Billionaire Bill Gates is advising people who live in severe poverty to invest heavily in live chickens.
Gates offered his sage advice earlier this week in a piece entitled “Why I Would Raise Chickens” on his blog, gatesnotes.
The 60-year-old Gates, who is worth an estimated $76.6 billion, also promised to donate 100,000 chickens to “the nearly 1 billion people living in extreme poverty today” — or exactly one chicken for every 10,000 suffering poor people.
“If you were living on $2 a day, what would you do to improve your life?” Gates asks in his blog entry.
“I’ve met many people in poor countries who raise chickens, and I have learned a lot about the ins and outs of owning these birds,” the jet-setting software tycoon suggests.
“I am excited about chickens,” Gates explains. “It’s pretty clear to me that just about anyone who’s living in extreme poverty is better off if they have chickens.”
The suburb-dwelling Gates then gives his arguments for why extremely poor people should exchange their meager assets for poultry.
Chickens are “easy and inexpensive to take care of,” he writes. They eat scraps and need only “some kind of shelter” and “a few vaccines.”
Roosters and hens are also a great investment, the Microsoft mogul swears. An amateur farmer who “starts with five hens” can convince a rooster-owning neighbor to let the rooster do his magic and “fertilize the hens’ eggs.” A few months later, voila! The farmer “can have a flock of 40 chicks” and “with a sale price of $5 per chicken — which is typical in West Africa –” the farmer “can earn more than $1,000 a year.” That’s $300 over “the extreme-poverty line of about $700 a year” — and just $76,599,999,000 less than Gates has at his disposal.
Chickens “help keep children healthy” because kids can eat the eggs hens produce, Gates writes. “They empower women,” too, Gates believes, because female chicken vendors “are likely to reinvest the profits in their families.”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is totally “betting on chickens,” Gates tells readers. His goal, he says, is “to eventually help 30 percent of the rural families in sub-Saharan Africa raise improved breeds of vaccinated chickens, up from just 5 percent now.”
Last year, Gates took to the pages of The Atlantic to pontificate that businessmen who operate in free markets — not unlike himself — are too greedy and incompetent to reduce concentrations of carbon dioxide that he believes are disastrously heating the planet. He also publicized his plan to spend $2 billion on green energy initiatives and urged other billionaires to give away money in an attempt to wean the United States from fossil fuels by 2050. (RELATED: Bill Gates: Only Big Government, Mega-Rich People Can Stop Climate Change Apocalypse)
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has also poured hundreds millions of dollars into efforts to develop and promote Common Core. In 2015, he complained that his ambitious quest to force a set of one-size-fits-all national education standards on America’s obstinate, noncompliant parents is much harder than finding a cure for malaria. (RELATED: Bill Gates: Imposing Common Core On America Is Way Harder Than CURING MALARIA)
Gates, who dropped out of Harvard University, has a high school degree from Lakeside School, a posh prep school in Seattle where Common Core is not mandated and where annual tuition currently runs $30,850. (RELATED: Bill Gates Loves Common Core For Your Kids, BUT NOT HIS)
For K-12 school, the ultra-wealthy Gates couple has sent their three children — Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe — to Lakeside. (RELATED: Bill Gates Loves Common Core For Your Kids, BUT NOT HIS)
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