Conworld random thread

[Moose-tache]

I suspect the larger issue would be that the main food source would have to be eggs, supplemented with wild plants and small amounts of grain and meat. Drinking an egg and mugwort smoothie every morning sounds like hell, but I wouldn't have guessed that people could live on just yogurt either, so maybe it's less miserable than it sounds once you get used to it.

[Ares Land]

I had a stupid idea, and I want to know just how stupid it is: pastoralism, based on birds.

Something like a goose can convert grasslands too marginal for farming into usable food just like a sheep or cow. And while they don't produce milk, they do produce eggs, as well as leather and down.

Is there an obvious reason why this would never work? I'm sure there must be...

As I recall, chicken more or less compete with humans, nutritionally speaking. I don't know about geese. I don't see why you couldn't come up with a grass eating bird.

One potential problem is that, except for chickens, birds don't lay that many eggs. But, again, you could probably come up with a plausible explanation.

[Travis B.]

As I recall, chicken more or less compete with humans, nutritionally speaking. I don't know about geese. I don't see why you couldn't come up with a grass eating bird.

Geese do eat quite a bit of grass, it should be noted.

[bradrn]

I had a stupid idea, and I want to know just how stupid it is: pastoralism, based on birds.

Something like a goose can convert grasslands too marginal for farming into usable food just like a sheep or cow. And while they don't produce milk, they do produce eggs, as well as leather and down.

Is there an obvious reason why this would never work? I'm sure there must be...

As I recall, chicken more or less compete with humans, nutritionally speaking. I don't know about geese. I don't see why you couldn't come up with a grass eating bird.

Anecdotally, I often see flocks of sulfur-crested cockatoos grazing, exactly like cows.

[Elancholia]

I'm not sure about running herds of geese across the open plains, but keeping flocks to forage in the fens seems reasonable enough. Use them on land that's marginal because it's wet, rather than because it's dry. I suppose they'd compete with pigs, cattle, and water buffalo, and with drainage and flooded-field cultivation (easier to dry out wetlands than irrigate the steppe), but you might be able to make it work by tweaking this or that variable. Plus, cattle don't get all those bugs, grubs, frogs, and minnows into your section of the trophic pyramid. Once you've got get a bird that eats all that stuff, plus grazing on plant-matter (grit and gastroliths taking the place of the specialized ruminant stomach), you're pretty much in business -- say your bird-ranchers they increased efficiency via selective breeding until they had a viable mode of subsistence.

People keep plenty of birds in the real world; ponds for geese and ducks are a common item in village and manorial inventories in medieval Europe, and Asian paddy-farmers use them for pest control. The English fens were sufficiently rich that people lived by fishing and fowling there until the drainage projects of the Early Modern period.

If you want transhumance, maybe the pastoralists do it for the same reasons migratory birds migrate naturally -- to the cold places in the summer and the hot places in the winter. Maybe there's a pronounced wet and dry season, and the wetlands only appear for part of the year in some places.

Turkeys might be another possibility.

[keenir]

I had a stupid idea, and I want to know just how stupid it is: pastoralism, based on birds.
Something like a goose can convert grasslands too marginal for farming into usable food just like a sheep or cow. And while they don't produce milk, they do produce eggs, as well as leather and down.
Is there an obvious reason why this would never work? I'm sure there must be...

The only thing is the birds would have to be flightless (e.g. ostriches, emus) for this to work.

maybe use bird that can fly but are either bad at it or prefer not to fly. (i think even roadrunners and nene geese qualify as those)

[keenir]

I had a stupid idea, and I want to know just how stupid it is: pastoralism, based on birds.
Something like a goose can convert grasslands too marginal for farming into usable food just like a sheep or cow. And while they don't produce milk, they do produce eggs, as well as leather and down.
Is there an obvious reason why this would never work? I'm sure there must be...

As I recall, chicken more or less compete with humans, nutritionally speaking. I don't know about geese. I don't see why you couldn't come up with a grass eating bird.

One potential problem is that, except for chickens, birds don't lay that many eggs. But, again, you could probably come up with a plausible explanation.

to be fair, chickens lay a lot of eggs because people keep taking their eggs, so chickens think "hm, clearly i haven't laid all the eggs I'm supposed to lay yet."

[Travis B.]

I had a stupid idea, and I want to know just how stupid it is: pastoralism, based on birds.
Something like a goose can convert grasslands too marginal for farming into usable food just like a sheep or cow. And while they don't produce milk, they do produce eggs, as well as leather and down.
Is there an obvious reason why this would never work? I'm sure there must be...

As I recall, chicken more or less compete with humans, nutritionally speaking. I don't know about geese. I don't see why you couldn't come up with a grass eating bird.

One potential problem is that, except for chickens, birds don't lay that many eggs. But, again, you could probably come up with a plausible explanation.

to be fair, chickens lay a lot of eggs because people keep taking their eggs, so chickens think "hm, clearly i haven't laid all the eggs I'm supposed to lay yet."

Apparently domestic chickens have a mutation such that they will lay eggs year-round rather than once a year.

[Moose-tache]

Here are some figures I found. Some breeds of chicken lay up to 300 eggs per year with an average size of 50g. An average egg-laying chicken needs 600 calories or about 115g of feed per day, though I suspect those super producing chickens require more. For geese, this could be a few hundred grams of pasture grass instead of seeds and bugs. The average ewe, on the other hand, eats about 3kg of alfalfa a day while lactating, and can produce hundreds of kilograms of milk per season. I did some quick math to see how many people can live off of one sheep, and it broke my claculator. Seriously, sheep provide hundreds of times more food than chickens, and they certainly don't eat hundreds of times more food. Bird pastoralists would require flocks of at least a couple of dozen birds per person, while one sheep from a high-yield breed can feed multiple people.

So it seems like yurt-dwelling goose nomads aren't really viable from an energy perspective.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Some form of fantasy bird might be viable, though, if it had similar energy consumption and productivity as an ewe. I'm not sure if that's possible with the biophysics we have, however.

[Ahzoh]

As I recall, chicken more or less compete with humans, nutritionally speaking. I don't know about geese. I don't see why you couldn't come up with a grass eating bird.

Makes me wonder why humans bother raising chickens then if they're so resource-intensive and can't feed as many humans as other common animals.

[keenir]

Here are some figures I found.

interesting; thanks for the numbers and info.


so...per day, 300 eggs vs (?) milk...115grams of food vs 3 kilograms of food.

[Raphael]

As I recall, chicken more or less compete with humans, nutritionally speaking. I don't know about geese. I don't see why you couldn't come up with a grass eating bird.

Makes me wonder why humans bother raising chickens then if they're so resource-intensive and can't feed as many humans as other common animals.

Hm, now I wonder whether, historically, in some times and places, chickens might have eaten the food that human beings could have eaten, but didn't want to eat - effectively turning that stuff into eggs and chicken meat, which many human beings were willing to eat. I guess in times and places like that, from the perspective of at least some people keeping chickens, their chickens were kind of feeding themselves, since they were eating stuff that would otherwise have gone to waste. But I don't know anything about keeping poultry, so take that with a lot of salt.

[Ahzoh]

so...per day, 300 eggs vs (?) milk...115grams of food vs 3 kilograms of food.

It's 300 eggs per year, so like ~0.82 eggs per day for 115 grams of food per day.
Sheep produce "hundreds of kilograms" of milk per season (so like 3-4 months?) for 3 kg of food per day

[linguistcat]

In most cases when chickens are raised for food by individuals, they eat insects, small animals like mice or lizards and a lot of the food waste from meals, as well as being fed grains and the like. There are cultures that eat bugs, mice, lizards etc, and almost all cultures eat grains, but I think you could have a set up where chickens do eat whatever the humans don't and mostly live on forage. The less the humans would have to feed them directly, the more chickens would be worthwhile for eggs and meat. Isn't that why pigs and sheep are kept? To turn calories humans don't use into calories we can, whether by eating things we don't or eating the left over scraps from what we do eat.

I might be mistaking something here though and I'd be happy to hear from someone with more insight.

[Ahzoh]

In most cases when chickens are raised for food by individuals, they eat insects, small animals like mice or lizards and a lot of the food waste from meals, as well as being fed grains and the like. There are cultures that eat bugs, mice, lizards etc, and almost all cultures eat grains, but I think you could have a set up where chickens do eat whatever the humans don't and mostly live on forage. The less the humans would have to feed them directly, the more chickens would be worthwhile for eggs and meat. Isn't that why pigs and sheep are kept? To turn calories humans don't use into calories we can, whether by eating things we don't or eating the left over scraps from what we do eat.

I might be mistaking something here though and I'd be happy to hear from someone with more insight.

Someone said that chickens compete nutritionally with humans. I understand the phrase "compete nutritionally" to mean that they require nearly the same types of food humans do rather than eating foods that humans don't or can't use.

[keenir]

so...per day, 300 eggs vs (?) milk...115grams of food vs 3 kilograms of food.

It's 300 eggs per year, so like ~0.82 eggs per day for 115 grams of food per day.
Sheep produce "hundreds of kilograms" of milk per season (so like 3-4 months?) for 3 kg of food per day

hm...so we just need to scale the chicken up to sheep size - thus making the eggs...ostrich-egg-sized? emu?
{shrinking the ewes would make for effective comparison and math puzzles, but would be counterproductive for feeding villages}
(sorry)

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Is this an attempt, by chance, to get a chocobo analogue?

[alynnidalar]

In most cases when chickens are raised for food by individuals, they eat insects, small animals like mice or lizards and a lot of the food waste from meals, as well as being fed grains and the like. There are cultures that eat bugs, mice, lizards etc, and almost all cultures eat grains, but I think you could have a set up where chickens do eat whatever the humans don't and mostly live on forage. The less the humans would have to feed them directly, the more chickens would be worthwhile for eggs and meat. Isn't that why pigs and sheep are kept? To turn calories humans don't use into calories we can, whether by eating things we don't or eating the left over scraps from what we do eat.

I might be mistaking something here though and I'd be happy to hear from someone with more insight.

Someone said that chickens compete nutritionally with humans. I understand the phrase "compete nutritionally" to mean that they require nearly the same types of food humans do rather than eating foods that humans don't or can't use.

I think "compete nutritionally" is a bit of a [citation needed]. From my deep research into chicken farming (read: my parents keep about half a dozen), chickens are indeed quite happy to eat anything humans do, but they really can get a decent amount of their calories from forage and kitchen scraps. Chickens will eat anything, up to and including baby birds, their own eggs, all of the landscaping, and random pieces of styrofoam they find on the ground no matter how much you try to take it away from them. Particular favorites include the remnants of corn cobs eaten for dinner and wormy strawberries. So yes, they do eat things humans typically wouldn't.

Some backyard chicken keepers with enough space do graze their chickens in lieu of buying feed, although it does seem they're less efficient in terms of calories in/calories produced than other options. Some factors that make them even less practical: while they theoretically could produce 300 eggs a year, that's the result of relatively recent breeding programs. Your more "heritage" chicken breeds (and certainly, I imagine, the wild originators) are probably laying 200 or fewer eggs a year. Egg production is also tied to sunlight hours; my parents' chickens will only lay year-round if there's a light on in their coop, otherwise the days are apparently too short to trigger it. (this is around 43N in terms of latitude--Michigan, USA) Finally, depending on breed, chickens only hit that max production for a couple of years before their production drops off significantly. (and, unfortunately, the ideal time to eat them for meat coincides with peak egg production. You certainly can eat older chickens, but they aren't as good)

That all being said, chickens require much less space than sheep, cows, etc. and can be raised even in tight quarters in cities if you need to. They also are a consistent source of protein compared with slaughtering meat animals--no need to worry about preserving meat or slaughtering at a particular time of year, as eggs are produced at regular intervals throughout the non-winter months. You also would get some actual meat, as you've got to dispose of extra roosters anyway--you only need about one per half-dozen hens, or less depending on the breed, and if you have too many they'll just fight (and injure the hens). And finally, unlike dairy animals, you don't have to worry about pregnancy! Hens lay unfertilized eggs as freely as fertilized ones.

[Raphael]

Thank you, that's very informative, alynnidalar! (And mostly like I suspected.)