Few people understand the situation better than Yu Xiaohai, a farmer who raises broiler chickens outside Beijing.
"I don't think we have a system [for raising broiler chickens] that is dependent on antibiotic use for its sustainability.
Raising broiler chickens takes 3,500 liters (924.6 US gal) of water to make a kilogram of meat.
Due to the industry's reliance on homogenous breeding techniques, commercially raised broilers are all pretty much genetically identical.
Egg production reaches its peak in the spring -- it's also when yolks will be their brightest yellow -- which means that there will soon be extras for raising broilers.
Feed cost constitutes about 70% of the cost of raising broilers, but the efficiency of feed utilization has not kept up the growth potential of today's broilers.
The researchers speculate that resistant bacteria persist on organic farms because, although organically raised broilers can be given no antibiotics from day 1 of life, the breeder farms where the eggs originate are under no restrictions on antibiotic use and may give mother hens antibiotic-laced feed.
In the nineteen-seventies, it took ten weeks to raise a broiler; now it takes forty days in a dark and crowded shed, because farmers are under constant pressure to cut costs and increase productivity.
Other than farm size, the type of antibiotic provided in the water and the fact that Farm B raised both broilers and layers, these farms did not differ in their management practices as determined by visual inspection of the premises and owner/manager responses to a questionnaire [ 17].
A similar phenomenon has recently been noted among Campylobacter spp. recovered from domestically raised and imported broiler chickens in Denmark (13 ).
