By: Bryan Good
Sustainability Studies student
Have you wondered what to do with your vegetable scraps outside of throwing them
in the trash? Just by you reading this implies that you are familiar with some form of
“green” living.
You could compost them, but you don’t want to make a pile in your yard to dedicate to rotting vegetation, and you can’t stomach the idea of worms in your house so what to do? You know that throwing the scraps away is a waste and you love chicken eggs so why not merge the two and have the best of both worlds?
That’s right! I’m suggesting to get your own chickens. They would be more than happy to eat your veggie scraps and then provide you with a three-fold bonus of eggs, manure and meat. Okay, it’s only two-fold for some as a few of you don’t eat meat. Either way you choose, it’s never a bad idea to have food security.
Food security enables you to meet your own need for food regardless of what’s happening on the store shelves. With your own chickens you know where the eggs came from, how they were cared for and hardly any disease risk.
For quite a while we have heard of egg recalls for salmonella to the tune of half of a billion eggs in recent past. We know that diseases are more common when mass production is involved. In several cases almost one hundred thousand birds were contained in one building. That is a lot of waste to manage which appears to be the primary cause of disease.
Studies have shown that when a chicken is allowed to be a chicken and not just an egg producing machine, it is healthier and happier which translates to healthy eggs. A video by The Cornucopia Institute speaks about the health benefits of free range, organic eggs while mentioning the conditions of egg factories.
Back to you and your vegetable scraps. It is known by those who have them that
chickens will eat almost anything and won’t eat what is bad for them. Vegetable scraps
rank very high on their “like” list. Fruit is delightful to them as well. Just ask the author
about the grapes he did not get this year due to them becoming food for his curious
chickens…
All this said because we are being subjected to a food system that is more
concerned about profit than the quality of life that the animals live.
Joel Salatin, an author and a well-known activist in organic food circles says in an interview, that “if one out of every five homes in this country raised chickens, the commercial egg industry would be non-existent.’
Too bad that we spend more time away from the home than we are there.
Good thing that chickens require not much more than food, water, shelter and a little
attention. Oh yeah, the veggie scraps are much appreciated so that you’ll get an egg or two
tomorrow.
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