Eh, beef, maybe, but the math basically comes down to: wheat, 4 million calories per acre, corn, 15 million. Take that 15 million calories of corn and feed it to chickens for a 3:1 calorie exchange and you've got 5 million calories of chicken per acre.
It's more complicated than that, but corn yields are so high that they can overpower the otherwise inefficiency of meat production.
Potatoes are as good as corn, and rice nearly so, but just from a land usage perspective chicken is no worse than eating wheat bread.
> First, this is an incorrect comparison: chickens eating corn VS humans eating wheat bread. Humans can very much eat corn as well.
I mean, it compares what it compares. From a land usage and calorie perspective chicken is approximately equivalent to wheat.
> Also, the environmental impact needs to account for water usage, pollution from the plant and animal farming and energy usage.
Yes, I am not accounting for those. The first reason is that I am lazy, and this is a comment on the internet; the second reason is that once you are trying to optimize for land usage, water usage, energy usage, fertilizer usage, human labor, capital costs, run-off pollution, CO2, and everything else, you now need to decide how to weight each factor.
Rice produces almost 3 times as many calories per acre as wheat, but uses more than 3 times as much water (449 gallons / lb vs 132). Which is better?
> Second, you have to consider the conversion rate for each nutrients including calories and proteins and chickens are much less efficient than that.
This is actually where chicken excels.
I should really be comparing chicken to soy, not wheat, because soy is a great source of complete protein.
If you plant 3 acres of soybeans, you'll get 18 million calories worth of soybeans.
If you plant 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soybeans, you'll get 36 million calories of grains, and if you feed them to chickens, you'll get 12 million calories of chicken.
On a calories-per-acre basis, soy is beating chicken 3:2. But soy only gives you about 0.1 grams of protein per calorie, while chicken gives you more like 0.2 grams of protein per calorie.
So your 3 acres of soybeans give you 1.8 million grams of protein, while your 3 acres of corn+soy->chickens give you 2.4 million grams of protein. So chickens beat soy on protein per acre by 4:3.
> Please provide evidence sources if you want to claim otherwise.
I've stated all the numbers I'm using; if there's one you want to call bullshit on in particular let me know.
Not really; there's also the complication that you don't actually feed your chickens straight corn. Because chickens need protein in their meal, it's more like, 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soybeans, for 36 million calories from 3 acres to get 12 million calories of chicken for a chicken-per-acre calories of 4 million. You also get your chicken manure as a fertilizer out at the end, but then, if you were already collecting your humanure it's probably not a net gain.
From a pure land usage standpoint, you're still better off if we're getting most of our calories from corn, potatoes and rice directly. Once you start adding in necessary protein, you can either subsist on soy, or feed that soy with corn to chickens and pigs (which have a worse feed ratio compared to chickens, but can supplement on food waste to reclaim calories that would otherwise go to waste) for roughly similar food-per-acre footprints.
It's more complicated than that, but corn yields are so high that they can overpower the otherwise inefficiency of meat production.
Potatoes are as good as corn, and rice nearly so, but just from a land usage perspective chicken is no worse than eating wheat bread.