News

USA: Chicken and farmed salmon have remarkably similar environmental footprints

Salmon
Frozen Whole Chicken
Meat
United States
Published Feb 14, 2023

Tridge summary

We love our chicken. We love our salmon. Thanks to how we farm these two popular proteins, their environmental footprints are surprisingly similar.

Original content

The key is in the feed, said UC Santa Barbara marine ecologist Ben Halpern, director of UCSB's National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis, and an author of a paper that appears in the journal Current Biology. In an effort to tease out opportunities for reducing the substantial environmental pressures of global food production, he and an international team of colleagues took a deep look at how we raise these two highly popular animals for consumption, focusing in particular on dynamics between land and sea. "Chicken are fed fish from the ocean, just as are salmon, and salmon are fed crop products like soy, just as are chicken," Halpern said, in comparing industrially farmed broiler chickens, and farmed salmonids (salmon, marine trout and char). In addition to land-based crops, chickens are fed fishmeal and fish oil; while salmon, which typically eat other fish, are farmed with land-based feed, such as oil crops, soybeans and wheat. "In a sense," he noted, "we really do ...
Source: Phys
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