Some Broiler Production Statistics

Wired:

Here’s what I learned about Georgia on Thursday:

• It raises more meat chickens than any other place in the United States, about 1.4 billion of them a year.
• That’s 15 percent of all the animals raised in confinement agriculture in the United States. Not just 15 percent of the chickens; 15 percent of everything.
• All those chickens produce 2 million tons of poultry manure and litter a year, one-fifth of what the entire U.S. poultry sector produces.
• That waste is applied on land — including land where other food crops are grown — from which it can run off and contaminate water supplies.
• 40 to 80 percent of gut bacteria recovered from confinement chicken-houses are multi-drug resistant.
• Caring for foodborne illness from organisms carried on chicken, and making up for lost productivity when people are made sick, costs about $2.4 billion per year.
• Chicken catchers, who cage the birds on their way to slaughter, may lift 5,000 pounds in an hour. Slaughterhouse line workers may perform the same repetitive cutting motions 20,000 to 30,000 times in a work shift.
• Slaughterhouses in Georgia kill 1 million chickens per week.
• Poultry is exempt from humane slaughter regulations.

I learned these things — some of which certainly snapped my head back — via a report from a new advocacy group that debuted Thursday, Georgians for Pastured Poultry, with the mission to remake poultry production in the most-poultry-producing state.

I'm not going to get into the pastured poultry versus confinement argument here.  I was just surprised that Georgia was the leading broiler producing state.  I actually did a quick search to make sure that was true before posting it.  Apparently, my pick for the leading state, Arkansas, is second.  One thing I can guarantee: most of the workers involved in the jobs mentioned above are not natives of the United States.  That work is just too hard.