Chickens Eating Vegan Food Might Help The Environment Says Research

Don’t rub your eyes, you read that correctly. The study conducted at UBC’s Okanagan campus have shown that poultry that was fed vegan and organic feed actually help in producing eggs with a lesser environmental footprint as compared to non-organic farm feed that contains animal by-products.

The ecological economist Nathan Pelletier assessed a Canadian egg and studied its cradle-to-customer life cycle. He even included the egg product supply chain in his study that aimed to find opportunities for environmental improvements. “With over 1, 000 registered farms, producing more than 70 million tonnes of eggs annually, Canada’s egg industry is an excellent example of the opportunities and challenges in managing food production systems for sustainability objectives,” told Pelletier to Science Insider.

His findings have shown that the feed and manure management has a lot to do with environmental impacts. The organic feed needs fewer resources and thus has lower emissions that conventional feed. “Canadian egg farming is highly diverse. Farms range in size from several hundred hens to more than 400,000, and farm-level efficiencies vary,” says Pelletier. “There is a large gap between the laggers and leaders in terms of environmental performance. This is where the opportunity to improve lies.”