I'm talking about TODAY, not 10 or 20 years ago. Fast food accounts for a majority of the chicken that is processed today, and the demands required to meet the needs of McDonalds, KFC, Burger King and others dictate the way the industry is set up. Wasn't always this way, but that's the way it is today.
Chickens farmed for meat are called broiler chickens. Chickens will naturally live for 6 or more years, but broiler chickens typically take less than 6 weeks to reach slaughter size.[24] A free range or organic meat chicken will usually be slaughtered at about 14 weeks of age.
6 weeks x 7 days = 42 days; I indicated 52 days, so I was off a bit. The reason they stick to this age, is to keep the SIZE constant; automation in the facitlity does not deal well with over-sized birds; in fact farmers get docked for bringing larger chickens in for processing - due to the havok it makes with the automated processes.
Again, we are talking about $0.58/lb of chicken. This is the market price set by the market - and again, because you obviously didn't read it last time; when your LABOR costs are around $16/hr you need every person processing >27 lbs per hour in order to just meet that price from the labor point of view. So, in the case of the laying hens - again - assuming we are talking about FREE birds, each dressing out to 5lbs each; each employee has to average >5 birds/hour to include slaughter, bleeding, plucking, gutting, and freezing to just keep your labor costs at that price.
Your past experience, while fine - and I believe you completely - is ... in ... the ... past.
I just got back from Arkansas Sunday night, I have family there - raising chickens hasn't changed in the past week. Layers are still being killed and buried - it's too expensive in labor costs to do anything else.
Again, the price per pound for chicken is $0.58. There is no way to process non-standard sized birds, and use automation to get the layers done in quantity - thus, these 'inferior' meat of the layers cannot be processed economically - and this is all based on economy.
The economy of scale is for the 7 week old chickens; that is what Tyson's production facility is automated to handle. Personally, I'd love to have these old birds used for soups, or even pet food. I'm opposed to wanton waste. But the fact is that the labor costs do handle these larger birds make it economically non-viable to do on a large scale. This is where you need labor to handle these birds - and people are simply not willing to pay more per pound, for a larger bird. I mean, given $15 to spend on Chicken for your family, would you buy 3 larger birds at $5 each, or would you buy 10.8 lbs of boneless chicken breasts (at $1.39) at Costco? Typically - most people buy the boneless chicken breast at Costco.
You just live in your fantasy world of burying chickens. I’ll remain in the real world where they go into pet food, soups, and nuggets.