Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
(civileats.com)314 points by greenie_beans 5 months ago
314 points by greenie_beans 5 months ago
But the culls are smaller, and so the impact lessened. The problem becomes more distributed.
This is the chief reason why Canada's egg prices have remained sane while the US has exploded. It's not like we don't have bird flu here and we haven't had culls. We just have smaller flocks.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-u...
Still, backyard chickens are a hobby, for if you like chickens. It will always cost more than an egg farm.
> But the culls are smaller, and so the impact lessened. The problem becomes more distributed.
Presumably the risk of spread of bird flu to humans increases though, due to the increased amount of contact. And then the increased risk of mutation leading to human to human transmission.
Bit wild to me that we don't seem to be taking this very seriously other than "o no my eggs" given we just had a pandemic a few years ago.
Arguably all the awful and crazy politics around COVID-19 has led directly to the scenario of people really not willing to take new pandemics seriously.
BC grocery stores shelves are getting bare of eggs, and the pricing is significantly higher that typical.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/egg-shortages-bc-grocery-bir...
That's definitely a part of it.
There was some move some years ago here in Ontario to push for a small flock exemption to allow for egg & pooultry sales outside the quota system for flocks under 300 bird. And I don't mean roadside sales, but market sales. So there has been some accommodation for smaller market players.
Yeah, My concern is more opportunities to pass to people who may not be doing good flock hygiene too. A farm has better resources and training than a backyard flock.
Is there any reason I shouldn’t let my half-dozen birds get it and die or survive, see if any develop immunity and work from there?
Mostly they can spread it to you and to any other animals around and by the time you’re aware that they’re infected, they’ll be seriously ill. Or shorter; the chances x benefit of them they developing immunity are much lower than the chances x cost of them becoming ill and having the virus mutate in a much worse direction.
Watching your chickens die sucks, my friend. They don't just drop dead overnight. It's often many days of watching them slowly suffer.
Then imagine spreading that misery to all the wild birds you love in your neighbourhood.
I am going today to buy 6 chicks, as i was told all 4 hatcheries in my area were producing chicks for sale this week. I was told they would be $5-$12 depending on the breed.
I was concerned because of the culling last year (over 130,000,000 fowl culled in 2024, before the election, even! weird!) that it might be hard to get new chicks, but as i was told
> Chickens lay a lot of eggs
in the US farm to table is 60-90 days for eggs, that's why we wash them and refrigerate them. Yard eggs you don't wash, and only keep "cool" like room temp, until you're ready to use them then you wash them with a foodsafe sanitizer (or dawn if you're making boiled eggs) and prepare.
130 million chickens et al killed prior to november of 2024, and 90 days to the home? looks like this will let up around mardi gras.
I wonder who will take credit? because, here's the secret: It's the chickens.
yes; and i did take it into account. I'm unwilling to share my methodology at this time, but the very little mainstream coverage of the cull last year was enough to piece together a timeline, and i'm sure a few people have, maybe even someone who isn't a complete nutterbutter.
In my estimation, the slaughter of chickens for disposal slowed down during the summer. Any reason why would be speculation i am unwilling to back up at this time.
Wash your hands if you handle livestock, people. and if you're around LOTS and cleaning up their poo, wear a respirator and eye protection. It's got what plants crave, but not humans!
wow, 60 to 90 days. I have a chicken and I was occasionally worried when an egg was on the table (inside is max mid 20s C), for a few weeks and thinking of putting them in the fridge. I also find they seem to cook better when in the room and not the fridge.
Tofu is cheap and high in protein and is great scrambled with some mushrooms and spices. You don't Need eggs!
A good tofu scramble tastes more like eggs than eggs thanks to black salt. And it's more flavorful than your normal egg+butter fry because it has an array of spices.
Recipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc5pZ-PY-H8
The compromise is mainly having to introduce a new food to your diet and change your habits.
Wow, no one is talking about the smell. Have you got any idea how terrible is the smell of a chicken coop? You do know that you have to get in there to clean it, right? This ain’t no fun activity. I prefer to get fewer eggs per month than to clean it myself (sometimes every day, it also depends on the weather too).
I’d say I can’t do it cause I live in NYC, but theres a very famous “Chicken House” in Bedstuy that disproves that. They got a whole chicken coup in their front yard. I got know idea how they keep away stray cats and rats etc, but somehow they’ve been doing it for at least a decade.
So maybe I could
Feed costs money. Unless you live in an area where feed is very cheap, or grow your own feed, this isn't going to be economically viable. Having said that, some people enjoy keeping chickens as pets, and in that case economic viability takes a back seat. Plus there's a certain psychological satisfaction akin to tending to your own (also not economically viable) garden, which should not be underestimated. When I had a garden my every morning started with tending to it, and that was basically the most psychologically enjoyable thing I'd done in the last 30 years, especially when there's something to harvest. Plus, when AI neo-feudalism takes over, I won't starve. :-)
The first egg from my flock cost me well over $1000. Now that was a golden egg!
> Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen
That sounds.. pretty cheap?
Here (Switzerland), 10 eggs (instead of 12), cost at least 4.20 CHF (almost 5 USD): https://www.coop.ch/de/lebensmittel/milchprodukte-eier/eier/...
These are the lowest quality eggs available.
Regular eggs are around $1 each and it's been like this for at least a decade now.
Honestly, terrible conditions. Factory-farmed style eggs. The “better” eggs were already at the $3-7+ price point depending on the feature set you’re looking for. Organic pasture raised eggs? Closer to the $7+. Plain brown organic eggs were closer to the $3 mark.
The egg industry in the US is a mess of marketing words that aren’t really regulated. Words like free-range, cage free, “access to the outdoors” often have little impact on the well-being of the chickens.
Why would it be, when you consider that countries with far less condensed supply chain (e.g. Canada) have not been impacted? If we blame commercial agricultural practices for exacerbating the risk then it makes no sense to frame backyard chickens as doing the same.
A friend of mine has kept chickens in his backyard for years (not for egg-cost reasons). He said he did the math recently, and given just the cost of feed (not including the up-front cost of building the coop, or ongoing costs to maintain it), eggs would have to go up to ~$11/dozen for it to break even. While I have seen eggs that high recently (at a small convenience-store type place in a relatively HCoL area), that's certainly still not common.
Texas has a law that you're allowed to have up to 6 hens and 2 beehives in your backyard. Hens are fine because they're not roosters (though usually one hen will take on some of the role of a rooster). I'm not sure about the wisdom of keeping beehives in a suburban backyard though because when your neighbor mows their lawn nearby they can get irritated and attack -- the hives really need to be 20ft or more away from the fence.
>Do you cook eggs daily?
Yes. This is very common. Most days breakfast is sunny side eggs. Egg drop soup, ramens, and steamed egg dishes also consume a lot.
weekly shopping list is a dozen eggs and 2 roast chickens.
Yep. 5 eggs a day between my wife and I. Then there are uses for food prep.
Yeah man, eggs are great. My wife and I cook almost all of our meals, and we go through about two dozen a month. Have one for breakfast a few times a week, cook a quiche once or twice a month, stir one or two into fried rice, use them for battering fried foods, many baked goods call for an egg or two.
Kind of off topic, but instead of culling flocks infected with the flu, are there any farmers just seeing which chickens survive and then letting them breed?
I spoke with a chicken farmer last week.
The government comes in and takes over. You don’t get to decide, they kill all your chickens and cut you a check.
I recommend listening to Patara's advice on chickens. [1] She mentions some of the things discussed in this thread and more. All practical advice. Just listen in the background.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbIGEK2q_VA [video][22 mins]
Your break-even point will be years away, so no, backyard chickens aren’t the answer for high egg prices.
That said, chickens are fun animals, and mine bring me a lot of joy even though I don’t like/eat eggs (the chickens came with my house; I give the eggs away).
This all reminds me this "The Mitchell and Webb Situation - Farming" sketch :)
Ok, so maybe a controversial opinion:
I've been buying local, pasture raised chickens for the last 10 years. I am very fortunate to have had the income to allow me to do so. I also don't eat that many eggs (roughly a dozen a month - so it hasn't been that expensive).
The price of my eggs was always between $8-$12 / dozen (including this weekend when I easily found and bought another 2 dozen). I get that I was buying "already expensive eggs", because apparently other people were buying eggs $2 / dozen.
However, to be frank, I'm not sure how people expect eggs to be so cheap. Taking into account the land, the water, the feed, the labor, the transportation all to create a dozen eggs, it must cost more than $2.
Clearly paying a little more for the eggs has allowed me to support farms which are robust to large shocks like this (both in terms of input costs and in terms of health of chickens). I really hope as a society we can all move away from the unsustainable farms and improve the economics of sustainable farming so that everyone can afford locally grown, healthy eggs for centuries to come.
In the meanwhile, there will be people who have to buy fewer eggs (either because of health regulations - or because reality checks will always exist like with market shocks right now).
Hopefully, after this crisis, through graduated health regulation we can cause a controlled increase to the floor price of unsustainably grown eggs, while also (through technology and economies of scale) reducing the floor price of locally sourced, sustainably grown eggs.
Feed at a large scale operation is a lot cheaper than you’d think. The bulk of the food is soybean meal left over from oil production and distillers dried grains with solubles left over from ethanol production. The feed manufacturers make deals with those producers for their left over product for very cheap. They supplement the feed with some other stuff like oyster shells for calcium. Bone meal from meat producers, bakery meal from stale or expired bread, wheat middles from milling flour, and so on. None of them are expensive primary products but whatever the cheapest local sources are producing as waste in huge quantities. Some places will even give the stuff away because the cost of transporting is less than its worth in compost. Since the input ingredients are variable and the feed manufacturers have to plan for that, they offer the big farms steep discounts on long term contracts that fix their costs.
A chicken lays a few hundred eggs per year so they’re very economically productive and you can house hundreds or thousands of them per coop somewhere the land, water, and labor are cheap.
Although we’ve sacrificed animal welfare, sanitation, and quality to get those prices.
The store is happy to lose a dollar on the eggs to get you to stop there, it's not just about the production.
I haven't made an omelet in months and I'm still eating like a king. Why are people so obsessed with eggs? Are they a linchpin to the American diet or something?
I have a hen and get an egg once every few days. I had two for a while, but I have had this one for years.
I live in an urban area, but I don’t even lock her up. She just wanders about. Sometimes she goes out the front gate, and people knock on my door and ask if I’ve lost a chicken. She always seems to go back to her coop out the back to sleep and lay. Occasionally, she starts laying in some random place. When I notice there are no eggs for a week, I go hunting. When I take the eggs, she seems to go back to laying in the coop.
The biggest issue I have is if I leave the door open and don’t put a little bit of wood that she can’t jump over, she comes into the house. They poop every now and then no matter where they are, so it’s a minor issue but still annoying. She knows the cat food is in the laundry and raids it if she gets in. If I leave the front door open and she can see it from the back, she will rush around the side of the house and run in through the front door.
I loved having our 6 chickens, but they do take some work to take care of.
Alternatively, we could ensure that government policy doesn't do this in the first place.
Egg prices are normal in Arizona in the US. (I wonder how transient the perturbation in prices was elsewhere.)
As a european that until recently owned 20+ chickens I can tell you no, it is not the answer unless you really want your own chickens.
Owning your own chickens has a bunch of downsides:
- They get sick / get parasites and may require expensive medication or massive amounts of work.
- They require warmth if you live in a cold place like me, and heating costs money.
- They eat a lot and unless you buy in large quantities, it is expensive. And if you buy in large quantities, you must protect the grain from mold and mice which can be hard.
- They require a lot of maintenance since they are pretty stupid and dirty animals that poop in their own water supply, food etc.
- You will get a lot more mice on your property and possibly, in your house.
- You are worried about bird flu, so you need to cover the coop with a roof. Building a roof is expensive, I spent ~$1300 for materials. That is a lot of eggs.
That said, you can get colorful nice eggs from animals you know have a good life and are healthy. Where I am from, that is largely possible in regular stores however but in some areas of the world I assume animal care is a lot worse.
I think more people should have their own animals, but they do require time and effort, more than most people can spare I would believe. We sold all of them due to this reason. We did not profit from having them, but rather lost both time and money but it is (mostly) a fun experience at least. And our waste was heavily reduced since you can feed them your food even if that is illegal where I live if you want to sell your eggs (you can buy a carrot, put it in your bed and sleep with it a week but if you lay it on a plate where you eat your food, it becomes illegal to give them it if you intend to sell the eggs).
I spent quite some time on farms and while chickens are adorable, the amount of poop you have to deal with is going to be a killer to most people. So in the spirit of HN, and if this upward trend of eggs' price continues, I have 2 business ideas:
- Uber for eggs. One household in the hood does all the chicken chores and sale eggs very locally to only some small ZIP code. Of course considering cost on a small home scale, eggs would be most likely at 15% price of shelf ones. Also bigger farmer could not just come and order thousands at such low price because the owner would not have capacity.
- diapers for chicks. If you can invent cheap diaper for chickens then 90% of chicks pollution is gone. you still have to deal with food, water, etc, BUT the major turn off will always be amount of excrement they produce.
Considering the price of eggs today, if nothing gets changed and flus will prevail, these are a billion dollar ideas :)
Edit: unless of course someone is doing that already :) I haven't checked.
I couldn't find anything online about it but some old guy in a youtube video talked about them using chickens to heat houses long ago.
They build the chicken coop against the house with a very thin wall between it and the living room.
Chickens have 41-42°C body temperature. (105-107°F) With a bit of help from fermenting poop they sit very close together and heat up the coop until it gets to hot. One chicken will go outside and walk around in the snow.
The otherwise isolated living room acts like a buffer, they gradually heat it up and it helps stabilize the coop.
I've never seen this thing in action but the old man said it worked really well. I also have no idea how many chickens were used. It would require a breed that does well in cold climate. Today people put electric heaters in the chicken coop.
If it really works that well, combined with the eggs, it could make it profitable.
i didn't realize keeping backyard chickens for food security would be so controversial when i posted this
> dominant egg producers . . . have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power
Call me ignorsnt, but I'm surprised to see fewer cases of this kind of exploitative capitalism here in the EU. The only similar case that cones to mind is the gas and diesel price hike. Am I missing something or are Americans just more accepting of agressive capitalism like this? Something similar is Healthcare. Insulin for example is dirt cheap to produce but costs the buyer hundreds (iirc) of dollars.
I don't think Americans are more accepting of aggressive capitalism, they're victims of an exploitative system that has completely captured their government, media, education, and every aspect of life. Sure many of them are willing participants, or victims who aspire to join the all-powerful ruling class - but that's the result of generations of social engineering and brutal suppression of any viable alternatives.
Anyone with enough critical thinking should be eating on a plant-based diet.
I won’t explain all the points as they’re widely explained around the web and just a search away.
1)Ethics
2)Health
3)Environment
4)Politics
We have raised a few hens at our hobby farm over the years. The eggs are nice and all, but they're actually quite fragile animals, and then you go and get attached to them and they get suddenly sick and slowly die on you in horrible ways. And veterinary care for backyard chickens is seriously problematic and difficult to get and expensive.
My wife fell seriously in love with keeping chickens and it kind of emotionally broke her. Always tried so hard to do things right, and something has always gone wrong.
I wouldn't advise it, personally, to most people.
Ducks are apparently a bit more resilient though. And duck eggs are great.
Yes, raising animals requires the mindset of… raising animals. They’re not pets and life happens to them which most people are very disconnected from these days.
It requires a level of detachment not everyone can accomplish. I brought them home, thinking that's how it would be. My wife fell in love with them, and basically stole them from me. And then it's been years of tears.
what are they dying of? I assume it isn't weather. I was shocked when my Wisconsin coworkers said their chickens handle -10F weather no problem in the winter.
there's just a pile of things. usually reproductive -- becoming egg bound, etc. there's parasites, viruses, bacterial infections. and being flock animals, they hide it, too.
yeah some varieties of chicken are remarkably tough around cold which is crazy considering their original tropical origin.
Guys please for the love of God. Dont eat so many eggs. We have cut down our egg consumption to 4 per week between the two of us. And I don’t think about the cost. I can afford it. I think about the supply.
Please please reduce your egg consumption. If you have people who are unhealthy and in need of nutrition, get as many eggs for them as you can. And leave it for them only. But if you are healthy, leave it for others.
Bird Flu saunters into the chat, infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands via backyard chickens that have zero health oversight
Remember, the case fatality rate of Bird Flu is approximately 52%, and this is with modern medical assistance for those requiring hospitalization. Without modern medical assistance (once it collapses), that rate is a third again higher.
Backyard chickens would increase the rate of cross species infection. Cats, dogs, wild animals, all would have increased access to viral load.
And obviously humans.
Most farms in australia with animals now post biohazard warnings, and instructions on how to be on the property (mostly, don't be on the property)
I love backyard chooks, lived next door to them for a decade, had the benefit of chook-poo fertiliser for the garden. This is a terrible time to keep chickens, distributed into the community at large.
This disease is hitting seal populations hard. This disease poses risks to endangered species in captive breeding programmes. This disease will be risky for immunocompromised people, small kids, pregnant women.
"The Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on the federal workforce through mass firings, funding freezes and communication blackouts is hampering the ability of public health professionals to respond to the growing threat of avian flu.
As egg prices continue to rise and more cases are detected, state and local health officials say there is no clear plan of action from the administration."
https://thehill.com/homenews/5154415-trump-moves-hamper-bird...
Plus our new HHS secretary is an anti-vaxxer! I'm sure nothing will go wrong.
I heard Trump was voted in because people were angry about the high price of eggs (among other things) which Trump promised to fix "on day 1".
Trump cultists will find a way to excuse this and blame it on DEI/woke/immigrants/Marxists, but those who voted for him because they thought he would bring prices down are in for a rude awakening when they discover they were misled (though I can't feel sorry for them, there were so many signs).
Rayts. They bring rats. Lots of them. Ok if your in the countryside with big land and farms, horrible home infestation s if not.
> Are backyard chickens the answer?
No. Trump is the answer (and DOGE!). Once we get rid of all the DEI/woke/Marxists in government, egg prices will fall. Have faith. Praise Trump!
That’s why I almost thought this was satire. Didn’t people just vote for for lower grocery prices and emergency economic improvements ? Rather than doing democracy we’re now going back to farming for our own food during a bird flu pandemic ?
“Weird”.
No? You just fill in a form. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/register-as-a-keeper-of-less-tha...
no, bird flu can still infect your backyard flock