My father in law raised chickens 40,000 at a time. He made good money doing that because he was early in taking advantage of new chicken breeds and knowledge of chicken nutrition and disease control. E.g., since he was raising chickens indoors, he had to supply vitamin D that chickens would otherwise get from the sun.
IIRC, in the wild, chickens ate seeds, insects, and maybe more. They might have eaten a soy bean if they had found one. IIRC US soy beans were imported from Asia; so, maybe chickens and related birds in Asia ate soy beans.
He also fed his chickens anchovies: So, in Chile, they would catch tons of the little fish and sell them cooked in 55 gallon drums. He said that the anchovies were an astoundingly good growth factor. The faster can get the chickens to grow, the less number of days have to feed them just to stay alive; so rapid growth is important.
He never mentioned that he gave anti-biotics because he fed soy beans.
For the soy beans, he grew a lot of those himself.
Eventually the big margins went out of the chicken business. He was in northern Indiana where the winters can be just darned cold, e.g., -40 F and 50 MPH winds, and that was cold the day I was in it. So, in the US, raising chickens moved to the US South where there were warmer winters and longer growing seasons for more soy beans.
When I asked him about some of the issues in raising chickens I read in the news, his answer was fast: He asked "Did the whole chickens I bought have any fat?" I said "Yes". And then he said, "Then they had to have been healthy." First cut, he was probably right. He also knew what a sick chicken was: Each day he had to walk through his big chicken houses, gather up the birds that died during the night, and toss them into a big trench that he dug and covered over occasionally.
IIRC, in the wild, chickens ate seeds, insects, and maybe more. They might have eaten a soy bean if they had found one. IIRC US soy beans were imported from Asia; so, maybe chickens and related birds in Asia ate soy beans.
He also fed his chickens anchovies: So, in Chile, they would catch tons of the little fish and sell them cooked in 55 gallon drums. He said that the anchovies were an astoundingly good growth factor. The faster can get the chickens to grow, the less number of days have to feed them just to stay alive; so rapid growth is important.
He never mentioned that he gave anti-biotics because he fed soy beans.
For the soy beans, he grew a lot of those himself.
Eventually the big margins went out of the chicken business. He was in northern Indiana where the winters can be just darned cold, e.g., -40 F and 50 MPH winds, and that was cold the day I was in it. So, in the US, raising chickens moved to the US South where there were warmer winters and longer growing seasons for more soy beans.
When I asked him about some of the issues in raising chickens I read in the news, his answer was fast: He asked "Did the whole chickens I bought have any fat?" I said "Yes". And then he said, "Then they had to have been healthy." First cut, he was probably right. He also knew what a sick chicken was: Each day he had to walk through his big chicken houses, gather up the birds that died during the night, and toss them into a big trench that he dug and covered over occasionally.