Community Chat

[Plaid Pants2]

When I was little, my family had truly free-range chickens. By that, I mean, they were allowed outside of the coop, to eat all the bugs that they wanted. Of course, we also had chicken feed for them.

Their eggs were so delicious!

The yolks were a deep, dark orange, and not the pale yellow that you find in super market eggs.

[chrystaltree]

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@newziesuzie wrote:

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@chrystaltree wrote:

Nothing new about that, they've been saying that for many years now and nothing has changed. 

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Yes if you read the article

youll see there are new things

being done which is why

I posted the article @chrystaltree.

😊

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      That's what I get for not reading the article.  But, truthfully, it was too long to read.   

[Irshgrl31201]

This is exactly why we get all of our meat from private farmers around here. We get our chickens and eggs from a great little farm. They walk around outside (or inside if they prefer) and have plenty of room. I can't eat eggs from a grocery store anymore, they taste weird to me. The chickens I get aren't huge either. They aren't "Chernobyl Chickens" as I call them. Chicken breasts aren't supposed to be so big that you have to cut them in half. We get our pork and beef from separate local farmers too. They all encourage you to walk around and see where and how they live. They are more expensive. Yes, they definitely are. When I was younger, I could not have afforded to get our meats from places like this so we ate supermarket meat. Now I am older and can afford this so I definitely take advantage of it and I think that the more people that do, other food manufacturers will take notice and maybe change some of these procedures. You are even seeing it now as many want you to know they have stopped using antibiotics and other stuff. I am already seeing a difference because for so long how our food was produced and its living conditions were so secretive. Now they are coming to light. 

[newziesuzie]

More from the article😊:

".......After Perdue (Farms) bought an organic-chicken company called Coleman Natural Foods in 2011, it adopted another unorthodox therapy: oregano. The fragrant herb not only goes well with chicken; it also has anti­microbial properties.....

......Moving away from antibiotics, Stewart- Brown says, has forced him to think about the birds' overall well-being—not traditionally a key concern in an industry that profits by converting feed into meat as cheaply as possible......

........Perdue even turns off the lights in the chicken houses for four hours a night so the birds can rest.

In the past, lights were left on 24 hours per day on the theory that chickens kept awake eat more and thus get fatter faster.

Reducing stress by letting the birds rest, Stewart-Brown says, makes them healthier—and since healthy birds grow faster, the extra sleep has the same effect as constant feeding......

.........Perdue sees a very different future.

After 14 years, Stewart-Brown tells me that the company can now produce meat without antibiotics as fast and efficiently as it once did with them.

Today, Perdue ships two kinds of chicken: About two-thirds of the company's product is already labeled "no antibiotics ever." It sells for about 20 percent more than the remaining third still treated with antibiotics.

Overall, Stewart-Brown explains, Perdue spends an extra $3 to $4 for every $1 it saves in antibiotics reduction—but recoups those costs by charging shoppers a premium for that meat.

Last year, the company's sales grew faster than those of its competitors—even when the overall market declined......

.......The rest of the chicken-producing giants (save for Sanderson) are scrambling to catch up.

Not long after McDonald's announced it would go antibiotic-free, Tyson, the nation's largest chicken supplier, declared it would rid its flocks of all human-important antibiotics by September 2017. Sasha Stashwick, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says this announcement marked a "tipping point for getting the chicken industry off antibiotics."........ "

[Lucky Charm]

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@allaries wrote:

Hckynut, have you seen the documentary, Food Inc.? That did it for me and I will not ear those things u mentioned either.

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I stopped eating meat back when the Nightly News showed cows toppling over from Mad Cow disease.

[Irshgrl31201]

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@Plaid Pants2 wrote:

When I was little, my family had truly free-range chickens. By that, I mean, they were allowed outside of the coop, to eat all the bugs that they wanted. Of course, we also had chicken feed for them.

Their eggs were so delicious!

The yolks were a deep, dark orange, and not the pale yellow that you find in super market eggs.

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Yes, the term free range according to chicken manufacturers doesn't mean what we think it means. When that term is used people think they are able to walk around outside and it doesn't necessarily mean that at all. People need to look for the term "pastured" to find more of what they had in mind when the term "free range" is used. 

[silkyk]

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@newziesuzie wrote:

I saw this on my Consumer Reports

email news letter and thought it might

be interesting to share. It's too long

to copy / paste here and too much

to summarize:

ARTICLE: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/05/perdue-antibiotic-free-chicken-meat-resistance?EXTKEY...

::

::

"An investigative article on the use of antibiotics in poultry farming"

"How Factory Farms Play Chicken With Antibiotics

And the inside story of one company confronting its role in

creating dangerous superbugs."

From the article:

"......Currently, livestock operations burn through about 70 percent of the "medically important" antibiotics used in the nation—the ones people need when an infection strikes.

Microbes that have evolved to withstand antibiotics now sicken 2 million Americans each year and kill 23,000 others—more than homicide.

Even though public health authorities from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have long pointed to the meat industry's reliance on anti­biotics as a major culprit in human resistance to the drugs, the FDA has never reined in their use......"

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This is why we have our own chickens...and they lay pretty "easter" colored eggs. They taste sooooooooooooo much better! Love my hens!

This is what their eggs look like.

[Marcail0825]

I've been reading about Perdue Farms. They're clearly leading the way. Kudos to them! Interesting thread and article @newziesuzie.

[stazgirl]

BEAUTIFUL colors!!!  I never knew chickens layed blue eggs.

[silkyk]

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@stazgirl wrote:

BEAUTIFUL colors!!!  I never knew chickens layed blue eggs.

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The chickens are called "Easter Eggers" and they do lay pink, green,aqua and blue eggs. Easter Eggers vary widely in color and conformation, and are exceptionally friendly and hardy. Since they are usually quite friendly to children and humans in general, they are a great choice for a family flock. We've had lots of chickens but these are my favorite ladies. Everyday when I gather the eggs I never know what i'm gonna get.