On a small farm. I have never used antibiotics on my chickens. I get the chicks when they are a day old and they stay on the farm until they die. I don't slaughter them at 2 years like most chicken egg farms. They live out their life in a very large field and chicken coop that I rotate the fencing on. I can't do those chicken tractors because of the steep terrain and heavy preditor problems. I give my chickens only food, water and ground sea shells. I had one chicken live to be 12 years old. Their eggs are delicious and my loss due to diseases and illness are very minimal. In fact, except for predators, I would get no chicken deaths until they start getting old at about 4 years. I keep about 50 chickens. I have had no spreads of diseases, no lice or other bug infestations. Every now and then I'll find a hen dead in the coop and it's usually due to old age. If hens were allowed outside with plenty of room, the disease problems on the farm would disappear.
I also raise sheep. Some processor who wanted my lamb to process into sausages, said except for the breed, my lamb was no different than other American raised lamb. That's when I did some research. Turns out the FDA has aproved 5 different continual injected antibiotics, steroids, hormones and growrh regulators for sheep. And that 90% of all lamb purchased by consumers was raised at least for 30 days in a feedlots. My sheep spend their lives on pasture. We hve a very small sheep shed, that we use so the ewes are outnof the bad weather during lambing. The only time antibiotics are used is when one of my ewes, not for meat animals, gets an injury that she would die from infection if she were not treated. So my hair sheep are a whole lot different than the crap sold in most grocery stores.
Ok so that's my long winded way of saying you don't need to pump farm animals full of chemicals to get good meat and make a profit. Farmers who need to pump their animals full of chemicals are doing something wrong.
= new reply since forum marked as read
