Pythons are farmed for meat in Southeast Asia.
Dan Natush
What is the most sustainable meat? Research from farms that raise meat snakes in Thailand and Vietnam says it could be pythons.
They say that when it comes to efficiency in converting food into meat, snakes come out on top. Daniel Natush At consulting firm EPIC Biodiversity. “No other livestock species studied to date have the same qualifications or production rates as pythons.”
Snakes have long been farmed on a small scale to produce specialized products such as venom. Only recently have they been raised primarily for meat.
Natush’s team measured the growth of about 5,000 reticulated and Burmese pythons (Malayan python and Python bivittatus) Calculate the weight of the carcass (excluding skin, internal organs, head and tail) in addition to the feed provided over the course of one year. They then compared this to existing data on other animals.
According to the study, the dry mass of food fed to pythons was 1.2 times that of the carcass, compared to 1.5 times more for salmon, 2.1 times more for crickets, 2.8 times more for poultry, 6 times more for pigs, and 10 times more for beef.
Source: www.newscientist.com
