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Happy 2008! I hope that this new year has started off very well for you and that you have exciting plans for the months ahead. A very warm welcome to you if you are a new reader of this newsletter.
One of my plans for this year was to keep free range organic hens on my allotment and I am pleased to say that this goal has already been achieved and I am a proud owner of some very happy and healthy hens that are being constantly admired by fellow allotment gardeners, for their beauty and capacity to entertain. This new hobby is quite exciting for me as I live in the heart of London with its city hustle and bustle and detachment from nature.
If you live in the UK, you have probably seen at least part of the passionate campaign for free range farming, broadcast nearly every evening on Channel 4 this week. The Big Food Fight
Food is essential. Therefore, in industrialised nations, food is an essential business.
Business depends on providing a product or service that consumers need/want and the more repetition of sales the better. In other words, a dozen eggs will not last a lifetime. The consumer will be back for more once the product has been consumed.
After the Second World War, in the UK, there were food shortages. Therefore there were opportunities to create lucrative businesses in the food industry. Chicken and eggs were (and remain) a popular food. If you are a business person, you know well that the way to maximise profit is by minimising the costs of production.
How would you minimise the costs of producing eggs or chicken meat?
Perhaps you would have done this very differently to our fellow business people in the chicken and egg industry.
The way they minimise costs is by stuffing the maximum number of chicken into the minimum amount of space and by reducing the animals to a mechanical instrument for converting pellets of food into eggs and chicken ready for consumption within 39 days of life. My hens are already 119 days old and still not ready to lay eggs. They are expected to live several years, not 39 days like the millions of hens being slaughtered in factory farms, daily. These modern day products of the industrialisation age, and our war against nature, were referred to as "Frankenstein hens" by the leading proponents of the campaign for free range farming, including the famous chefs, Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley & Gordon Ramsey.
If you live in a city, like I do, I wonder how much you personally contribute to the process of getting food into your kitchen. I buy most of my food at a supermarket and until I got my allotment 4 years ago, the only contribution I made to getting food into my home was paying the supermarket. I was totally dependent on my food being a business.
In developed countries, the majority of citizens are easily able to meet their basic survival needs of food, water and shelter. Businesses provide all these at prices that the citizens can easily afford.
Or do they?
How dependent are you on the business of food?
What choices do you exercise?
My hens will start to lay eggs in about 6 weeks time. Feeding them, keeping them clean and protecting them from predators will be mandatory if I wish to consume any of their eggs. It seems much easier to pay less than 20 pence an egg at the supermarket! The fact that millions of industrialised people are making the latter choice, means that we have created "Frankenstein chickens" to meet the demands of the population. You might think that factory farmers are raking in all the profit from this high level of demand? Well, no, not the farmers. According to the Channel 4 documentary broadcast last night, farmers earn less than 3 pence per chicken. I dread to think how little they earn for each egg that they sell.
I hope that you have a much wiser business plan! If you are interested in finding out more about factory farming, this link will entertain you while educating you about the issues: The Meatrix Jesvir Mahil
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