Bill Gates is a blogger, did you know that? His blog is called Gates Notes and generally covers areas of interest not only to Bill but also to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which means there’s more coverage of malaria than Microsoft. His latest post that a reader pointed out to me today is about raising chickens, which Bill says he’d do if he was a poor woman in Africa.
I’ll wait while you follow the link to read the post, just don’t forget to come back. And while you are there be sure to watch the video…
For those who don’t bother to read the post, BillG thinks chickens are both a good source of protein and a good business for folks in the Third World. It’s easy to get started, chickens are manageable, there’s plenty of demand for both eggs and meat and — best of all — they eat bugs! No chicken feed even required.
Bill hints strongly that we’ll be seeing a lot of chicken action coming from his foundation, too.
All this is pretty darned impressive and I commend Bill for his interest in feeding the world. But just in case he missed something, just in case in all his hanging around with chicken farmers Bill missed some point or other, I turned to an old friend of mine who happens to be a chicken farmer.
I think of this career move as a life of agrarian penance after a career in high tech, but maybe that’s just me.
Bob: Did you see this essay from Bill Gates? I thought it was great.
Chicken farmer: Bill Gates is an idiot.
Bob: Tell me more. I know nothing about chickens. How is Bill wrong? Or is this just a general comment about Bill (which I can understand). I would have been more inclined to say “Bill Gates doesn’t smell good,” but he could be an idiot, too, I suppose.
Editorial comment: I haven’t smelled BillG in years, though he used to be pretty ripe.
Chicken farmer: Everything always comes down to immunizations with Bill Gates. Chicken is just his latest tool to sell the idea of immunizing kids, it even crept into the video. Imagine a family so poor that they have only 100 chickens, and then the woman is going to sell one and use the money to get her child an injection. That’s the last thing I would spend the money on if my children were starving.
Chickens are dirty, messy, hard to confine, need to be fed in order to be healthy, carry diseases, and require water to live and grow. I’m not sure how much water these families have for their own needs. And not every woman wants to raise chickens.
By dumping free chickens, which are then required to be immunized according to Heifer.org’s rules, the Gates group is once again disrupting the natural market that would have evolved if we just got the heck out of the way. How long will these regions require our charity? When will people recognize that the charity is what’s holding them back? Just my opinion.
I’ve been raising chickens for 5 years and it is not easy, and I haven’t been able to make it sustainable – of course I couldn’t force my children into being my helpers either – they’re already too educated for that. They helped for a while, and then begged me to set them free.
I don’t vaccinate my hens and don’t order them as chicks with vaccines. I’ve never tested for viruses nor have I had any unusual deaths in my flocks – and I was up to 800 hens at one point.
Vaccines are expensive, but may be necessary when birds are closely confined, but I’m not sure of this. By the way heifer.org has a zero grazing policy, meaning that the recipients have to buy feed. It is not easy to keep a hen healthy on grazing alone, or on food scraps alone. If you want the birds to grow for meat you have to fatten them up somehow, and I’m wondering where that feed will come from.
Here’s an interesting piece on vaccinations.
Sending vaccinated birds into a region where other fowl are unvaccinated will wipe out the local birds. Great way to create dependency on vaccines, everything unvaccinated dies. Very similar to the oral polio fiasco in India and all over the world, where children in families with the kids getting vaccinated developed paralysis. Of course it wasn’t the wild polio virus, so the World Health Organization could claim that wild polio was eradicated.
I’m guessing that Bill’s motives are good, and I shouldn’t criticize without proposing something better, that’s not fair. I’m just to the point of believing that a lot of these organizations like heifer exist to spread conventional agriculture around the world. Seems like that intervention creates more dependency.
Back to you, Bill.
To say nothing of the fact that most vaccines are pretty poisonous cocktails containing, amongst other things, mercury and aluminium which are going to be in any chicken product and therefore ingested by humans…..
Go away,
curiously, your drinking water also has mercury and aluminum… copper, lead or antimony from solder, chlorination byproducts similar to chloroform, calcium and magnesium, and of course fish pee in it. don’t drink the water, either.
Your link to an interesting article on vaccinations doesn’t work. It tries to open http://This%20chicken%20vaccine%20makes%20its%20virus%20more%20dangerous.
Is this supposed to be https://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous/ ?
Yes, that’s the link. It worked for me. I’ll try to fix it.
Robert, I enjoy your writing and your blog. I read your book, good stuff. Some people may say a bit too negative on IBM, but I think you are fair.
However, this time you have gone out of your league. I have smelled Bill and Melinda, they are wonderful people who have saved millions of lives. Heifer has been doing this for 70 years, helping over 25 million families in need, changing their families and future generations.
From your article, it sounds like you haven’t spent too much time in farms or in the third World.Heifer and the Gates are making a meaningful positive difference in the World. It seems it would be better to stick to what you are good at, technology reporting.
And if you feel compelled to help the World, use your audience to promote Heifer, or Population Action, or Kiva. Not to criticize those who are helping with an article based on very limited research.
I look forward to continue reading the demise of IBM on your blog.
(Hey, you could apply for a job at IBM and pull a Dan Lyons)
@Gerado Dada
I know nothing about chicken and have no idea who’s right, but all you’ve done is to say you wish he wouldn’t criticize this, without offering any rebuttal at all. Do you have specific criticisms?
> When will people recognize that the charity is what’s holding them back? Just my opinion.
I’d wager this person has not spent much time traveling the world and learning about its problems.
During my 2 year trip around the world ( including 6 months in India, Nepal, Indonesia and Malaysia ) one thing I discovered was how complex charity can be. It’s better to donate money than to show up and help build a house or do work.. they have plenty of cheap labour who would love to develop skills. But don’t just give money.. it’ll end up in the wrong pockets; it is important to manage your donations. BillG was in the headlines when I was in Delhi for going out without a local police escort; he was inspecting one of the charities he donates to. Kudos to him. Don’t assume that the locals are interested in helping each other; they are all competing for survival. Why do you think the caste system existed? Don’t be too efficient. The middlemen you cut out may be needed infrastructure for when the charity ends. Try to understand the societal background for the corruption you come across and lead by good example – it won’t be fixed overnight. Mother Teresa might not be a saint – criticism from a disenchanted volunteer was a huge shock to me. I’m still not sure what to think.
Have you read Christopher Hitchens on the subject?
I have read “Don’t Pray For Rain, The Atheist’s Guide to Raising Chickens in the Third World”. Stupendous read.
During my 2 year trip around the world ( including many months in India, and Nepal, Indonesia and Malaysia ) one thing I discovered was how complex charity can be. For example: It’s better to donate money than to show up and help build a house or do work.. they have plenty of cheap labour who would love to develop skills. But don’t just give money.. it’ll end up in the wrong pockets; it is important to manage your donations. BillG was in the headlines when I was in Delhi for going out without a local police escort; he was surprising one of the charities he donates to. Kudos to him. Don’t assume that the locals are interested in helping each other; they are all competing for survival. Don’t be too efficient. The middlemen you cut out may be needed infrastructure for when the charity ends. Try to understand the societal background for the corruption you come across and lead by good example – it won’t be fixed overnight.
One of the lowest points in this blog, Bob. This Chicken Farmer, knows nothing about familiar agriculture. All his business is about confinement, tons of maize and soy and antibiotics.
In agreement with the above: Bob, your chicken farmer knows next to nothing about small-scale chicken keeping and also seems to have that strange American “All Vaccines Are The Work Of The Devil” mental block.
I grew up on a sheep farm in NZ where, like most of our neighbours, we kept a dozen or so chickens. We kept them as a source of fresh eggs though we’d also eat them when they were past egg-laying age: this meant that roast chicken was a fairly rare treat. Keeping hens this way was not a messy operation. There was a hut with straw-filled laying boxes and perching rails where the hens roosted. This was connected to a fairly large netted run (20 feet or so square and 8 feet high), so even when the hens were shut in they had plenty space to scratch around. Every so often the shed needed shovelling out, but I don’t remember any messy build-up in the run. In any case the hens were let out for most of the day so they could forage, dust-bath, and generally scratch around the farmyard and veggie garden. We also fed them kitchen scraps and a small amount of wheat grain, which they loved.
In summary, once the shed and run were set up (essential if you live where the local felines and canids like a tasty chicken dinner) the cost of keeping a small flock is low provided that your main aim is to get eggs rather than meat. If you are a small mixed third world farmer you probably grow your own grain, so the grain used as supplementary chicken feed would be a small price to pay for a regular supply of fresh eggs.
Actually my career began in 1973 at Triway High School in Wooster, Ohio, where I taught Vocational Agriculture. This was a farming community and if I didn’t know my stuff I would have been run out of town. I’m not at all disputing your position on raising a dozen chickens but that’s not the point made by either BillG OR the chicken farmer. A dozen chickens isn’t a business and BillG proposes this as a business. The chicken farmer has 800 laying hens. The problems of 800 hens versus 12 make your argument less than insightful.
Gates wants to change the game from, “people can keep a tiny number of chickens for free, so it’s all profit” to “people can maybe make cash profits from cash outlays and good management.” He doesn’t seem to understand just how few chickens can be kept before chicken feed becomes a major expense.
Nutrition is going to be bottleneck #1. When chickens are left to find their own feed, or are supplemented haphazardly with, say, grain and calcium, as was standard in the US in 1900, they grow slowly and lay few eggs. Taking the US in 1900 as an example, you’d expect about 80 eggs per hen per year. A well-fed flock in 1900 would lay twice as many eggs, and a modern one (better breeds, better nutrition) will lay around 300. But the “modern breeds” issue doesn’t matter until you have modern nutrition, which means spending cash on chicken feed.
Old American books on chicken farming, particularly the 1909 book “The Dollar Hen” by Milo Hastings, compare and contrast different methods of chicken farming, from the full-time chicken farmer, through the ordinary farm flock, which had maybe 50 hens and was given attention and investment as an important sideline, to the casual farm flock which had no investment or attention worth mentioning. Each has its sweet spot, and deviating too far from that leads to losses.
I don’t know anything about chicken diseases in Africa, but I wonder if inoculations are more important than parasite control.
In any event, the way to introduce new techniques properly is through the experiment-station system, where people on salary who won’t starve if the effort fails try out the latest techniques, and nearby folks can come take a look and see if it works well enough to copy. Usually it doesn’t — not without serious adjustments for local conditions.
Robert
I downloaded Dollar Hen — pretty fascinating!
Thank you for yet another wonderful article. I criticize the IBM ones because I draw a different conclusion, not because I think you are unfair (fair, good articles).
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Really, BillG is trying to set up moderate sized businesses? wow. I thought the scale was a decimal place or two smaller. At the overall investment, if it’s 500 or so chickens per business, he isn’t setting up that many. Furthermore, all your points seem if anything understated. If it’s Ma and Pa and kids and 20 chickens, then infrastructure is one scale, if it is 10 times that, then all the infrastructure is 10 times (ok, a hundred times) more of a problem. Sheesh, the resources it’s going to pull from other activities in the area is going to be a problem. Luckily if it is at that scale it will merely fail fast most places and succeed in 3 or 4 where it might make some sense.
As a country doctor, I have known a few people that raise a few chickens as a hobby. It is a supplement to food and income and a neglible one. I’ve met an industrial chicken farmer. It is not easy. It is not cheep (har har). BUT, geography is going to matter on this, and rural East versus San Mateo desert is all the difference in the world, apparently.
Keep an eye on this one, it shows the complexity of charity. And thanks also to the best comments section anywhere.
If Bill gives everyone chickens and those chicken have more chickens, the value of chickens will go from 5 bucks to ‘You can’t give them away’. So anyone now who has chickens will have a worthless commodity. Great Move!
I don’t remember Bill giving away the source code to Windows & Office for everyone to be able to sell their own version…
uh, that’s the idea, free protein. mostly renewable, as long as you leave a couple eggs in the nest box every week to hatch. and it’s said Africa has no shortage of disagreeable bugs that look like steak to a chicken.
The article was talking about selling your surplus chickens at 5 bucks a piece to buy other kinds of food and necessities. It seemed pretty clear to me it wasn’t just about eating chickens for the rest of your life. Bill Gates sees it as the perfect business to get into to generate a revenue as well as providing food for the family.
So back to my original statement, getting into the chicken business seems like a bird brained idea if everyone else is in the chicken business. Now if you want to get into the bird feed business or the hen house business or even the chicken immunization business you might have a chance for a short while until this whole chicken bubble bursts because some billionaire with good intentions flooded the market with free chickens. I stand by my original statement.
Really? MS is giving away Windows 10. I don’t want it and i wont install it. MS Office is history except for the corp world. Nice business model…
I’d say your chicken farmer sounds a little curmudgeonly. While he probably has some good points he lambasts Gates for trying to help. I can’t imagine that there aren’t some very smart people involved who have taken a look at both sides and decided that giving the chickens is better than not. I applaud Gates for trying to make up for his years of greed. Wish there were more b(m)illionaires who were doing the same.
So you’re anti-vax now Bob? Talk about jumping the shark.
Capitalize that VAX, it is a registered trademark, and keep doing weekly backups.
I am not anti-vaccination. My three kids have had all their shots. The chicken farmer is talking about vaccinating CHICKENS, not people. Yes, there’s a point where he says if his kids were starving he’d spend money on food before vaccines but IF YOUR KIDS WERE STARVING wouldn’t you do the same?
I think he means that if their kids were starving it would be better to spend money on people food instead of chicken vaccines.
Once again, ideas and considerations I wouldn’t have read anywhere else. Thanks for the column and the comments.
The farmer’s response went way down the anti-vax hole. Way down. Completely lost my interest at that point.
I can tell you raising a dozen chicken is totally different from industrially farming thousands. As a lad my family had a dozen chickens or so to get fresh eggs and some meat. We usually allowed one or two hens to raise chicks to replenish lost hens and to eat the rest. There were no vaccinations for poultry back then, NONE. They were free to roam during the day consuming insects and greens, and we gave them kitchen scraps and residual grain from the cows.
A few years later I experienced industrial chicken farming with some distant relatives, and I can tell you it has NOTHING in common with the subsistence variety.
Regarding the comments relating to the collapse of chicken prices in Africa, I think it is premature and it does nothing to address the fact that a poor family can eat the eggs and the chicken regardless of any market value. Protein IS protein.
Regarding the mercury comments in vaccines, David please READ before you say anything else. You could probably drink litters of vaccines without any ill effects from the mercury they contain (most contain no mercury). You get more mercury from eating fish than from vaccines. Vaccines are one of the great triumphs of humanity, and for every death or crippling that a vaccine produce, millions of lives have been saved.
Methinks you are confusing vaccines with antibiotics. The use of the latter is really out of control and highly damaging. My complaint is that BillG is a tad simplistic.
Ok, I read your friends comments and gave him the benefit of the doubt until I got to “oral polio fiasco in India”. Just google that and you will see a who’s who of crackpot anti-science lunatics.
I’m disappointed Bob.
If they are the anti-science lunatics, why are you the one resorting to name-calling and shaming tactics to argue against them? Shouldn’t you be using science? You’re no better than you believe they are, perhaps worse.
I work at Embrapa – Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. We are a partner in a governamental program called “Brazil Without Misery”. Chickens plays a fundamental job in the program.
In the link a “Camp Day”, with distributions of chicks and coaching for families in the program:
https://www.embrapa.br/en/busca-de-noticias/-/noticia/3415016/dia-de-campo-sobre-criacao-de-galinha-reune-600-agricultores-na-paraiba
This post is a rare low point for you Bob.
> Gates group is once again disrupting the natural market that would
> have evolved if we just got the heck out of the way. How long will
> these regions require our charity? When will people recognize that
> the charity is what’s holding them back?
What the crap kind of libertarian Ayn Rand bullshit is this? Is this your politics also? This is a pretty horrible statement and makes it impossible to take anything else this person has to say seriously.
Wait, did your chicken guy just say that Polio vaccines are responsible for paralysing children? Mate, I’ve been following you for many many years, but this is just ridiculous.
This lost it for me too… but I think I know where’s he’s coming from and in response I would point him to a particularly good Penn and Teller bullsh*t episode on Anti-Vaxxers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG3W1O-t6sc
The full video is worth watching too if you can find it. Language Warning
They hit the target on this topic.
How ignorant, completely.
When my mother was three years old, she lost her mother to influenza. We’re big on vaccines in my family.
A good idea except that in the West African Countries where chicken imports are allowed, a bird that size imported from Brazil or the USA will cost no more than USD 3.00 as against the $5 in the video. The local poultry farmers are unable to compete against the imports from the EU/US/Brazil. The last time I checked, Nigeria still doesn’t allow chicken imports but they have the muscle to (to put it PC) ignore the US. Feeble nations like Ghana, my own, cannot.
These countries in Africa have ridiculously high tax rates, so no one can earn returns on investment. Somehow this made it into Alan Alda’s dialogue on The West Wing.
Best thing Bill Gates could do is pick a country and say lower your tax rates, I will cover any losses you incur.
Then move on to the next country.
So the richest man and the world, who is also a philanthropist with a heart of gold, and who deserves the Nobel Peace prize like no other, is an idiot. And your friend the chicken farmer – he’s just a chicken farmer Bob. And an anti vaccine conspiracy theorist.
Wait a minute. Bill Gates is a better person BECAUSE HE’S RICH? Does that make Larry Ellison a good person, too? Bill’s a philanthropist, that’s true, but if you read my book Accidental Empires you’ll learn that hasn’t always been the case. In fact there is some reason to believe my writing about Bill’s LACK OF CHARITY may have helped prod him down his current path. The chicken farmer’s point is that Bill Gates has the power to disrupt Third World economies and ecosystems INADVERTENTLY. Yes, Bill means well (the chicken farmer admits that) but is he headed in the right direction with this?
Bill Gates lack of charity stopped when he met Melinda. God keep Melinda! :-0
Ask another chicken farmer.
I doubt very much that Bill Gates knows much about raising chickens. However, as one of the richest men in the world, he has the means and the desire to hire people who definitely do know about not only raising chickens but also doing so in places other than overly-wealthy Marin county (or whereever mister 5-years-a-farmer lives.)
And the whole anti-vax nonsense, well, just shut up, you privileged, entitled moron. I hope you’re old enough to have had chicken pox and that you get shingles over and over again.
Personally, I just wish there was a vaccine to prevent people from ignoring and not finishing a kickstarter project.
Roger,
You are rude. Please go somewhere else with your claptrap.
Cheers,
John
He expressed it rudely, but aside from the rude comments, he’s right.
I was raised on a 40-acre farm that had milk cows and chickens. We named the cows, but not the chickens. Most of the land was used to grow alfalfa for the cows. When we got a batch of chicks from the feed store, we fed them water and chicken mash. We sold most of the eggs (in crates of several hundred eggs or so) to retirement homes and the like.
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Going from a live chicken to a roasted chicken was not an easy task. First, you had to chop their head off and let the blood drain out. The worst part was dipping the chicken in hot water to loosen the feathers. Ever hear of chicken pluckers? Oh, what a horrible job.
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No, we did not vaccinate our chickens. We kept them in hen houses surrounded by a fenced yard. The main problem was keeping an occasional weasel out of the hen house.
My grandmother, who was Arkansas Cherokee, would wring their necks. As a five year-old I was very impressed.
Bob,
The last time we got a new batch of chicks at the feed store, one was sickly looking. So the feed store owner grabbed that chick by the head and spun it around. So long chick, no more miseries. I wouldn’t try that with a full grown chicken myself.
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I might mention that all the help for the chicken operation was unpaid labor.
Lmao! Double that! Oh Id like to meet your grandma.
Here’s a response from the chicken farmer:
My flock is too small for me to make it work, and the models proposed by Michael Pollen and Joel Salatin have been tested and have failed in San Mateo County. The backing has been from people like me and from others who have deeper pockets than me. I’ve watched young, industrious young people burn out using Joel’s pastured poultry models, and for eggs the same. Joel Salatin, who is promoted by Heifer.org, has free labor – interns – because he was turned into a farming celebrity by Michael Pollen. I contributed by having him at my home to speak before my friends and the farming community of San Mateo, which is tiny and can’t seem to grow larger for another reason – the fact that all good land gets bought up by open space organizations to be “saved” from development. Africa has the same problems – the land with water goes into parks and preserves and the locals lose access. New article for you.
So, the truth about chickens is that everything outside likes to eat them, from coyotes to bobcats, hawks and skunks, raccoons and domestic dogs. They get stressed out and sicker when they are on pasture, and the idea of moving their home to keep them grazing on new ground is close to cruel punishment. They become disoriented and drop their egg production each time their home moves. Electric fencing is the best invention for the inventor – and it sucks. The wind knocks it down, the chickens fly over it, the electrical charge is too low, and it doesn’t stop predators. It is expensive crap.
Chickens in buildings live healthier lives and if you can let them out to dust themselves, that is great. They will demolish a pasture so quickly and deposit so much manure – when the flock is numbered – that to pretend that they have access to grass is misleading to the public.
For that reason, I am getting out of the egg business. My eggs sell for close to $13 a dozen in a local store, and that doesn’t cover my costs. I pay my workers $15 per hour, and that doesn’t allow them to live in San Mateo County with very much comfort.
As an agricultural economist, I would say that the industrial model is the safest food for the consumer, the best economic model for the producer, and frankly it works. Without creating efficiencies and economies of scale, we instead create a new class of subsistence farmers who will trap their children in this small scale model of production. Heifer.org makes it sound sexy and easy. It is the furthest thing from sexy and easy that you could imagine. The fact that cages have been enlarged now due to societal pressures is a good thing, especially for the large cage system producers and early adopters who were funding the Humane Society to promote these ideas.
The consumer has no idea what is going on, it is an interesting concept for a book or documentary, but has to be presented without being depressing. I’ve lived this for a long time now and my reactions to people like Joel Salatin and Michael Pollen have changed quite a bit. They are media hounds who don’t understand how they are misleading young potential farmers and how they are hurting family farms that were producing using conventional systems.
I normally enjoy your articles Bob, but this reads like pseudo science rubbish and is overly dismissive of the no doubt considerable research that the foundation has put into this program
He may be wrong, but I find that logic foolish. Bill Gates can’t be wrong because he is rich?
Fair call, and don’t know much about chickens. However I maintain that the column sends out red flags left and right. It starts off with “Bill is an idiot” and rambles with an apparent anti vaccination agenda. Didn’t enjoy it, unlike other columns, that’s all.
I m the founder and CEO African Chicken a social impact company working with women in Tanzania,
I m currently in Seattle attending Fledge 7 cohort held at Seattle Impact Hub, I was opportune to meet the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation team two times and the last meeting was yesterday 9th June/2016 from 10-11am,
This meeting was to discuss possibility of our company to work with Gates to introduce chicken project in Tanzania but we were surprised when they told us they want to import a new breed that has been developed in India to do trials in Tanzania and this breed cant lay fertile eggs, this means the rural farmers will have buy chicks from (LARGE CORPORATION) continuous which they have parent flock and they said if the local chickens meet these chickens results will be that the chicken that will be hatched from this cross egg will be very small or unusual ,so we were so disappointed this and we don’t understand why our country?
We need support to stop this madness.
for more details contact me on ceo@africanchickenltd.com
We proposed to them that our company is working with very poor rural communities;
1. We partner with women in rural communities
2. We train each women to raise chickens
3. We give each women 100 baby chicks + all feed they need
4. Once a week we check up on chickens providing all veterinary needs all for free
5. After four months African Chicken BUYS back 90% less cost of chickens leaves 10% for farmer to feed her family
This is what African chicken is doing and proven in practise.
THE GATES FOUNDATION REFUSED THIS MODEL
For more information visit FLEDGE.CO
I’d love to hear how vaccinating the chickens, a process that prevents disease transmission, will decimate the local bird population.
Marek’s disease virus vaccine. Google it for a link.
See Bob’s link in the original article in the sentence “Here’s an interesting piece on vaccinations.”
I don’t know nuttin’ ’bout chick’ns. I suspect Bill Gates knows about as much as I do about rasin’ chick’ns. Please go back to talking about IBM. I know about IBM. I knowe that as a company that ‘cares’ about it’s employees, it sucks but their mainframe products still rule the roost (did you catch the chick’n reference there?).
As much as Bill G might have gained some charity and compassion from his wife, I rather doubt he’s changed his character. He’s looking out for the foundation. He works with big corporations. He likes good press. I’d be cautious about lauding him and his work too much. Scratch deeper than the surface because there’s sure to be something other than the sunny surface.
I’m with Bob on this one. He knows his chickens..
I say this as the grandson of a N’th generation farmer (probably since the Bronze Age settlements of the British Isles) who used to have to feed my grandmother chickens as a kid. Not sure about the Kiwi poster and his self sufficient chickens. Sounds kind of bogan to me. Must have been before Rogernomics. If you want your hens to lay or not taste like a scrawny pigeon then you have to feed them.
Plus in all the years I’ve known Medina I dont think I’ve ever seen a single chicken coop. And I cant imagine Mary Gates ever keeping chickens either.
So BillG is full of cowpats. As usual.
Never forget BillG is just your average tax cheat who has engaged in sharp / illegal business practices since the Traf-O-Data days. So not the sort of person who could be trusted to look after farm animals let alone express an opinion of them.
What is it with Americans that you feel the need to ‘fix’ the world? From religious missionaries to current foreign policy all you have done is mess up the rest of the world. Get out of all the countries you have currently invaded and they would do a lot better! It’s been fed to you, the US public, as something you are doing to help the rest of the world because ‘we know best’ when actually most of it was running OK thanks. Its actually a cover up by your government for their imperialistic policies that have led to the current complete global mess. Look at Iraq, Syria, Chile etc etc…
Oh and by the way if you are still buying the ‘vaccinations are all good’ bullshit that Big Pharma is foisting on you then you need to wake up! And I thought this column was read by aware free thinking people…?
It’s easy to be isolationist. That’s what we did before WWI and again before WWII. But after being dragged into both wars at the last minute, we decided it’s better to prevent world wars by participating with vigilance in advance rather than isolating ourselves, until we come under attack again.
Are you serious?! I’m assuming you’re joking as no intelligent person could really swallow that sort of nonsense, or could they? The US (along with UK, the 2 biggest arms sellers) are in the business of creating wars. They don’t need to be ‘dragged into them’ because they start them to sell arms and that’s what is beginning to bite them back…the latest atrocity in Orlando being part of the result….
History is well known: “…the world war is generally said to have begun on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom. ” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
Narcissism on a national scale. Now say what ought to be done about it.
Seems like there are plenty of chicken farmers doing just fine with allowing their chickens out to pasture during the day.
https://www.inglewoodfarm.com/eggs
https://www.cornucopia.org/organic-egg-scorecard/
These chicken farmers do not use antibiotics, but they may still use immunizations.
https://www.perdue.com/perdue-way/no-antibiotics/
https://www.gerbers.com
I believe BillG means well, but I suspect he hasn’t lost much of his arrogance. I’m not sure you could ever teach him about unintended consequences. I don’t know enough about chickens to judge this post or its comment thread, but here’s one example of his Foundation apparently doing more harm than good.
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From the Tampa Bay Times:
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“A seven-year effort to put better teachers in Hillsborough County schools is costing the system millions of dollars more than officials projected. And the district’s partner in the project, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is spending $20 million less than expected.”
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https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/hillsborough-schools-shouldering-millions-more-than-expected-in/2246528
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tl;dr – His “Empowering Effective Teachers” program, begun in the Tampa Schools in 2009, cost too much to run, created another level of bureaucracy, and ultimately had little or no positive effect.
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Hillsborough County has recently phased it out altogether.
Hey Bob,
Why not cover election fraud in the democratic primaries?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWOXH3AP_hQ&feature=youtu.be
The chicken farmer said: “Seems like that intervention creates more dependency.” He’s right, it does, but that’s the way civilization works. Most people in civilized countries develop a marketable skill that provides income allowing them to purchase the marketable skills of others. No one has to participate, but most choose to, after they see the standard of living possible with this interdependence.
No that’s not civilization mate, that’s big business taking over markets and not giving a damn to the consequences. You have an incredibly naive view of the world Ronc…
Christopher Richardson made a movie called “Where’s My Goat” about this a few years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSYPowFlm7c
It was investigating the charities that “sell” goats as gifts, which they say will be given to poor families in Africa. Richardson went to Zambia (IIRC) to see if it happens, and if so, what is the result.
Bottom line: Government, industry, etc., hates the idea. The people that get the goats love it.
Raising a few chickens is not hard at all. I hate anything to do with garden but I easily raised a couple of chickens before I got rid of them because of the flies. Chickens alone won’t eliminate poverty from Africa but can give some protein to those poor kids. Gates claims some women may raise upto 200 chickens a year! Not a crazy idea, you need to be able to manage about 20 hens to do that. You can sell their chickens in two months. Not all sub-saharan Africa is desert with no water as seen in Charity commercials!
I think your friend comes from the Anti-Vaccine- hence whoever does Vaccine is an ill intent A-hole dogma- camp.
Appropriate you would post about this as Donald Trump is running.
When Ross Perot was running, do people remember his half hour ads?
He had one where he put up a chart of employment in chicken industry in Arkansas.
“The people who do this work are good people, but if Bill Clinton gets elected, we’ll all be plucking chickens!”
It stuns me that the majority of commenters both here and on BillG’s blog (not to mention Bob’s farmer buddy) either trash this philanthropy or effectively say they can do it better. From what I can tell, with one or two exceptions, none of them are actually doing anything to improve people’s lives. At least BillG’s plan ensures that some moms somewhere in Africa can provide some protein for their families, and maybe earn some cash for a few other necessities. Will there be unintended consequences? Sure. But from where I sit, and from where the moms sit, that beats starvation and subsistence level quality of life. Those of you with better ideas, spend a little less time carping about things and a little more time doing something to make things better in the world.
Bolivia does not want chickens from the Gates Foundation……
https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/16/11952200/bill-gates-bolivia-chickens-refused
[…] Bill Gates hingegen hat einen ganz anderen Karrieretipp: Werden Sie Hühnerzüchter! Befragt man einen professionellen Hühnerzüchter dazu, hält er den Ratschlag von Mr. Microsoft allerdings für ein wenig faktenarm. […]