Comment Re:Not humane? (Score 1) 47
I'm not sure that's actually true. What would have to happen is that the production of chickens and eggs would have to become more distributed, and you would need more human labor. There's lots of places where the chickens can get free food, but they do need to range for that, so you're going to have to spend a lot more time and effort managing your chickens.
On the other hand, integrating chickens into more agricultural scenarios has the potential to improve them in a variety of ways. Chickens can be mixed in with most plants once they reach a certain size that makes them less appealing than the pests that they attract, and the weeds growing up around them. The chickens help with both of these problems. If we move to a more integrated food production model in which we do sensible things like compost our shit and put it back into the fields once it's become soil again, we'll want to move away from tilth and towards guilds anyway. Robotics is advancing on fruit-picking, and in the mean time, we have a lot of labor lying around to handle the substantial increase in labor currently demanded by such a change. We only don't do this now to maximize profits. We could pay people enough to pick vegetables, but then some of the vegetables which currently produce the most profit would fall by the wayside, and we can't disturb the status quo now, can we?