Chickens were traditionally machines to convert agrarian debris (bugs, seeds) into protein-rich eggs. Their current...
Chickens were traditionally machines to convert agrarian debris (bugs, seeds) into protein-rich eggs. Their current battery-farming use turning corn feed into breast, thigh, and wing meat is relatively novel.
Pigs are traditionally a way to convert farm waste and forest forage (grubs, mushrooms, nuts) into fat and protein, with pigs hardy enough to stand up to the forest’s threats
Cows turn grassland forage into protein-rich milk, meat, and leather. Cows are sturdy enough to be turned loose to live freely outside of direct supervision for long periods in secured territory and then rounded up, so can be raised with little labor on large amounts of poor land. Can move long distances under own power, can be raised in remote areas and sold fresh in high-demand population centers. Dairy herds, by contrast, were kept right outside population centers. Quick-spoiling milk can be processed into cooking lipid butter and stable, transportable, marketable protein source cheese. Can be used as traction-generating and load-bearing beasts.
Sheep are similar to cows at smaller scale and requiring closer attention, process grassland into mutton, milk, and wool, once most important textile in world before cotton.
Horses convert grassland to service as traction-generating and load-bearing beasts. Intelligently trainable, nimblest animals practical to tide.
Donkeys convert grassland to service as traction-generating and load-bearing beasts. Size and output/consumption ratio makes more practical than horses for many applications, but intensely annoying.
Mules - we bred a donkey with a horse to make it less annoying.
Deer, Antelopes, Turkeys, Ducks, Pheasants, etc. - game animals. Sustain their own life cycle from undeveloped land, are hunted in regulated fashion to sustain stock.
Bees - plant-fertilizing function radically increases productivity of fields, yields rich, high-sugar, indefinitely stable honey
Doves - we used to fuckin’ farm doves, we’d have big-ass birdhouses out in the fields. Not sure what that was about.
Ostriches - one of those 80s things, a tax dodgee that sounded cool on cocaine
All true, but don’t forget Goats, which turn a wide variety of otherwise inedible plant life (including poison ivy) into milk, meat, and / or fiber depending on the specific breed.
Also, any amount of livestock produces a fair amount of manure, which is generally useful as a fertilizer to restore vital chemicals to soil being depleted by agriculture. Chicken manure is so chemically volatile it can give crops chemical burns, for example.
I think I need an explanation about the ostritch
So I looked it up and yeah in the 1980s “farm crisis” small staple farms were failing and a lot of them considered alternative specialty crops, and states responded with a lot of targeted tax breaks
But the 1980s = ostrich farms thing is that American luxury brands that relied on ostrich inputs were cut off by anti-apartheid trade restrictions, cause the ostrich industry was historically South African