We already know that each broiler chicken consumes 3.7 kg of food, this means that person ‘X’ would have actually used up 3.7 times 3, which is 11.1 kg of food! According to a recent survey conducted by the Registrar General of India in 2014, out of every 10 Indians, 7 are non-vegetarian. Since each chicken yields approximately 1.9 -2 kg of meat as dressed weight, 3 such chickens would be required to make 6 kg of meat. Six kilos of meat would require butchering three chickens, each with a live weight of 2.5 kg.
We will also assume that all this meat is coming from broiler chickens. This amounts to 6 kilos of chicken meat a year. Let us assume that a person ‘X’ in India consumes half a kilogram of chicken meat every month. Again, taking the batch size as 2000, the amount of food that will be consumed by each batch will then be 103,000 kilos of food or 113.5 tons of food!! Even on these farms chickens are raised in batches. In this time, each chicken will consume 51.5 kilos of food. In these farms, chickens are raised for a period of 72 weeks or 504 days.
So if the live chicken weighs 2.5 kilos then the dressed weight would be close to 1.9 kilos. Post butchering and removal of feathers, skin, head, legs and a few undesirable internal organs this weight reduces by 20 – 25%, this is known as dressed weight. The total weight of these chickens reaches anywhere between 2.25 – 2.5 kgs. Every such commercial farm can produce 5-6 such batches every year. This number will increase exponentially as the batch size increases. Given that each chicken consumes 3.7 kilos of food, then a batch of 2000 chickens would consume 7,400 kilos of food. The batch size can be as small as 2000 chickens or as large as 50,000 chickens.įor the sake of simplicity let us take a batch of 2000 chickens. Most of our meat/broiler chickens are raised on commercial chicken farms in batches. By the end of 42 days, each chicken would have consumed a total of 3.7 kilograms of feed. There are certain regulations which decide the amount of feed each and every chicken must be fed per day. In these farms, chickens are raised for a period of 42 days. So let’s look at both these farms piece by piece or should I say feather by feather. Why do you need to know all this? It’s because we are trying to map the amount of food this industry really hogs. There is a third type also but that’s not relevant to this article. When their egg production starts declining they are sold for meat. Layer Farms – Here chickens are raised for eggs. In fact, these two products are obtained from two different types of chicken farms:īroiler Farms – Here chickens are raised purely for meat. When it comes to the chicken industry, as consumers these are the two products that we are mainly concerned about – meat and eggs. In this article, we shall focus on poultry, specifically the chicken industry in India and try to understand just how big a burden they are to our food resources. By resources, we mean the very things that we use to stay alive – food, water and energy.
Most of us consume these products without ever giving it a second thought and realizing that the poultry and dairy industries use up a lot more resources than what we believed they did. In the last two decades, the demand for poultry and dairy products has increased rapidly.
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