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Eggs US – Price – Chart

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Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#381

Post by declan_roberts »

joe8756438 wrote: post #322
oaththrowaway wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lost 2 flocks of chickens to a combination of raccoons, foxes, and skunks. Interestingly enough none of those could kill my turkeys - they are big enough to fight them off I guess. They don't lay as many eggs though. It is a lot of work, but after my last group was killed off 2 months I have not impressed by store eggs, so I'm planning on re-enforcing my coop so I can get another group of them soon.

i have a simple system for keep my birds safe from land predators. so the birds get a point for each level of protection they receive. each group needs two points to be safe. i mainly raise geese, which are tough, not going to be bothered by a hawk. geese (turkeys similar) start with one point. an electric fence is one point, a fully enclosed coop is one point, night light (.5?), guard animal (.5?). chickens are alwa…

I know people here who specifically add a "guard goose" to their hen flock for protection. They swear it helps against predators.

We have a very reinforced coop and an automatic coop door so we've never had any issues.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#382

Post by toast0 »

ge96 wrote: post #332
toast0 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's brutal; but roosters don't get along. You would have to have a huge amount of space to raise all the males. For mammals, you can castrate the males and raise them for meat, but that's not feasable for birds.

A messed up thought is I wonder if they have looked at trying to get chickens to produce only female chicks not sure how some hormone or the eggs are injected without compromising integrity

Looking around, this seems like an area with a lot of interest (for a long time, usda has a description of a pamphlet from 1921 [1]).

Here's a scientific looking study about adjusting incubation temperature in Korat Chickens. [2]

TLDR: higher than standard temperature results in similar hatch percentage, but more genetic female, morphological male chicks. Lower than standard temperature results in a lower hatch rate, but more genetic male, morphological female chicks.

I saw some less scientific articles that attributed higher surviving female chicks at lower incubation temperature to male chicks being less likely to survive in those conditions, but since this paper did genetic analysis, it appears there's some amount of temperature dependent sex determination in addition to genetic sex determination. I didn't look around to see if I could find a paper showing this in more typical US livestock breeds of chickens, and at least from these results, it seems like while the proportion of female to male chicks increased, the number of female chicks at 5 weeks after hatching, did not due to differences in mortality.

I also saw a news release about giving the mothers stress hormone and seeing more female chicks, but that artificial hormones is not acceptable practice in the poultry industry, so they were looking for other ways to induce that reaction. [3]

I also saw some references to determining (presumably genetic) sex before hatching, which could lead to earlier intervention, which may be more humane. It didn't look like there was anything definite there, but I'm going to stop going down the rabbit hole here.

[1] https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/ipd/frostonchickens/exhibi...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645652...

[3] https://www.poultryworld.net/health-nutrition/stressful-bird...

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#383

Post by WillPostForFood »

niceice wrote: post #246
llamaimperative wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we must freeze USDA funding, halt all public health communications from our federal government, and urgently (TOP PRIORITY!!!) scrub all mentions of the word "women" from every public-facing piece of scientific content we can find.

Source for the claim they are removing the word "women" from every public-facing piece of scientific content?

There is no real source, it is a lie.

https://chcoc.gov/content/initial-guidance-regarding-preside...

The order is to remove gender ideology, i.e. trans. Switch gender back to sex (binary).

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#384

Post by mlyle »

epistasis wrote: post #279
Chabsff wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with that reasoning is that it fails to take into account that risk is a commodity now. It's often more profitable to go for short term profit and offload your risk to an insurer who amortizes that monetary risk in a pool containing a bunch of other industries. For critical services like food production , that's a problem. "Well, we don't have food, but it's okay because screw production went well" doesn't…

I'm not sure in what sense you mean risk is a commodity, and why it's a problem. I'm also unsure what changed to make it so now, as opposed to having ever been so. Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully. Those who did not take risks into account lost their bet. Eggs are priced higher for some, but are pretty much available everywhere still, and have not dipped belo…

> Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully.

I don't know why you're saying this. Imagine I'm investing.

If I "take risk into account" and select stocks anyways, I may lose a bunch of money one year. But I expect to make more on average than bonds.

Looking at a year where bonds excel compared to stocks doesn't mean that I failed to "take risk into account."

Likewise, a conventional producer of eggs that has now had a significant downturn in production may be having a bad year, but this doesn't mean that they're not following a profit maximizing strategy or not taking risk into account.

> Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine.

I think this is making the same kind of mistake: looking at today's outcome and assuming that reflects the risk picture.

We're not observing too much famine right now. But we could certainly have a more of a risk of the most catastrophic possible famines now because of things like monoculture, critical links in production, climate risk, etc. Just looking around and saying "all is great today" or "conventional egg producers are having trouble today" or "stocks are down 15% for the year" does not capture the picture of risk, particularly for rare events.

The best we can do is try to interpret sentinel events like this one and think about what else can happen.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#385

Post by declan_roberts »

_tariky wrote: post #45

Perfect time to build chicken coop. Also eggs price is increasing globally witch is not good.

I agree. Just remember that hens take around 18 weeks or longer to start laying so get started sooner rather than later.

And you can get an automatic coop door to make your life easier.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#386

Post by WillPostForFood »

llamaimperative wrote: post #41
PaulHoule wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the kind of thing that today's right-wingers would accuse today's transgenderists of wanting to do. I think you'd have a hard time expressing traditional values if you couldn't say "woman".

The internal incoherence is a feature of a cult, not a bug! The more deliberately twisted shit they can make you believe, the more dependent your entire cognitive architecture is on them.

[flagged]

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#387

Post by MrLeap »

theonething wrote: post #243
oaththrowaway wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lost 2 flocks of chickens to a combination of raccoons, foxes, and skunks. Interestingly enough none of those could kill my turkeys - they are big enough to fight them off I guess. They don't lay as many eggs though. It is a lot of work, but after my last group was killed off 2 months I have not impressed by store eggs, so I'm planning on re-enforcing my coop so I can get another group of them soon.

> I have not impressed by store eggs Curious to know what differences do you discern between store and fresh eggs? Not doubting you, just curious to know.

In my experience they taste richer. The yolks are more orange than yellow.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#388

Post by ljf »

bombcar wrote: post #368
aj_icracked wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From an absolute financial standpoint it might be hard to justify eggs from backyard chickens, though once you realize that they can eat something like 25% of their feed can be grass or clippings, and that some percentage can be redirected household waste (think: peels, food waste, etc) it becomes much more favorable. As you mentioned, most treat them like pets which means they get to learn how long-lived chickens ca…

I grew up on a (very) small farm - I still go to throw apple cores out of the window, as when I was younger the was always /something/ that would be happy for the treat. All dinner scraps were saved (or rather taken straight out), and all the windfall and rotten apples were happily eaten by the sheep, cow, geese and chickens.

I really hate throwing food away now, really pains me!

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#389

Post by WillPostForFood »

Spivak wrote: post #14
llamaimperative wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we must freeze USDA funding, halt all public health communications from our federal government, and urgently (TOP PRIORITY!!!) scrub all mentions of the word "women" from every public-facing piece of scientific content we can find.

I did think it was funny that they included 'women' and 'female' in that list. Medicine is gonna have a hard time with that one, "this drug has some adverse effects with uhh… ovulating persons?"

[flagged]

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#390

Post by jcranmer »

9283409232 wrote: post #303
duxup wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think that one was ignorance more than direct malice. I think he is in fact as ignorant / incurious as he seems.

Both are bad. Trump was wrong because he was speaking on outdated information but he wouldn't accept that he was wrong so his administration created some data so he could say he was right.

> he was speaking on outdated information

I don't think there was ever any information, outdated or otherwise, that suggested that the hurricane was going to hit Alabama. The theory I've heard that the makes the most sense is that Trump saw a report about the damage it was going to inflict on the Bahamas, mixed up Alabama and Bahamas, tweeted condolences to Alabama, and the administration tried to defend his mix-up by concocting fake information to explain it.

(In many respects, if he had just quietly dropped the matter, it would have been largely ignored since it was cleared up pretty quickly; it was the childish response to try to justify why it wasn't a mistake that made it such an issue.)

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