The feed conversion ratio cannot fall below 1, because mass cannot be created out of nothing. I guess values below 1 have not accounted for all feed (e.g. maybe food naturally present in the environment is not accounted for sometimes).
The feed conversion ratio cannot fall below 1, because mass cannot be created out of nothing. I guess values below 1 have not accounted for all feed (e.g. maybe food naturally present in the environment is not accounted for sometimes).
Mass cannot be created out of nothing, but feed conversion ratio, in weight terms, can fall below 1. This is because body tissues (mainly muscles) also consist of things other than protein + carbs, such as water. If the muscles have a high enough proportion of water, and the efficiency of raising gets efficient enough, FCR does indeed sometimes fall below 1.
But if feed conversion ratio is calculated using calories conversion or protein conversion, then it is always higher than 1.
I think in practice no one uses dry mass to calculate FCR, possibly for these reasons:
It makes the FCR higher, and therefore uglier (from the business perspective, talking about FCR is ugly to me no matter what)
They very rarely sell entirely dried meat, so the FCR doesn’t really tell the sellers how much meat they should expect to be able to produce by raising an animal.
Nice piece, Fai!
FYI, I estimated the scale of the welfare of farmed and wild animals is 4.64 and 50.8 M times that of humans.
The feed conversion ratio cannot fall below 1, because mass cannot be created out of nothing. I guess values below 1 have not accounted for all feed (e.g. maybe food naturally present in the environment is not accounted for sometimes).
Thank you for your comment!
Mass cannot be created out of nothing, but feed conversion ratio, in weight terms, can fall below 1. This is because body tissues (mainly muscles) also consist of things other than protein + carbs, such as water. If the muscles have a high enough proportion of water, and the efficiency of raising gets efficient enough, FCR does indeed sometimes fall below 1.
But if feed conversion ratio is calculated using calories conversion or protein conversion, then it is always higher than 1.
Thanks for clarifying! I was thinking in terms of dry mass.
Thanks too, for clarifying what you thought!
I think in practice no one uses dry mass to calculate FCR, possibly for these reasons:
It makes the FCR higher, and therefore uglier (from the business perspective, talking about FCR is ugly to me no matter what)
They very rarely sell entirely dried meat, so the FCR doesn’t really tell the sellers how much meat they should expect to be able to produce by raising an animal.