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Eggs US – Price – Chart

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Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#351

Post by bluGill »

roughly wrote: post #200
uticus wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are now often cheaper...increase the resilience of the system as a whole cheaper and resilience are not proportional here. in fact, cheaper is proportional to efficient, which large producers are better at (apart from questions of healthiness, etc). i can't argue against resilience though, although that comes at a cost. speaking as a backyard-chicken-raiser of some years.

"Cheaper" varies by the costs of the various inputs. A local chicken farmer which sells to a local market has, aside from the costs of the land, chickens, feed, and labor, the costs of putting the eggs in a truck and driving the truck to the market. Larger distributors have the cost of collecting the eggs, driving them to a warehouse, storing them, potentially repeating that while optimizing inventory and locality, a…

Many of your small producers are not counting their full costs. They see they $ from selling eggs, but don't count the cost of the barn, their labor, the land the chickens are on... A real accountant would find all those hidden costs and figure out how you allocate the cost of the light bulbs in the barn to each chicken - only when you have all those numbers can you really see if it works out.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#352

Post by roughly »

likeabatterycar wrote: post #348
mplanchard wrote: post #18

Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper. This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.

Ok, but, you can't feed 340M people with "fresh, local eggs". While it's nice you buy six eggs at a time from Joe Farmer off the back of his '72 Ford, but factory farms are an unfortunate necessity to feed everyone that isn't so privileged.

We’re not reliably feeding 340M people eggs right now, either. The current system has significant friction points and deadweight loss.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#353

Post by davidw »

crtez wrote: post #207
davidw wrote: post #171

I've been fiddling around with the Albertsons API for fun. It's kind of neat to see a whole year's worth of purchases in nicely formatted JSON. I have half an idea to create something like a personal inflation tracker, but I'm still thinking about it. It's entirely possible that these goons will start fiddling with official statistics around things like unemployment and inflation to tell us that inflation is not actu…

Is it an official API? I’m not able to find any links about it, if you could provide some I’d love to look into my own purchases.

If you get in touch with me (email or Blue Sky DM) I would be happy to think about how to share what I have so far, although it's not much at all.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#354

Post by aj_icracked »

TylerE wrote: post #339
aj_icracked wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with this. After selling my last company (iCracked W12) I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables. I've always wanted to build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture and we decided to start wit…

Seems interesting a bit but surely the economics are rather brutal? Even a traditional coop has an ROI of years and years and years.

It's a good question - From what we've seen most suburban people that raise chickens don't do it to lower costs of eggs - they do it to have better control over the quality of food they eat, to teach their kids that you take care of the chickens, they take care of us. To eliminate food waste (avg family throws out 200+ lbs a year of food that can go to chickens, and because funnily enough most backyard farmers treat the chickens as family and pets vs just little egg-factories.

Avg hen lays about 250-270 eggs a year depending on breed. So 6 chickens (our coop is designed for 6) throws off about 1500 eggs a year. Avg American eats around 291 eggs + egg products per year (which is crazy!).

Most people build their coops or buy one from Tractor Supply or Amazon for $300 and day-old chicks are around $4 each and feed is inexpensive (50lb bag at Tractor Supply is $21). You can make the economics work super well if you want to but as most backyard chickens are treated as pets (I am leaving out large farms and homesteads, etc) a lot of people pamper and spend $ on their hens because it's more than just getting a lower cost egg if that makes sense.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#355

Post by miki123211 »

IMO, price comparisons are a very misleading signal if you want to understand what's really happening in the world. They tell you that something is now more expensive, but not whether that's due to external events, evil corporations, evil corporations blaming external events, or some mix of the three.

What you really want to look at is costs, income and profit margins in the supply chain, which prices are a direct result of.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#356

Post by rsync »

ge96 wrote: post #271
rafram wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were actually impossible to have affordable eggs without confining chickens to tiny cages for their entire lives, that would be a damning indictment of our entire food system. But luckily that isn't actually the case. The price difference between cage-free and "caged" eggs is negligible. I'm in New York City, not known for its local egg production, and I can still get cage-free eggs for $4/dozen. Kroker/Walmart…

I think the most brutal thing is when the male chicks are immediately sent into a shredder damn. Out of sight out of mind That's where I can be a proponent of lab-grown meat without consciousness

You should see what the roosters do when we let them live…

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#357

Post by lacksconfidence »

vlan0 wrote: post #220
tcdent wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been paying almost $11 for them.

Big city "tax"? Whole Foods and the local co-op out in WNY are both $8 a dozen.

My city has 30k people, although we are part of a larger metro. Store brand eggs are $9.50/dozen. Alternatively Costco is still selling 60 packs for $20, although they have had per customer limits recently and don't alway have stock. Works out to $4 per dozen. But thats a lot of eggs.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#358

Post by rcpt »

llamaimperative wrote: post #268
rcpt wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all great policies. And yes credits to buyers is pretty stupid. But this is still a far cry from "vote for me and your home value will go down".

Because why would you say that? You would say "we're going to build more housing."

People say that about eggs.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#359

Post by bluGill »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #237
mplanchard wrote: post #18

Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper. This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.

Canadian and Mexican egg prices haven’t budged because they vaccinate their chickens [1]. I’m not a fan of factory farming. But this isn’t a story about that. It’s a story about American (a) producers favouring cheap production by avoiding the cost of vaccination and (b) regulators favouring a policy of trade protectionism that keeps our neighbours’ cheap eggs off our grocery-store shelves. [1] https://www.slowboring…

Buried in that story is one more important point: if you vaccinate many countries will not let you sell that chicken to them anymore. US exports a lot of chicken to such countries and if we vaccinate that market dies. (or we can vaccinate some but not others and then deal with the supply chain complexity)

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#360

Post by singleshot_ »

afavour wrote: post #84
mplanchard wrote: post #18

Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper. This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.

This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.

If all the birds are in a farm, would you have more or less inter species infection than if lots of people lived close to chickens?

What’s worse for the community, eggs from factories going way up in price due to supply shocks, or rapid and pervasive infection in the community?

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