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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

I want to like this idea. I agree that the world's food supply is a critical issue. But I'm just not agreeing with some of the underlying assumptions.

Are eggs really the problem we need to be solving? Sure, commercial chickens farms are scary. But locally sourced eggs / backyard chickens makes more sense to me than commercially produced egg substitutes.

After all, how are those peas being produced? Is it a large monoculture operation, involving massive amount of chemicals and fertilizer? Or is it sustainable and organic? Can the operation scale if it becomes as successful as the current industry leaders?

To be fair, a brief article probably can't get into enough depth to answer those questions - maybe these guys have good answers. I'm just a bigger proponent of the local food movement vs. a new take on commercial operations.

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The energy input for animal products is higher across the board than for plant products http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/webber-more-effici... . Even if you grow the chickens better way, you still need to grow the feed, so you are back to the original problem. If the chicken feed can be grown in a good way, then so can the peas probably.

So -- just moving from eggs to a plant based substitute, changing nothing else about the agricultural process, would reduce any negative consequences of farming.

We feed our chickens our kitchen scraps and leftovers. We also house them under our apple trees so they can catch any windfall and eat any bugs or rodents that arrive. We move the straw out of the rabbit runs and put it into a container in the chicken run, so the chickens also pick the seeds and bugs out of there, too, and start the composting process so all that material can get recycled. They also fertilize our apple trees with their waste, and the compost that comes out of this process is used in our gardens.

So the chickens pretty much take care of themselves... lets talk the next step up - the rabbits. They feed on the grass and other plants that grow in our fields, as we move their mobile runs around the property. We also provide them with straw and alfalfa that has been locally grown. (We do buy that from one of our neighbors.)

So yes, we do feed our animals - but a lot less than one might think, and most of it comes from our own land. We take advantage of materials that would otherwise be waste, and use them to have a more sustainable operation. It will always be true that the same amount of resources could produce more plants (if your gardens grow perfectly)... that math is inarguable. But if you build a full ecosystem around your animals, you can do fairly well.

How much land are you using to produce food for how many people?

Yeah, the answer to "commercial mass-produced eggs waste resources" isn't "let's use mass-produced X instead!"

...it's more along the lines of what you suggest: preferring locally-produced eggs from smaller producers. Preferably organic, free-range, etc. Certainly more expensive in "dollars", but ...

There aren't enough free ranges to product the eggs people want. Does everyone want tl pay $1 per egg? The answer is to be less greedy about animal produce.

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