help from the EU and from their governments.
I'd say that goats are a lot better option if you really need meat. They feed practically on everything (cows are a lot more picky) and they're smaller, so they're easier to "store" and protect at night. This is why I think they're so widespread in the poorer regions of the world.
A little quick googling and I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio
I grew up in my grandma's backyard (literally) with chickens, cows and porks. Cows were mostly used for milk than meat.
It's like having a dog vs. a cat as a pet. A cat just needs to be fed and given a box where they can place their waste. A dog needs to be walked, socialized with other dogs, etc. Do you need to travel for a 2-day weekend? With a cat, while not ideal, you can get away with leaving behind plenty of food and water along with an extra litter box. You simply cannot abandon a dog on its own for 2 days.
You only need $10-20 to get started with chickens, and from there you can grow quickly to $500-1000 in a matter of few months.
To get started with a cow, you'll need a huge capital (thousands) and take a big risk (cow dies).
Wikipedia says quite the opposite:
"Two kilograms of grain must be fed to poultry to produce 1 kg of weight gain, much less than that required for pork or beef."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_farming#Efficiency
I've read studies in the past that found entirely the opposite, and by a very large margin. If I remember correctly, I believe that raising chickens for meat was many times more efficient, and among common meat livestock cows were the worst.
Are you sure you've got it right?
(And it is also illegal in most of the states here in India)
Depends where you are, of course. Some places you just leave your cows out eating grass for years until it's time to slaughter them, then you hire some dudes with helicopters to round 'em all up.
And a barn? For 150,000 cows?
> Are they $2/day because they don't have jobs, or because they work but they only make $2
It was, let's say difficult, for them to find a steady job in their early 50s after the steel works factory that was feeding my hometown and where they had worked for almost all their life closed down. They had to sell the city apartment (because bills have a nasty habit of showing up at your door each and every month) and moved out to the country-house, where at least they were able to put some food on their table.
I shared these personal details because I think that my parents' story happened to a lot of people in Eastern Europe in the '90s-early 2000s (Russia saw its average life expectancy actually go down in the '90s), I'm talking about people who fell hard through the social safety net's very large holes. Things are better now, of course, but there are entire generations who saw their entire life's work go to nothing. I think a similar thing is now happening in places like Greece.
But you are pretty much comparing to the worst possible option there with cattle. Almost everything else is easier and has a better feed conversion ratio: chickens, turkeys, ducks, rabbits, pigs, goats, sheep, etc.
As an anecdote, when I visited rural China a couple of years back I asked my friends who grew up there why, if most people had one chicken, they didn't simply grow a few more?
The response was "you don't know what it was like back then. In the Mao attitude people would say ... 'who are you to have two chickens when everyone else only has one' " ... which was enough social pressure to keep everyone to one chicken, no matter how much that contributed to malnourishment.
I'm not proposing the same social attitudes are at play in these regions, but there may be other non-obvious contexts discouraging people from getting started with a flock.
For some scenarios I could imagine an initiative like this helping to break through inertia and change norms.
The biggest argument for micro livestock in extreme poverty areas is the barrier to entry. You can run a large chicken, rabbit, cuy, or grasscutter farm for less than it costs to own a single pair of cattle, and nobody in the area has high amounts of saved wealth.
http://www.nap.edu/read/1831/chapter/1#xv is an attempt to explore the options for getting the world's subsistence farmers (mostly growing crops that have already been heavily automated) into livestock production (which still require lots of human care).
Giving a flock of chickens to desperately poor families sounds like a great idea that will pay dividends for many years. However, I can't help but be reminded of the many charitable programs that sound great but end up having very unusual unintended consequences that often defeat the purpose or make it worse. Anyone care to speculate as to some unintended consequences this project may have?
1. Family ends up homeless because there is no legal framework to raise small anymals in urban environments, and the flock is framed as "unruly pets" by abusive landlord/neighbours. Family ends up worse than how they started without help.
2. Family receives the flock, but not any training/resources to tend them properly. Chickens die of illness, malnourishment, or get killed by urban predators (i.e. semi-feral cats). Purpose of the program is defeated.
3. Family just eats the chickens right away, which would be a relief from their situation, but still defeats the purpose of the program.
[Edit: I posted this prior reading the article, and assumed this would be about helping the urban American poor, not the Global poor. I simply could not imagine rural poor people in 3rd world countries not knowing chickens are a good source of income/food. They may still forego the option if they lack other resources to raise the chickens.
So, you may say I stand corrected. Thanks for your polite feedback]
That said, you have to break some eggs to make an omelette (ok, I guess the pun was intended). These are things you can help educate about in the process and shouldn't stop something like this from being rolled out.
Getting them killed by predators isn't difficult but I wouldn't worry too much about a cat - it is unlikely to take more than one or two adults and the young chickens would likely be more secure/with an adult hen and they are quite good at keeping their young safe. Regarding malnurisment, you can literally just let the chickens walk around and eat grass, insects and whatever you throw in your compost - chickens have been eating that for centuries.
Chickens are some of the easiest animals to raise and they provide both eggs and meat. I think this is a great idea.
> Less than 5 percent of Haiti's land is officially accounted for in public land records, according to the United Nations, compounding the difficulty in establishing who owns what land. [0]
Regarding 2: Another difficult problem as conditions unique to a market are often not known by outsiders. Outsiders have a different assessment of how to properly care for resources or best practices that may not be applicable to the local market or may even be counter-productive.
Regarding 3: Always a possibility you underestimate their utility curve in regards to current and future consumption
[0] http://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/unclear-land-rights-hinder...
It's not an issue. Especially as in the video it is seen it is pretty common
There might be some "official concerns" (read: someone looking for a bribe) but that's quickly taken care of
Fast forward a few years and their are fewer chickens, not more, in targeted areas.
For what it's worth, Heifer International has released quite a few detailed reports on their projects which you can review here: (http://www.heifer.org/ending-hunger/our-impact/reports.html). If you're satisfied, maybe consider giving. If not, and you're qualified to offer a contrary explanation, please share it.
But assuming a negative impact without reviewing their approach is a perfect example of what has come to be known as "middlebrow dismissal". "Charities can have negative consequences which outweigh their good, this is a charity, therefore it has negative consequences which outweigh its good" is not a valid argument. The propensity of charities to produce negative unintended consequences is a sign to be careful, but not sufficient proof to dismiss charities outright.
Note that Charity Navigator gives Heifer International a nearly perfect score on Transparency and Accountability. (http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...)
That's not to say it won't have unintended consequences, but this is kind of what they do. I'm sure they've studied the ramifications of the programs they run more than any HN commenters have.
That is, donating a flock of chickens through Heifer is actually making a monetary donation to the entire organization. It is unlikely that your donation will be directly linked to a specific flock donation to a particular family (if it results in any animal donation at all).
According to the latest filing I have seen, less than half of a donation to Heifer will make it into a grant, or other assistance to an external entity (my guess is that salaries and benefits at these legally separate entities will consume a good chunk of those grants).
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...
~75% of total expenses go to programs and services.
A) Gets a bunch of chickens
B) Gets the money the chickens would cost (including all project overhead)
C) Gets nothing
My guess is that B would in-fact have the best outcomes for the simple reason that Africans probably know what they need to improve their lives better than do foreign central-planners.
However, you have a point. If poor urban families do not have access to fairly priced chicken feed, they will face the choice of feeding them pet food (at a net economic loss) or cutting their losses and eating all the chickens right away.
Don't lay? I get a dozen eggs/day. Use lay crumbles not lay pellets; doing so doubles the output.
Enclosure? I used a horse stall for boxes/roosts and have big outside enclosure. Works great.
Your comments make sense for a pet like a dog, those do tie you down, but they make no sense for chickens in my experience.
- lock you at home: with an automatic door on the coop (ours free range), waterer and multi day feeder, you can leave them for a week, possibly longer. If we moved we'd just give them away (or well, I'd probably eat them, but I'd be voted down)
- huge garden and social use: We don't have a big garden. They happily co-exist in the garden with our kids and friends running around with them.
- reliably lay: for their laying period chickens that are bred for laying are incredibly reliable. We have four chickens and get four eggs a day like clockwork.
- don't have the time: I spend about an hour a week taking care of the chickens. Collect the eggs once a day and clean the coop on the weekend.
- rats: They do attract rats if you keep their food easily accessible. This is definitely a problem. There are feeders that make this harder, we have one and it seems to work.
- gardening: The gardening thing could be true I guess, but my wife is an avid gardener and she seems to make it work. I think you just change your gardening practices a little. She does like their manure for compost.
- cost of keeping them vs fiscal benefit: this is an interesting one. I haven't done the numbers, but I know people who raise small flocks specifically to make money. I doubt I'm making money on them, but they seem incredibly cheap to raise to me.
It might be that such stories are interesting and more likely to make the media/top of HN. I mean 100 charities could work just fine, and no one really cares. But a single story about unintended consequences is interesting and gets on the top of reddit and facebook etc.
> Thank you Gates Notes Insiders! For our Coop Dreams giveaway, I partnered with Heifer International to donate more than 100,000 chickens on behalf of the Gates Notes Insider community. The campaign is now closed, but we may do something like it again.
Seriously though, chickens are very easy animal. The next step would be goats.
Possibly, it costs more to feed the chickens than the chickens provide in economic benefit?
Avian influenza spreads like wild through chicken populations and from thence to poor families?
The expression "to chicken out" was not chosen at random :)
$5 is £3.45[1] and I can buy a (dead, plucked, gutted, packaged, delivered to my door) chicken in the UK for £2.95[2].
I realise the local supply's much lower because my Sainsbury's chicken is grown in a cage in a factory somewhere, but nonetheless, I didn't expect that.
[1] I presume USD is the currency in the video, since 5 of the local currency is £0.006
[2] http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/chicken/sainsb...
edit: looks like I left the page open for longer than I thought - this discussion happened elsewhere hours ago. Apologies.
Like cows, chickens provide ongoing sustenance. That $5 chicken may yield $50 in eggs. When the bird gets old, you make some soup.
[1] - http://time.com/money/3901655/costco-rotisserie-chickens-hot...
They need lots of water and shade, so make a continuous drip somewhere in the shade.
Domestic cats don't mess with full grown chickens, and in my experience they leave the chicks alone too if they are fully feathered and about pigeon size. The cats eat pigons on a regular basis, but they let the chicks run around and seem to enjoy them. In the daytime it's common to see the cats and chickens laying around in the shade within a foot of each other. Racoons like chicken, and they are good climbers, but the chickens just make lots of noise and fly off if one gets too close. By then I have my paintball gun out and the Racoons learn quickly to get dinner elsewhere. I'm constantly surprised about how smart they are, if they know they are not allowed in a spot they will wait for you to go away and then rush over. If you catch them in the act, they freak out and run off back to their allotted area. I find small firecrackers a good way to tell them "stay away". They learn quickly.
Most of my chickens are good flyers, they can easily jump up to a perch 5ft above the ground and then into a tree from there. They could also easily fly over my fence and exit the yard, but they _never_ do.
I wish I had started years ago, the eggs are fantastic.
Some breeds are more self-sufficient l than others. What chicken breed do you raise?
The Bantam/Leghorn/Maran hens have a celebration every time they lay an egg which can be a bit annoying if it's 7am, but usually it's mid morning.
Other random tips, to pick them up, especially fast chicks, place your hand under their belly and let the legs hang down, don't come at them from behind or above or too fast. Laying chickens often will assume a mating pose if you go to pick them up which makes it easier and you can just grab them with 2 hands around the folded wings. They like being pet under their chins, but generally not on top of the head. Be sure to wash your hands even though they look perfectly clean.
They are all pretty spoiled, if it was a harsher situation I would stick to the small fast breeds.
Also, I give them the eggshells back, they love em and need the calcium anyway. Some folks say that encourages them to eat the eggs but I have never seen that. It's only when one gets broken by accident.
He did pounce on one once by jumping on it off the bonnet of my wife's car, but soon got off it. I think it was more for fun than a serious attempt.
Sounds like some philanthropist has kindly provided you with all the chicken you can eat — if you catch it.