Right now, there aren't any barriers for regular people to raise their meat - if you have some space you can have some chickens there... I don't think changing to a centralized false-meat production and forbidding the free range chicken is the way forward...
IMHO the way forward is to heavily regulate the treatment of animals on farm and largely do away with factory farming. The meat that gets to our table wouldn't even be that much more expensive. Most humanely raised and slaughtered me is only marginally more expensive and that is largely because people are will to pay a premium to know the animal has been treated well. If all animals had to be treated equally well, the prices would drop to near the current prices of factory farmed meats today.
Eliminating meat is a non-answer, but legally requiring the humane treatment of animals raised for slaughter is a platform that you wouldn't have any difficulty getting most Americans behind were it made a national issue.
Most humanely raised and slaughtered meat is only marginally more expensive
The skeptic in me wonders if this is because what you think is humanely raised and slaughtered isn't, really, and plays the rules to earn the label and higher price while only marginally increasing costs.
Alternative terminology can also be used to make high-density confinement sound more palatable. For example: cage-free, free-running, free-roaming, naturally nested, etc. are used as an alternative to the technical term, high-density floor confinement.
Free-range chicken eggs... have no legal definition in the United States.
I haven't a clue what percentage of products that claim they are humanely raised actually are raised that way, but I've seen several documentaries (I don't remember their names) where they interview farmers that raise animals humanely and show how the animals on their farm are treated and in at at least one of these documentaries they showed the slaughter of some chickens and it didn't seem nearly as cruel and inhumane as the slaughtering of chickens in factory farming. With that in mind, I don't know how profitable it was relative to factory farming, but I assume that this farmer was making enough to earn a comfortable living.
Demand for animal food products isn't going away and I can't even imagine the changes that would have to take place in society to change that. With that in mind, it seems like you could literally combine a campaign to create farming jobs and treat animals decently during their lives before being slaughtered and served, based on the simple fact that it will require more labor to meet the national demand for meat.
I would love to see an economic study that measures the differences in labor and total cost of production per pound of meat between a factory farm and a humane farm. I expect the costs to be marginally higher, but that the benefits in terms of jobs and humane animal treatment to far outweigh the negatives. If any political candidate wants to base their platform on producing and protecting agrarian jobs I would expect this to be the platform on which to base it. Plant-based agriculture products are never going to return from factory farming, but animal products could.
You're right, there are very humane farms out there. You're right, demand for meat is only going to keep growing. You're right on many points; I'm just trying to point out that the sticker prices you see on "humane meats" in the grocery store could easily be far less humane than the farms that feature on those documentaries, giving a skewed perception of what "humane meats" actually cost to produce.
Now they don't but you could phase out inhumane meats the same way that California deals with legislation that regulates the number of cars on the road that need to be electric car.
Just set figures of the percent of meat that needs to be humanely raised reaching 100% in like 10 years. The industry can correct that quickly.
