Pastured Chicken
Have We Become the Government’s Chickens?
[This was published in the May/June 2020 APPPA Grit newsletter, a trade publication of the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association, and relies on contextual understandings of pastured poultry farmers].
As processing plants close and big chicken destroys barns full of birds, CAFO chickens have been in the news a lot over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. The fragile nature of the industrial chicken model is self-evident to the entire public in times like these; however, that broken food system is not my primary target for this writing. I’ve been thinking about how our response to the Covid-19 virus is like the approach big chicken takes to raising birds.
The confinement poultry industry can produce a lot of cheap food by isolating tens of thousands of chickens inside a barn for their entire life. While in that barn, one of the biggest goals of the farmer and the company is to protect the flock from outside dangers. They are protected from the sun. Their contact with people is limited. Contact with the soil and other living creatures is a risk to be mitigated. Vaccines are developed and administered to supplement the immune system. When some of the flock gets sick, the entire flock is medicated because it’s impossible to treat individuals.
As the birds grow, the farmer and the integrator pray that no bacteria or virus gets inside the barn. When that virus (think high path avian influenza) does get in the barn, the immune-compromised birds have no chance of overcoming the threat on their own. Entering the barn requires a coveralls and booties.
What I just described is called biosecurity in the industrial poultry dogma, and it’s a fear-based approach hidden behind science. If you have a two-story barn with 40,000 chickens in it, you are scared to death that a virus will sweep through it, so you try to keep all the “bad” stuff out. As a pastured poultry farmer, you reject the prevailing paradigm that says environmental isolation, medication, and hope are the way to raise a healthy chicken.
Then a novel virus sweeps the world.
We react, based on the scientific guidance, in the same way Tyson, Pilgrims, Sanderson Farms, Perdue and others currently raise their confinement poultry. We try to isolate the entire healthy population and limit exposure to other people and the environment while we hope for a vaccine to magically appear and give us immunity. Don’t forget to sanitize everything.
The human response to the pandemic, at least in the U.S., is a near exact parallel to the CAFO chicken model. The government (integrators) initiate a bio security plan to keep us (the chickens) safe from a dangerous world.
We’re not fowl, however, and implementing a biosecurity plan on the public would be offensive. Instead, we’re “flattening the curve” while we wait for our governments to allow us to resume life. We’re waiting for governments to give us guidelines on how to live in a “new normal.”
Don’t worry. The new guidelines that instruct us on the safest way to live will be informed by science and in our best interest. That way, you can trust them. Wink, wink.
Here’s a wild reality that brings my analogy home to roost in a way that makes me deeply sad. At the time I’m writing this, nursing homes are a leading place of Covid-19 deaths. I’ve seen estimates as high as 50% (or more actually) of the total deaths in the U.S. are from people in nursing homes. Nursing homes are essentially locked down to the residents living in close environments and staff. Family visitations are out. Do the residents stand a chance when Covid 19 comes through the door and attacks an otherwise stressed immune system?
When you challenge the establishment.
Coming out of the 2019 American Pastured Poultry Producers Association conference in Greenville, Texas, one of the attendees who represented an institution and trained in modern poultry science was worried by some of the stuff he heard about poultry health. Our group tends to turn to a management-first mindset and natural remedies as primary defenses. This agent wanted to offer expert resources like himself to lead a presentation on poultry health at the next conference, so we got accurate information. I’m still trying to remember where I put his number. This is not a slight to the institution in general, as we have a few who try to understand pastured poultry as a solution to resilient food systems and as an alternative to the industrial poultry model. This is really a slight to the arrogant way of thinking that there’s only one approach to a problem.
I remember another interaction with another modern poultry science office after I published APPPA’s response and guidance to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (here and here). The paper was informed by research and readings from the across the world, and it refuted the party line, which was to isolate, tighten up biosecurity, and live in fear of wild ducks. Don’t forget to incite fear among confinement growers by testifying that backyard chickens are a risk to your flock. This institutional representative dismissed some of the research we used because the data didn’t stem from the “right kind of science.”
These are just two of many examples I can cite about the ways in which pastured poultry challenges the status quo. If I recommend a garlic tincture instead of antibiotics or suggest that you can treat blackhead with cayenne or that having birds outside in the sunlight is a good defense for a UV sensitive virus, then I must not be literate enough to understand how things work. The institution must come in and correct me with approved thinking. This doesn’t mean I should exclude institutions from the conversation, but the information they present should be challenged just like the information I present should be challenged. In chickens, this is easy to do. We can test, measure, and evaluate, and when we have measurements, we can judge whether our approach worked or whether the messaging around high path avian influenza matched the results, as an example.
Back to our current human virus problem.
If you’re still following Facebook, how many alternative treatment recommendations do you see concerning Covid-19? Sometimes, people are creative, and they can sneak some information about Vitamin C or Zinc or something else by the censors. The reason you don’t see information about natural treatments is because that information is actively censored. Back in February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) met with Silicon Valley tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, to discuss the moderation of information as the spread of Covid-19 spanned the globe.
Fake news is the drum beat you hear, and if a company is monitoring fake news, it’s for your own good. The reality is that alternative viewpoints are actively censored by our tech platforms. If YouTube, Facebook, cable news, or the nightly news are your primary sources of information, you’re only getting one side of the story. To hear the other side of the story—the side that questions our approach or treatment—you may have to wade through some conspiratorial commentary and sensational headlines. It’s ok to acknowledge that stuff exists because it does. But if you deny that alternative approaches may exist, you’ve essentially become the chicken in the barn relying a world organization, a president, a governor, or even a local police department to protect you from yourself and to protect the public from you.
In the modern virus scenario, you are the problem, because if you dare go outside your home, you’re labeled as an uncaring, deadly threat to your community. I’m sure none of you have had that claim leveled against your chickens, right?
I don’t know what societal norms we’ll have in three months. I think as statistics continue to emerge, it will contextualize our risk one way or the other. I do want to encourage us to think and challenge the prevailing wisdom because we are, after all, pastured poultry producers. We challenge the status quo every single day with our chosen farming model. When require farming tools like a tractor, we recommend you to look here.
At some point, while driving on empty highways while making deliveries in April, the similarities between CAFO chicken and our human virus response struck me. That caused me great alarm, and the comparison never left me.
The Covid-19 coronavirus is real with real risks; however, the discussion and the approach has become about political and personal gain ahead of the interests of the people. That completes the analogy of the government’s chickens.
I fully understand and expect that each of you will take steps to protect your family from sickness just like you assess the risk to the health of your flock. Many of you will assess your risks differently, and your assessment will inform your response.
While the negative effect on the human condition is the greatest detriment from Covid-19, the suffering has yielded groundbreaking societal insights into the fragile food system we have allowed to develop. I’m walking a personal line between celebrating the newfound opportunity for pastured poultry and trying to do my part to not allow “we the people” to slip further down the confinement chicken paradigm.
The Covid times invites trials, opportunities, and time to think. All views expressed belong to Mike Badger as a way to express critical thought in a challenging time. Assess your risk and be safe; it is your personal responsibility.