U.S. Potential of Sustainable Backyard Distributed Animal and Plant Protein Production during and after Pandemics

Abstract

To safeguard against meat supply shortages during pandemics or other catastrophes, this study analyzed the potential to provide the average household’s entire protein consumption using either soybean production or distributed meat production at the household level in the U.S. with: (1) pasture-fed rabbits, (2) pellet and hay-fed rabbits, or (3) pellet-fed chickens. Only using the average backyard resources, soybean cultivation can provide 80–160% of household protein and 0–50% of a household’s protein needs can be provided by pasture-fed rabbits using only the yard grass as feed. If external supplementation of feed is available, raising 52 chickens while also harvesting the concomitant eggs or alternately 107 grain-fed rabbits can meet 100% of an average household’s protein requirements. These results show that resilience to future pandemics and challenges associated with growing meat demands can be incrementally addressed through backyard distributed protein production. Backyard production of chicken meat, eggs, and rabbit meat reduces the environmental costs of protein due to savings in production, transportation, and refrigeration of meat products and even more so with soybeans. Generally, distributed production of protein was found to be economically competitive with centralized production of meat if distributed labor costs were ignored.

Nutrition in Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenarios: Envisioning Feasible Balanced Diets on Resilient Foods

“…Many variables can impact these conclusions, such as the extent of the sunlight decrease (which could force relocation to lower latitudes and therefore changed photoperiods, rendering some crops impossible to grow, though a small amount of supplemental artificial light could ameliorate this [ 25 ]), the global and regional temperature decreases (that would impact transport distances and regional food availabilities) and the degree of cooperation for industry up-scaling (that could impact single cell protein, cellulosic sugar, and/or greenhouse production). Another uncertainty is the degree of information and willingness of the population to use distributed food production techniques to meet their needs as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic [ 98 , 99 ]. It should also be pointed out that the selected timing of the catastrophe is only one possible scenario; a different timing would likely imply a somewhat higher food availability at the onset, due to different food stock levels, degree of aerosol lofting, and harvest timing.…”

“…This has the added benefit of providing a potential source of food even without industry or wide-spread cooperation, while these were optimistically assumed in the rest of this analysis. As was observed during shortages of some foods, families pivoted to decentralized food production as there were runs on supplies for chicken and rabbit production in the U.S. [ 99 ]. Decentralized production of protein from chickens and rabbits can supply a substantial amount of calories and proteins.…”

Assessing lignocellulosic biomass as a source of emergency foods

“…Preprocessed biomass can be used to grow edible mushrooms or insects and grow single cell species (yeast or green algae) after converting lignocellulosic biomass into sugars or acetate via digestion and/or fermentation ( Hann et al, 2022 ; Sun et al, 2021 ). Raw biomass or the residual biomass after mushroom cultivation can be used to grow small ruminants or pseudo-ruminants such as rabbits ( Meyer et al, 2021 ; Spinosa et al, 2008 ). Further, household-level greenhouses could be maintained to grow vegetables and microgreens using artificial lights and room heaters ( Appolloni et al, 2022 ).…”

Yield and Toxin Analysis of Leaf Protein Concentrate from Common North American Coniferous Trees

“…foods include wild edible plants [11], hydrogen single cell protein [12], electroactive bacteria produced vinegar [13], chemical synthesis of glycerine [14], rabbits [15], and transforming petroleum wax into edible fat [16].…”