Red Jungle Fowl, long thought to be the ancestors of all
modern chickens,
are widely distributed throughout eastern India, Burma,
Thailand and Malaysia.
It is more likely that this is one of several species
of birds that
have contributed to the modern bird. These include: the
Java, the Ceylon
and the Jungle Grey.
Then
Throughout history, with a few exceptions,
(ancient Egypt, for example, to be covered later,)
raising chickens has been an informal farmyard activity.
Each family kept a flock of
birds for eggs, meat and by-products such as feathers
and manure.
This is a Dutch farm scene from the early 20th century.
Extra birds were carried to market and
sold or bartered.
These girls are from Aosta, Italy (circa 1920's.)
There are many ways to transport birds
to market.
This Chinese farmer is from Fukien Province. (circa 1920's)
A chicken wagon arrives at a Havana, Cuba
market. (circa 1920's)
These chickens were raised by many different producers.
Live poultry trains were used in the USA
(1920's).
Each car could accommodate about 4,600 chickens and each
was
equipped with a water tank, grain crib and a room for
an attendant
who cared for the birds. Eggs laid on route were the property
of
the train crew. The birds were raised by many different
producers,
and sold to brokers who brought the birds to railway stops
for transport.
As far as mass production of eggs and
chickens for meat, the ancient Egyptians
were probably the first to succeed in this. Hatching ovens
have been in use in Egypt
for many centuries and continued into the 20th century
unchanged from the time
of Moses. Each facility produced from 15,000,000 to 20,000,000
chicks a season.
The operators who lived on the premises had no thermometers
to help regulate the temperature, but by the "feel"
of the air recognized when the fires needed attention.
There was a relationship between the huge labor force
required to build the pyramids and the organization and
mass production of food, in this case, chickens.
In the United States masses of chickens
were raised as free range flocks
housed in a variety of buildings. These chicken ranches
were found across
the country and usually near large cities. This scene
is in California, circa 1930's.
A farmer at the Rancocas Poultry Farm
in Brown's Mills, New Jersey
near Philadelphia feeds his birds.
Joel M. Foster was the founder of The
Million Egg Farm, as Rancocas was known.
Foster was a pioneer promoter of humane and environmentally
responsible mass production of eggs and birds. Besides
writing a how-to book on the subject (1910), he developed
and marketed a line of products that included industrial
incubators, sanitizers and feeders.
Now
http://www.factoryfarming.com/gallery/broiler01.htm
Raising chickens for eggs and meat changed
from free-range farming
to factory production methods gradually from the 1930's
to the 1970's.
It was discovered that chickens would lay more eggs and
get fatter faster if you confined them indoors and kept
the lights on at night. Such large numbers of birds cooped
up
required large doses of antibiotics and a floor of wire
mesh for droppings to pass through
in order to keep them healthy. Birds needed to have their
beaks blunted so they did
not peck each other. So a controlled diet of mush was
developed as well, that the
birds could feed on with their mutilated beaks.
About
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations
& the Poultry Industry
By 1965 one person could operate a plant
producing forty thousand
birds a day. Factory farming on this scale is known as
CAFO which
stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.
All CAFO's create massive amounts of manure which has
to be removed.
Poultry manure is traditionally a valuable and important
fertilizer.
The chicken manure has always been recycled by spreading
it on the land.
However, CAFO's produce so much waste that the land cannot
absorb it and the excess is contaminating ground water,
rivers and lakes.
The nitrogen rich waste causes excess
algae buildup in nearby waterways.
Lakes and streams are deprived of oxygen, killing plants,
fish and other organisms.
Corporate poultry processors like Tysons and Cargill escape
blame for this
environmental pollution, by claiming it's the responsibility
of the farmers who
supply their factories.
Read
a summary of the problem with Ohio, USA's Buckeye Egg
Farm.
Poultry
production in West Virginia's Potomac Valley has tripled
in the last decade. The area produces nearly 90 million
chickens a year. But is poultry pollution threatening
the growing state tourism industry? Is it responsible
for a national environmental group's charge that the Potomac
River is one of the 10 most endangered rivers in North
America? What is being done about the problem, and who
is paying the bill? Find out in this special series.
Processing
Then |
Now |
All parts of the chicken abattoirs are,
of course, automated. In the Perdue plant the chickens
are taken from the trucks at six-thirty in the morning
at Accomac, Virginia, and hung upside down by their feet
on a conveyor belt. The belt then moves through an electrically
charged solution, which, in Christian Adam's words ("Frank
Perdue Is Chicken," Esquire Magazine, April,, 1973),
"shocks almost all of them senseless. From there
they move to the Kill Room where a knife-like instrument
cuts their throats; then down the 'bleed tunnel' where
their blood drains away into a vat of hot water which
loosens the feather sockets and then past rubber finger-like
pluckers which remove most of the feathers and through
a flame that singes off the fine fuzz." Next in the
processing, the head and feet are removed. In the Eviscerating
Room, the birds are gutted by machines and inspected and
graded by government inspectors. Finally, they are chilled,
weighed and packaged. Nothing is wasted. In that respect,
at least, the Puritan Ethnic is still observed.
Those parts considered inedible by humans are made into
pet food, or, as in the case of legs, considered a delicacy
in the Orient, exported. Even the feathers are processed
and made into a component of chicken feed.
---Page Smith, The Chicken Book, Little
Brown & Co., Boston,1975.
http://www.vegetarismus.ch/bilder/img/chicken_b_022.jpg
Let us know
what you think of this exhibit and the issue of CAFO's.
Join
our Food Museum Blog discussion on this topic.
Links
Keeping
Chickens; coops, chicks, eggs, supplies...
everything you need to know to get started (without a
panic attack)
from the Farm at Morrison Corner.
A
Citizen's Guide to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations
All
about Free-Range Chickens
Factory
Farming.Com: the truth hurts
For More Information
The Million Egg Farm
by Joel M. Foster, 1910
"The Races of Domestic Fowl" by M.A. Jull,
published in National Geographic Magazine, April 1927
The Chicken Book by Page Smith and Charles
Daniel
Little, Brown & Co, Boston, 1975
The Food Museum's Poultry exhibits
Asian Avian
Flu Report
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