The majority of large chicken farms use antibiotics to keep chickens healthy and protect them from infections.
This method is widely used and quite profitable for farms, as they spend a small sum on drugs.
However, one Pennsylvanian chicken farm does things in a different way and succeeds to have great results.
Scott Sechler is the owner of one of the first farms which treat and care for chickens using only a combination of oregano oil and cinnamon. Besides the fact that this oil is completely natural, it offers many health benefits for chickens.
Therefore, this technique gives natural chickens much higher quality than the technique which uses antibiotics.
Oregano oil protects chickens from infections and lowers the number of dead birds due to disease, like antibiotics.
However, the difference is that the chicken treated with oregano oil is much healthier than those given unnatural, manufactured drugs and antibiotics.
This natural technique is considerably more expensive that the regular one with antibiotics, but the farm of Scott Sechler manages to sell a lot of chickens to grocery stores and consumers. The mass-produced chickens fed with antibiotics raised on most commercial chicken farms are associated with many health risks, and people in the U.S. are becoming more aware of that.
Therefore, a growing number of them are deciding to pay a little more extra for naturally raised chickens like Sechler’s ones. Besides chicken farms, this oregano oil technique has been used in other types of farms too.
For example, a pig farm in Pennsylvania with Bob Ruth as a president has been giving this oil to the pigs for a period of 6 months, to see if oregano oil really helps fight infections and provides healthy animals.
The reason why farmers need to use antibiotics is because of the filthy conditions prone to viruses and infections caused by improper slaughterhouse cleaning. Scott Sechler is one of the few farmers who understands this problem and therefore ensures his slaughterhouse is thoroughly cleaned and disinfected after every slaughtered set of chickens. So the oil he uses for his chickens becomes only a precaution.
Antibiotics wouldn’t have been used on modern chicken farms if more companies and farmers cared for humane and healthy techniques more than gaining huge profits.
We hope consumers will learn more about the harmful techniques used by modern factory farms. The decision of Scott Sechler to avoid antibiotics on his farm is surely a positive one, but a greater one would be to start supporting pasture-raised farms or to try raising our own natural chickens.
Via New York Times
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