03-21-2019, 02:24 PM
quote:
Originally posted by ElysianWort
If I were king, organic would be mandatory so there would be no other way of farming and no schemes like this.
Here is where the "mandatory" thing steps on my liberty...
Farm A (not a factory farm, just a small family farm in Orchidland) raises meat chickens for food. Knowing that wild animals spread coccidia and other diseases to the farm, the family farmers use non-organic medicated feed while the chicks are small so they can thrive. When they are old enough to fight off the parasites and diseases on their own, they switch to regular feed knowing the amprolium* will be out of their system before the chickens are consumed. The survival rate of the chickens (until butcher day) is usually 100%, but more importantly none of them suffered a day in their life.
Farm B is organic. Since they aren't allowed to use preventive medicines 20% of the flock gets sick and suffers. The farmers recognize the sick chicks and begin separating and medicating the sickest among them. Many of them die, but the survivors are still allowed to be sold, just without the "organic" label. This "shrinkage" in the original flock is passed onto the "organic" consumer (yes, you are still paying for inorganic meat) in the form of higher prices, but it's the chicks who suffered and died that paid the ultimate price.
In your "king" scheme all of the sick chickens would just be ground up into fertilizer or something, for "inorganic" farms?
People like to associate the word "organic" with "healthy", but ask the chickens who got sick or died how that organic "healthy" is treating them... or for that matter, do people eating organic chicken notice a difference in nutrition or taste if the animal got sick and narrowly survived a preventable illness? I don't know. All I know is that I choose to not make our animals suffer. Coccidia is brutal in the tropics.
*Amprolium is not an antibiotic, it's an anti-parasite medicine, it may be legal to sell "no antibiotic chicken" that has been fed amprolium but as far as I know it's not "organic" for labeling.