Farming, why is battery farming more energy efficient than free range farming?
Farming, why is battery farming more energy efficient than free range farming?
March 10th, 2010 by My Efficient Planet Leave a reply »
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Battery farming crams more into less space.
Confinement (battery) farming makes efficient use of space, more animals per square foot output.
The environment is also control in confinement farming with temperatures, humidity, and airflow kept at optimum levels to gain the fastest and produce the most livestock with the minimum amount of investment per chicken. They can produce more generations and more animals per space than free range farming can.
Free range farming is subject to slowdowns in growth due to season that are too hot, too cold, too rainy etc for optimum feed consumption. Airflow is not a problem. Mortality is higher in free range farming with animals exposed to wildlife predators, inconsistant environments, and weather.
keeping livestock in a single place ensures that there is control of costs by efficiency, battery raising makes it possible to identify stock that is profitable and one who is not. it is much easier to identify an unproductive chicken, for example, if the farmer has easy acces to her egg clutch. it is far more difficult to identify a particular chicken’s nest if such a bird is completely free range.
I am not sure it is. CFO’s use a lot more energy to heat and vent the barns. It also rakes a lot more energy and resources to build the barns than it does to build simple structures and use electric netting to confine the animals.
There is a far higher mortality rate with CFO’s, around 20% vs around 2% on a free range farm. Mainly because with more room, fresh air and sunshine the animals are much, much healthier so they do not tend to die early (and they do not need therapeutic antibiotics to keep them alive until slaughter). Even with predation, free range mortality is a lot lower
I find I must question this claim by the industrial farming sector that their way is more efficient than diversified free range farming as i have noted that 75 years ago a farm could support a family of 7 plus feed 5 other people and those farms were under 100 acres. Today a farmer must farm at least 5K acres in order to support a family of 6 and that amount of space will feed only 125 people. So the diversified smaller farm actually will feed twice as many people.
But hey, the industrial farming industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry with great influence over gov’ts and markets so they get to put forth their myths and most people will take what they say as truth because the vast majority of Americans (like 97%) neither know nor care where their food comes from.