Backyard chickens are awesome. Turn garbage into food and compost. My moms flowerbeds and garden have never looked better. Plus they lay so many more eggs than anybody could eat, so every time I stop home I can grab a dozen+ Fresh, better than grocery store eggs. Also a good project for anybody with kids, teaches responsibility and a useful skill.
We kept chickens (for the eggs) for several years. They were awesome. We sold (or maybe gave) them to another backyard adventurer when we needed to put in new grass (they eat/scratch up fresh seeds). I would do it again in a heartbeat. They're not free to raise, but nothing makes you feel worse than throwing food scraps away after having chickens who would happily eat them. wow... now that I think about it - I kinda miss them more than I remembered.
Africa has a population of 1.1 billion. If every 3rd African owned 30 chickens then there would be over 10 billion chickens in Africa. At a feed conversion ration of 2:1 you are looking at 20billion LB of feed/biomass. To get to his $1000 target every African would need to 1000/5= 200 chickens per year or more simply at a assumed unit weight of 5lb each a total of 1000lb of chicken a year. Now assume 366million people are doing this at our 2:1 conversion ratio so 366B people1000lb/year2lb feed/per lb chicken and were up to 732Billion LB of feed/biomass. Lets take a real rough estimate of how much food Africa might consume if everyone only ate rice. Rice is 130 Calories per 100g. Lets assume a daily value of 2600 calories per person. 2600/130100= 2kg per person per day. Converting back to standard 2kg2.54lb/kg=5Lb a day. At 1.1billion people X365 days thats 2007 Billion LB. So very roughly speaking you would need 732B/2007B = .36 X100= 36% more food produced in africa to cover this. Now this isn't quite right because those chickens are likely all being consumed local so your average person would now supplement his or her diet with chicken so each 1lb of chicken feed actually reduces the need for human feed by .5lb. so the net increase is actually (732-7320.5) so back to 366b. 366B/2007B=.18 100=18% more food/biomass. At first pass 18% additional required to do this feed/biomass is not hugely unreasonable but has some problematic assumptions. 1st its assumed that all chicken food is free. If you factor in the cost of feed at say 50c/lb you need to double the volume to produce the same amount of profit and a 36% more feed/biomass. If people are living in shanty houses where are they going to keep 40 chickens? Reasonably speaking you need at least 40 sq ft of cages at a commercial farm operation scale and 120 at a backyard scale. Then there is also the assumption that the price of chicken is fixed. If one were to increase chicken production 6X is it really reasonable to assume prices stay constant at 1$/lb? What about initial investment in cages and fencing? How much will that cost? How about predators? How about diseases?That many chickens will spread disease like crazy. Overall though I would say its a good idea at 5-10 chickens , just not one that will necessarily scale all that well. Encouraging some chicken ownership works well up until you hit the point that your scraps and available local biomass exceeds what the chickens eat daily. Once you have to supplement a large part of the feed the necessary scale becomes too large to work well.Suppose a new farmer starts with five hens. One of her neighbors owns a rooster to fertilize the hens’ eggs. After three months, she can have a flock of 40 chicks. Eventually, with a sale price of $5 per chicken—which is typical in West Africa—she can earn more than $1,000 a year, versus the extreme-poverty line of about $700 a year.
One of the things that makes this a bit off is that rice is terrible on the environment and takes a significant amount of water. With GMO grains, that can be worked on, but the other thing is that Rice alone cannot feed a population. You need a protein to go with it, beans, cheese, eggs, meat etc. The other issue to consider is that we make more than enough food, but the problem becomes that of logistics. Then you have the issues of food aid harming local farms Otherwise you math checks out. Now, how do we stop the wars, the border disputes, stamp down on the tribal rivalries, fix the infrastructure issues, roll out electricity, educate the local farmers, build irrigation.... and so on and so on.
I needed a staple grain to use as a standard unit of measurement. Rice is abundant, easy to transport and is common everywhere so its a good standard measurement unit. Now, how do we stop the wars, the border disputes, stamp down on the tribal rivalries, fix the infrastructure issues, roll out electricity, educate the local farmers, build irrigation.... and so on and so on.
I dont think any government is actually interested in doing this for real. Unstable Africa that can be used as a toxic waste dump, and stripped of natural resources is much more desirable for the ruling elite.
I very much like Heifer International. The weirdest wedding present I received was a donation in my name to Heifer. I had never heard of them, so I checked out their website, and it turns out they're pretty cool. Among other things, they help poor farmers buy livestock in the developing world for just the reasons Gates lists. For the last couple years since I've been married, I've bought a goat for someone each year. I suppose I like the immediacy of it, because instead of asking for $10, $50, $100, or $1000, they ask for chickens, goats, cows, etc. Pretty nice to know exactly what your money is paying for (even if it turns out to not be that simple if you were to follow each dollar, which I imagine is the case).
Gates is my kind of billionaire. He doesn't seem to blindly throw money at problems but rather, he looks for solutions and then executes them. Good stuff.
If Steve Jobs had never existed this beautiful story wouldn't either. Let it not be said that Steve Jobs did nothing good for the world.