It’s astonishing what you can not know about the place where you live. Me, for instance: I live mostly in Atlanta. I’ve lived here twice, once for 10 years as a newspaper reporter, and now — after a four-year break — for 15 months so far as a writer (and trailing spouse, which is how I got back here). Between working for one of the (formerly) largest papers in the country, liking long drives, and regularly indulging my ungovernable curiosity, I thought I knew Georgia pretty well.
I was wrong. Here’s what I learned about Georgia on Thursday:
- It raises more meat chickens than any other place in the United States, about 1.4 billion of them a year.
- That’s 15 percent of all the animals raised in confinement agriculture in the United States. Not just 15 percent of the chickens; 15 percent of everything.
- All those chickens produce 2 million tons of poultry manure and litter a year, one-fifth of what the entire U.S. poultry sector produces.
- That waste is applied on land — including land where other food crops are grown — from which it can run off and contaminate water supplies.
- 40 to 80 percent of gut bacteria recovered from confinement chicken-houses are multi-drug resistant.
- Caring for foodborne illness from organisms carried on chicken, and making up for lost productivity when people are made sick, costs about $2.4 billion per year.
- Chicken catchers, who cage the birds on their way to slaughter, may lift 5,000 pounds in an hour. Slaughterhouse line workers may perform the same repetitive cutting motions 20,000 to 30,000 times in a work shift.
- Slaughterhouses in Georgia kill 1 million chickens per week.
- Poultry is exempt from humane slaughter regulations.