Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-30-2021
Department
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Department of Social Sciences
Abstract
To safeguard against meat supply shortages during pandemics or other catastrophes, this study analyzed the potential to provide the average household’s entire protein consumption using either soybean production or distributed meat production at the household level in the U.S. with: (1) pasture-fed rabbits, (2) pellet and hay-fed rabbits, or (3) pellet-fed chickens. Only using the average backyard resources, soybean cultivation can provide 80-160% of household protein and 0- 50% of a household’s protein needs can be provided by pasture-fed rabbits using only the yard grass as feed. If external supplementation of feed is available, raising 52 chickens while also harvesting the concomitant eggs or alternately 107 grain-fed rabbits can meet 100% of an average household’s protein requirements. These results show that resilience to future pandemics and challenges associated with growing meat demands can be incrementally addressed through backyard distributed protein production. Backyard production of chicken meat, eggs, and rabbit meat reduces the environmental costs of protein due to savings in production, transportation, and refrigeration of meat products and even more so with soybeans. Generally, distributed production of protein was found to be economically competitive with centralized production of meat if distributed labor costs were ignored.
Publication Title
Sustainability (Switzerland)
Recommended Citation
Meyer, T.,
Pascaris, A.,
Denkenberger, D.,
&
Pearce, J. M.
(2021).
U.S. Potential of sustainable backyard distributed animal and plant protein production during and after pandemics.
Sustainability (Switzerland),
13(9).
http://doi.org/10.3390/su13095067
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/14874
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Version
Publisher's PDF
Included in
Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons, Materials Science and Engineering Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons
Publisher's Statement
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/su13095067