Seriously, on the moral issue, yes, the debate could go in several different directions. Here in California we have so much agriculture and there is a big “buy local” movement. But then there is the fact that we also have a major water shortage, so the debate here has begun as to whether it is better to actually buy the avocados that come from NZ. Good avocados, by the way! It is worse if you look at it through the lens of environmental affects of food transportation. But through the lens of a water shortage, maybe California shouldn’t be producing quite so much at this time. It would be great if there was an iPhone app that could be used at the grocery store to calculate these factors and definitively state the best option. I’m sure this is in the works!

Steve, it’s about what the chickens eat and how they’re processed. If you’re raising your own they’re likely to eat a lot of your food scraps as well as bought food, and the marginal transport cost will probably go down. It’s hard to tell, because right now urban chicken keepers tend to be greenie type who already have low footprints (and often the food scraps come from the vege garden where the manure goes, making for a very short transport loop). Someone driving out of Auckland to a rural supplier to buy organic chicken food is right at the other end of the spectrum and even analysing the result is tricky, let alone predicting it.

There’s also hassles with allocating emissions – a simple example is us dumpster diving for compost. Do we say that that is a zero-emission acquisition because it’s a waste product for the shop, we use bikes to get it and it would otherwise be trucked away to landfill; or do we count our compost pro-rata into the total emissions of the shop? The same thing applies to chickens fed on food scraps – are those scraps zero-valued, positive or negative?

I don’t see how raising chickens yourself, instead of purchasing them helps. In fact it is worse for climate change because it probably takes longer to produce the same ammount of food as purchasing chickens from a chicken farmer/supermarket.

I eat meat. Like you, I don’t plan to stop. But I do eat less and what I do eat tends more and more often to not be red meat. Anyone with even a tiny patch of ground could raise a couple of chooks / month for the dinner table. Buying fertilised eggs and letting them hatch is all that is required. Not as efficient as factory poultry, but that product is being adulterated with all manner of injections to the point where I don’t want to buy it at any price.

I don’t have to.

I won’t be raising sheep or pigs or cattle in town, but a half-dozen hens for eggs and the odd roast is certainly do-able.

In the years ahead, I suspect more people will, once they get over killing to eat. Even a n00b can take the head off a chicken and have it cleaned and dressed in well under an hour.

Maybe I should start a consultancy.