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Eggs US – Price – Chart

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Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#471

Post by thuanao »

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…

You may be interested to know MIT did a project called ["The Billion Prices Project"](https://thebillionpricesproject.com) to scrape the web and calculate CPI.

Sorry to all the tinfoil hats, it closely matched official CPI.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#472

Post by ANewFormation »

shkkmo wrote: post #405
bluGill wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antibiotics are not widely used. There are many regulations, to use them at all you need a vet to sign off. You also have to pay for them. Then the animal has to be off of them for weeks before you can sell it. In any case where are talking about a virus which an antibiotic won't touch at all. Modern large farms have very strict bio controls. Things like: You shower before entering the barn (there is a shower in the…

> Antibiotics are not widely used. There are many regulations, to use them at all you need a vet to sign off. This isn't true, some types of antibiotics are routinely used as a preventative measure on chicken farms. > Both FDA and the World Health Organization (WHO) rank antibiotics relative to their importance in human medicine. The highest ranking is “critically important.” Antibiotics in this category are used spa…

While I'm unsure about chickens, they're also [ab]used for larger meat animals like cows and turkeys because they make the animals grow larger, faster.

The fun thing is - nobody knows exactly why this happens. There's a bunch of hypotheses, but they're exceptionally hand-wavy.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#473

Post by bombcar »

silisili wrote: post #442
bombcar wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most places that allow them don't have much in the way of inspection, etc, until you start selling the eggs. Amusingly enough, rural towns are more likely to prohibit backyard chickens than suburbs of major cities these days. This is because if you want chickens in a rural area, the assumption is you'll buy just outside town; the people who moved into town don't want to hear roosters (which are often banned or severe…

Noticed that too. The two rural towns near me bans any poultry with under 5 acres, which is essentially the entire town. Luckily I live right outside their limits. RE: roosters, a lot of cities that permit backyard chickens do not allow roosters as they're considered a bit of a nuisance. As I'm sure you're aware(though I've found many people aren't), roosters are not required for the keeping of chickens nor the produ…

They can be useful for flock protection, if you don't get a dud rooster. But in general, they're more annoying than you expect.

And yeah, you don't need one to "get them to start laying" though if you want to try to actually hatch some eggs you will need one (or buy the eggs ready to go).

Now I've heard that the roosters in Kansas/Nashville, them do lay eggs ...

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#474

Post by wahern »

shkkmo wrote: post #405
bluGill wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antibiotics are not widely used. There are many regulations, to use them at all you need a vet to sign off. You also have to pay for them. Then the animal has to be off of them for weeks before you can sell it. In any case where are talking about a virus which an antibiotic won't touch at all. Modern large farms have very strict bio controls. Things like: You shower before entering the barn (there is a shower in the…

> Antibiotics are not widely used. There are many regulations, to use them at all you need a vet to sign off. This isn't true, some types of antibiotics are routinely used as a preventative measure on chicken farms. > Both FDA and the World Health Organization (WHO) rank antibiotics relative to their importance in human medicine. The highest ranking is “critically important.” Antibiotics in this category are used spa…

> maintain poultry health and welfare

That's a little deceptive. The antibiotics widely used by the industry are used for growth promotion. I don't know how it works, but I don't believe it's because they're keeping the birds healthy--i.e. treating infections. Some sources suggest part of the mechanism is by suppressing otherwise healthy or benign gut microbiota that compete for calories. Antibiotics have been used this way for nearly a century. There have been attempts to phase out subtherapeutic antibiotic use, but the practice is standard operating procedure in the US, and the US is a major chicken exporter. It's banned in the EU, though.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#475

Post by bombcar »

ryandrake wrote: post #436
bombcar wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so common in small businesses. The biggest example I see is single-family landlords who are notoriously bad at doing the honest math. This is often why small businesses survive until the owner dies/retires, because the were making much less money than needed to continue. The biggest one is ignoring location costs because they own the building (avoiding rents or mortgage which would immediately put the busines…

If the business lasted until the owner died, then it was making at least the amount of money it needed. Not all businesses need to grow or make tons of money, if they at least serve their owner's lifestyle. If I could make a business that supported me until I died, I'd start it right now.

Yeah, it's called a "lifestyle business" and you can't buy them, but you can start them (or sometimes be given one).

(Many common small businesses are lifestyle businesses, because they're individual service businesses, like plumber, contractor, etc.)

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#476

Post by bombcar »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #460
bombcar wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the assumption they're making is that we want to guarantee a certain reliability of food, and that even if we have perfect insurance that pays out when there isn't enough food, we just have money, and no food. That's a theoretical problem that could occur, but is extremely unlikely. The worst we'll see is what we have now (eggs are spendy) or a certain type of food disappearing for awhile (tomatoes one year w…

Here's an idea. Let's get a large proportion of our calories from inefficient animal sources. Then if there is a widespread crop failure we can eat the breeding stock and then the animal feed. That's generally what happens in Africa. It doesn't work as well in North America because consumers here are too rich to switch to barley and oats when wheat is expensive.

The problem in the USA is we produce about infinity billion times the calories we need.

If food was a problem in the US we wouldn't be putting corn in our cars or our cows.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#477

Post by TylerE »

hammock wrote: post #444
TylerE wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because capitalism? Small farmers are already fighting brutal economies of scale.

If they don't want to charge more though?

When their gas prices go up, their equipment goes up, their feed goes up, etc, they won’t have any choice.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#478

Post by bombcar »

ljf wrote: post #388
bombcar wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yeah, the amount of food waste that can easily be "reprocessed" on even a small farm is tremendous.

Not only do you have reduced waste, you have reduced packaging (no need to put the eggs in cartons if you're just carrying them to the kitchen).

People usually thing you need pigs to eat waste, but most farm animals will take some or all (the biggest risk is accidentally giving an animal something it shouldn't have).

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#479

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

The disease affects wild bird populations heavily and is just as transmissible to disparate flocks as it is larger flocks. Breeders tend to keep their flocks isolated, often for genetic reasons, and because they're their cash cows versus just cattle.

I generally agree with you about centralization and monocultures, just in this case I don't think it's really going to change things.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#480

Post by ars »

miltonlost wrote: post #416
ars wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's simply not true. It's being spread by wild birds, not concentrated farming. I know people love to blame "big anything", but it's just not true here. Here's a source: https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/virus-transmission/avian-in-bir... "Domesticated birds (chickens, turkeys, ducks, etc.) may become infected with avian influenza A viruses through direct contact with infected waterfowl or other infected poultry, o…

"Domesticated chickens may become infected by wild waterfowl or by other infected poultry", and other infected poultry includes domesticated chickens. Nowhere in that web page does it say that domesticated chickens cannot spread it to other domesticated chickens. Once a domesticated chicken becomes infected (however it became infected) in a massive concentrated area, it will spread that infection to other domesticate…

I'm not conflating it. Spread with Avian flu means to other places. A single chicken in a farm means ALL chickens will get it. That's such a trivial thing, it's not even worth noting.

What matters is how does it spread.

I think what's confusing you is that there are diseases where a single infected animal does NOT mean all animals will get it, and in those cases the more concentrated the farm the higher percent of other animals will get it.

That exists. But it's not the case here. Here it's 100%, doesn't matter if it's a concentrated farm, or a pastoral farm with chickens walking in the house.

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