Wow! I had no idea! Similar to how seafood can be in Asia, then.
Guinea pig may be an interesting idea for a livestock animal. Are they easy to process? My sister (who raised meat chickens last year) told me that processing the chickens was kind of a pain, and she’s heard rabbits are easier. I remember reading somewhere that squirrels are really easy to process, too. (We don’t have a lot of squirrels in our area, which my garden appreciates.)
It is hard to process chickens for sure! Especially if you don’t have someone to teach you. I learned off of YouTube and wasn’t getting very far. Like, every single time I processed a chicken or three it turned into a frustrating and gross all day long thing. haha. I finally went and took an entry level job as an eviscerator for a bit and now its not bad at all. But that was years into persistent learning.
I bet guinea pigs would be easy like squirrels. I don’t have any first hand experience but an ex boyfriend of mine totally had pictures of his trip down there and a whole guinea pig on his plate. I think the just gutted it and cooked it on a skewer! Anyway, I wracked my brain for you trying to think of a solution and this is what I’ve come up with.
Seriously though, It’s better then bugs right? Maybe not nutritionally bit in a totally North Americanized way. Which, I totally respect your admitting that because I catch myself being like that a lot of times too. 
Yeah, the more mature I become, the more I recognize that “gross” isn’t the same thing as “morally wrong,” and if something grosses me out while being morally superior (for instance, raising my own meat to make sure it’s raised ethically), I should do it anyway. I want to be good more than I want to stay comfortable.
Guinea pigs do sound like an interesting possibility. I found a blog post comparing rabbits with guinea pigs for meat production, and it sounds like guinea pigs are much easier (although the author preferred the taste of rabbits). It would be useful to be able to taste both meats before committing to raise either species for meat.
I ended up kind of customizing my own chicken harvesting method that doesn’t involve keeping the skin. It’s fine for canning, doesn’t leave the bird in a single piece, and is super quick. Lots of trial and error for sure.
That sounds like a really good workflow. How do you do it?
I’ve put off reading this thread because I know it’ll be a rabbit hole for me lol. As a farmer, someone who has experience with different animals, and even raised guinea pigs for a while with the intention of breeding them bigger for the up and coming urban micro livestock. More on that later.
The only thing that is remotely possible in those narrow guidelines would be to raise a hog. And that is assuming that you have enough kitchen waste and forage to give it.
Pigs are omnivores like us. Contrary to what some people on the internet say, they are absolutely not grazing animals and will not grow or be healthy on only pasture. Even if it was a mix of open field and woods. Wild pigs are small and modern pigs grow too much to live like a wild pig. They can digest and use grasses as food only slightly better than we can.
This type of set up is as minimal as you could get away with. It does require bedding material. Wood chips. Corn cobs would work if you have a feed mill near you. But it also means you’ll have a mine of compost.
If you can I’d suggest starting with a smaller breed like AGH (American guinea hog) or kune kune. They are smaller and will grow slower but will need less feed if you don’t have lots of kitchen waste.
“I keep reading people saying you have to buy chicken feed and can’t just grow food for them. That can’t be true, because then how did humans feed their chickens hundreds of years ago? Maybe it’s that they need bugs in their diet, and they don’t get enough bugs unless you buy feed or let them free range.”
Wild birds lay eggs for a short time in a season. Only enough eggs to set on. Then they set and are done. Few will set successive clutches after raising one. Of that is the chicken you want then yes you could raise them on nothing. However they still need about a half acre per bird to have enough space to forage. And that would be my guess estimate for here in Ohio. Remember wild chickens are rainforest animals.
People forget that our livestock is thousands of years removed from it’s wild ancestors. Lots of breeding for traits humans want. Less and less breeding for traits that let an animal survive in the wild. And animals in the wild only produce what’s necessary. There isn’t a cornish cross chicken in nature because nature can’t support it. There isn’t a bird laying almost an egg a day in nature because nature can’t support it, that bird is cranking out a waste of resources. Except when we breed them for it for us to eat.
“How destructive are chickens to a garden if you let them free range? I suspect they’re terrible pests, but it would be really cool if they’re okay in a garden and I could give them all my food scraps and garden scraps and let them forage for pest insects through my garden. My suspicion is they’ll eat all my tasty leaves and seed pods if I let them free range.”
Last year my young chickens kept escaping the poultry netting. Electrified but they were light young chickens and not grounding to get zapped. I lost half my tomato plants in two days and all my mulch was spread across three times the area. I caught them all and put them in cages because something was killing them in the movable ground pen.
“My neighbor told me her grandmother kept a chicken they let wander around wherever she pleased, and they never had any insects in their garden, which sounds neat. Of course, she also said they never got eggs because the chicken laid them in random hiding places, and they’d then wind up stinking months later, which sounds very unappealing.”
Loose chickens are free and do whatever the hell they want. Which almost never includes what we want. So any eggs get laid in hidden nests. They dig in the most inconvenient or damaging places.
My biggest take home message to people is always to look at what wild animals do versus livestock. How they live and how much they produce, whether it’s eggs or meat or milk.
Wild hogs is a great example because hog farming is so huge.
"The average adult body weight of a feral hog is approximately 180 lb. Males are slightly bigger, with the comparable body weights for adults of each sex as follows: 150-170 lb for females, and 200-220 lb for males. Exceptional specimens have been reported to exceed 500 lb. In most instances of these exceptional weights, the animals were males. "
So that’s for 2 year old or older feral hogs. Modern pigs outgrow them super fast and have significantly more muscling that has been selected for to get us the cuts we like.
"Reproduction in feral hog populations can occur during any month, with both sows and boars being capable of breeding year-round (Fig. 2). Typically there are 1-2 seasonal peaks in breeding. However, annual patterns with one or two seasonal peaks can occur within the same population, varying from year to year. Regional photo-period, rainfall and nutrition all influence the breeding season in a feral hog population. Feral sows are capable of producing more than one litter per year. The production of a second litter was observed to be common when sows lost the entire first litters; however, sows have been breeding while still nursing a litter of piglets. Normally, sows do not conceive when still nursing a litter of piglets. In eastern Tennessee, numerous wild sows were observed to have bred within a month of farrowing, however, very seldom did these females conceive. In addition, when these sows did conceive, only very small litters were produced. "
Modern pig farming is down to the day. It is planned what day they get bred or AIed. What day they move to farrowing crate. What day they birth. What day the piglets are weaned. What day the piglets are sent to another barn to be raised. What day they move to the finishing barn. What day they will be shipped to the butcher and what they should weigh.
It’s clocked so tightly that they have a day or two to empty and sanitize the whole barn before the next truckload of piglets comes in.
This is why during the beginning of the ahem illness that shall not be named… Why farmers were selling half raised hogs for $20. Why entire barns of animals were put down. Because it’s on a schedule and that doesn’t include them not being able to take the current barn load of hogs to the processor. Now the entire system is stopped. And more sows are about to birth because they were already bred almost four months ago. And there is a succession of sows bred to birth after them, and after them,…
This is in very stark contrast to wild animals that have one or two litter a year and many of those die off before reproducing.
I hope this doesn’t read as a rant, I just know that most people aren’t aware of how this works or just how wide the gap is between modern livestock and wild animals. But it is extremely important to know if you are going to think about raising any animal.
If it was a rant, I enjoyed reading it. I know that pigs are awesome livestock for a situation like how Justin Rhodes does in that video. I raised some kind of like that, with deep bedding. I found them a bit too noisy for the suburbs where we were living. I still think chickens are best for the small scale.
Very succinctly, I cut them open between ribs and hips sorta? Along the thin part of the ribcage and abdomen, which facilitates both skinning and gutting.
My Ossabaws are terrific in this regard. Small, thrifty, hardy in many climates.
I don’t have any direct experience with guinea pigs, but I find them to be very compelling as a food source.
they can free-range like other livestock as opposed to rabbits, and they are a grazer, so you don’t have to rely on buying grain
in the second video, they are just used as little lawnmowers, but it shows how well they can free-range. (it’s one of my favorite videos and it made me interested in raising guinea pigs in the future.)
Well, this seems to answer some questions about how to get chickens free protein! 
I really like the bug zapper idea. I have a solar panel and a battery I can charge it with, so it may be feasible to run one all night every night, even in a permanent gridless situation. Not only that, we have millions of elm seed bugs in our yard all the time (thanks to those huge Siberian elm weed trees), as well as loads of earwigs and some very unwelcome mosquitoes, so I wouldn’t mind decreasing those pest insect populations at all.
Of course this is all theoretical, as I don’t currently have chickens or a specific plan to get them, but chickens are something on my mind that would be nice to have sometime. I feel like the bug zapper idea may be a feasible idea in that direction.
Question for those of you who keep chickens. Do chickens need just as much protein in the winter? If so, we don’t have living insects in the winter, so if I’m using a bug zapper and insects to give chickens all the protein they need, I’d to collect twice as much as the chickens need every day, and then set aside half of them for winter. How many insects does your average chicken need per day in order to fulfill all their protein needs?
Also, even though we aren’t allowed to keep roosters in back yards in our city, I’m pretty sure somebody in our neighborhood has one, because I hear him crowing sometimes.
That may be GREAT for long-term food security. If there’s a rooster around, even if it’s only one, everyone in the neighborhood who keeps chicken could borrow the rooster for a few days to get fertilized eggs. It’s rather heartening to think that, if society collapsed tomorrow, this neighborhood may be able to keep on breeding new chickens and producing more eggs long-term.
Oh, yeah, another thought. If I deep mulched the chicken pen, would that result in loads and loads of pill bugs that the chickens could scratch out to eat? If so, that may be a great idea.
For me the only zero input livestock that makes sense are dairy goats, but you need about an acre per animal under average conditions, and multiple animals to make a viable herd. I’ve been raising my saanen goats with no imported feed for years now. The biggest issue is variability in feed production. You can’t just look at the average amount of space per animal since there will be seasons when pretty much nothing grows (for us it means 9 month droughts fairly often). That means you also need overflow space to keep the herd going during bad times (for me it is forests of fodder trees planted around their usual paddocks to cut branches from). Goats were the preferred option for peasants for millenia for this reason. Cows were for the elites who could access much larger parcels of land. My goats have a dedicated ten acres, and another 20 acres of regenerating forest for bad times.
For poultry, geese are the best zero input option if you have plenty of grass, but they will graze grass to death during droughts, and are incapable of flattening weedy brush on their own.
When you buy in concentrated feed for animals like chickens you are basically using the animal to concentrate the protein in it, but at best you only get 50% of the protein back. At the same time you are burning off all the carbohydrate energy in the feed. Pre-industrial chicken breeds can get by mostly on foraging. In this case the small amount of concentrated energy in their feed is being leveraged to allow them to gather most of their own protein, but you will usually only get a single batch of eggs a year from these old lines. Specialised egg laying breeds were always coupled to granaries (in the same way that high intensity pig production was often tied to dairies to make use of all the left over whey and buttermilk). If you need to buy in this concentrated feed, rather than it being an onsite waste product, then it is basically boutique battery farming (with the inputs coming at retail prices).
One species I haven’t seen suggested here is the muscovy duck. I find they are relatively non-destructive when free ranging, prolific breeders and decent at foraging if you get the right genetics. Also very quiet and disease free, and the meat is my favourite. They use a fair bit of water and shit everywhere, so you would need a system to make use of that waste stream to avoid neighbours complaining about smells.
I lost track but a fellow in Florida was trying to recreate the chicken landrace he grew up with. Think game chickens. The ones just about everyone who owns chickens avoids because they are also known for fighting cocks. The average person who buys chickens to own treats them like buying the latest designer dogs or want their favorite farm breed or simply buys factory egg layer hybrids. Landrace chickens need little to zero input from their owners and pretty much fend for themselves. The chickens always are on alert, their skeleton frame makes them more upright to start with, they look to the skies constantly for danger and the roosters fight to the death to protect the flock against predators. They pretty much free roam and it’s your job to hunt down and capture one if you want a chicken dinner 
. Farm breeds like pure breeds are inbred, dumb as planks, have high vet bills and needs and their owners need to provide all the high inputs themselves at their expense. It has been so long I am trying to remember if I originally heard about he project from David the Good years ago. But if you want to landrace chickens you are going to have to bring in game cocks close to the original jungle fowl to get some game DNA into your landrace if you want any hope of them not being taken out in a day if left to fend for themselves unless you prefer to keep them constantly caged.
Edit. Thought I hit general reply button. Not a reply to Shane.
Edit. Found the guy in Florida. Breeding the Florida Cracker Gamefowl and working on his landrace
I just learned that there’s a chicken breed with roosters that crow very quietly! You can hear them if you’re standing within ten feet of them; you can’t hear them a hundred feet away.
That may be an excellent solution for someone who lives in a place where roosters are allowed, and who would rather only hear roosters crowing when they’re near them.
Could you post a link to this chicken breed?
I have no idea what breed they were. I saw them in person, and the lady who owned them told me she had gotten them because they were quiet. I heard them crowing when I was ten feet away, and I couldn’t hear them crowing when I was a hundred feet away. I was surprised and impressed.
Maybe it was one of these breeds?
They looked like the rooster in the picture of Barred Plymouth Rock on this website.