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Eggs US – Price – Chart

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Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#701

Post by jen729w »

ammojamo wrote: post #661
aucisson_masque wrote: post #599

Lots of people suggesting to build chicken coop. i have one, sure it's not much work. 2 minutes every day to grab the egg and bring the food and water, but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings. then there are the few occasion where you miss with the hatchet and it cuts half its neck, its h…

Just to offer a different experience, we've kept chooks for years and it's been great. However, we do have a large yard where they are free to range around – I think this is key. In my experience there is no need to kill a chook after 3 years. Average lifespan for a chick is 8-10 years. Egg laying frequency does decrease with age, but there's no need to kill them just because they're slowing down a bit. Our oldest ch…

> In my experience there is no need to kill a chook after 3 years

I assume you don't have ISA Browns? We just had 3, gorgeous girls, but they all started laying lash eggs at about 2yo.

The ISAs are bred to lay, and -- turns out! -- 300 eggs/year isn't sustainable for a poor little chook's insides.

Don't get ISA Browns. It's heartbreaking and, if you decide to treat it vs. letting them die (we did), expensive.

We loved our girls to death. Chickens are amazing pets.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#702

Post by blitzar »

whalesalad wrote: post #583
likeabatterycar wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how British eggs have deep, amber yolks. Are they force-feeding the hens Earl Grey?

a lot of farmers feed them marigold and other color enhancers to try and boost the color - because it is also a sign of the hen having a good diet

something about metrics becomes a target it fails to be a good metric springs to mind.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#703

Post by latency-guy2 »

bdangubic wrote: post #637
Retric wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost a round error comparatively doesn’t mean it’s 0.01%. People used to spend ~30% of their income on mass produced basic staple foods with very little meat they cooked at home. You can live like that on like 1$/day. Median household income is over 80k today so we are talking more than an older of magnitude price reduction. Get regular meal delivery etc and sure you can spend crazy money but it’s not really spendi…

family of 3, never ordered delivery in my life outside of pizza once in a blue moon and eating out no more than twice per month - food bill $1,900-ish / month

I have a similar build, basically all adults and I am the only one who pays for food. My monthly bill is about 30 - 60% your bill. Mostly sits in the 30 - 40% range.

I don't dine out, I don't drink, and I have some lifestyle + allergy restrictions for some things, but I tend to believe those restrictions actually make it more expensive than not.

I am also not in a VHCOL, but still quite high since I'm quite close to a major hub in an expensive suburb.

That number is insane to me. I would have to go high end on every single meal to get to the same number. I don't think I debate quality all that much either. I don't feel I cheap out either generally. Food is a fair bit less than 5% of what I make annually too.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#704

Post by eric-hu »

philipkglass wrote: post #572
crdrost wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So hens don't usually have to be force-fed. Some of that color can come from having a diverse source of proteins--like the bugs and insects that pasture-raised hens get access to--but farmers "in the know" will also add paprika and marigold to the usual soy-and-grain supplemental feed, to try to encourage it to come out a bit more.

A few years back I briefly thought that a rich yolk color was a quality signal, until I found that additives could produce that color cheaply. The color comes from dietary carotenoids [1]. Companies like BASF sell carotenoid feed additives that producers can employ to get a yolk color as rich as desired: https://nutrition.basf.com/global/en/animal-nutrition/our-pr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carotenoid

I wouldn't be surprised if you were correct in your belief and that this became a case of Goodhart's Law when implemented in the egg industry.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#706

Post by [deleted] »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #599

Lots of people suggesting to build chicken coop. i have one, sure it's not much work. 2 minutes every day to grab the egg and bring the food and water, but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings. then there are the few occasion where you miss with the hatchet and it cuts half its neck, its h…

[deleted]

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#707

Post by gadders »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #599

Lots of people suggesting to build chicken coop. i have one, sure it's not much work. 2 minutes every day to grab the egg and bring the food and water, but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings. then there are the few occasion where you miss with the hatchet and it cuts half its neck, its h…

>>but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings.

We've had chickens - up to about 20 at times - and have never done this. We're not farming them. Once they become too old to lay they can still hang out with the other chickens and scratch around. We don't mind that they're "retired".

I have had to dispatch sick chickens, or ones that have been attacked by foxes, but that's maybe one a year if that and I typically do it by wringing their necks.

//edit// And if you have a rooster, it stops a lot of the intra-hen fighting, especially if you introduce new hens into the flock.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#708

Post by close04 »

iancmceachern wrote: post #656
DiscourseFan wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We in fact do make most decisions in our lives based on finances, you're just not aware of most of them.

Try living your life the other way around for a while.

I agree with the sentiment but keep in mind that being able to do that is a luxury, not the baseline. Too many people in the world, very developed countries included, have to take decisions based exclusively on their finances, having no more room for the niceties than you have for a yacht.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#709

Post by tfourb »

xyzzyz wrote: post #684
explorigin wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network Years ago I worked on Farmforce that is basically this. In America we have centralized agriculture. Over the ocean, small-holder farmers in Africa provide lots of food to lots of markets. Keeping track of all of these farms, their herbicide and pesticide usage and weather-based yield projections is alre…

We should not model our food supply chain on Africa. In fact, it is beyond absurd to suggest it. African small holders run very unproductive farms, with horrible yields despite high labor intensive practices. Most countries have been on the brink of starvation up until very recently (some still are), and this only improved via adoption of modern farming practices.

This is ignorance at its worst.

Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition). They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture) that is often incredibly wasteful (except when it comes to paying their laborers a living wage).

"Modern farming practices" mostly translates to "use a tremendous amount of energy and really bad wages to produce a respectable surplus in calories and large profits for a few actors within the supply chain".

And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving. In 100% of cases lack of food is due to it not being made available by choice, i.e. because nobody is willing to pay for it, or it is actively withheld in war, etc.

Source: degree in development studies and more hours on African (and European) smallholder farms than I can count.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#710

Post by iancmceachern »

close04 wrote: post #708
iancmceachern wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try living your life the other way around for a while.

I agree with the sentiment but keep in mind that being able to do that is a luxury, not the baseline. Too many people in the world, very developed countries included, have to take decisions based exclusively on their finances, having no more room for the niceties than you have for a yacht.

Agreed.

I've found, in my own life, that when I'm hyper focused on optimizing things for cost I often get far less "out" of things. I end up not eating my whole dinner because I don't like it. But if I let go a bit, things are actually in aggregate more financially efficient when I'm getting more of what I pay for, if that makes sense.

It only works for people who are built this way though. Not hedonists.

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