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Eggs US – Price – Chart

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Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#791

Post by ammojamo »

cullenking wrote: post #763
ammojamo wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

there is absolutely a reason to kill your chickens that aren't laying - it costs money to feed them. if you don't optimize for price by slaughtering your older hens you will easily be paying > $10 a dozen for eggs. all bets are off though if you consider chickens pets, instead of livestock. basic economics for me: 20 chickens, a dozen eggs a day, 30 dozen eggs a month. decent non-organic feed is $20 a bag, organic is…

All good points, but I would add a couple of things:

1. Scale also comes into play: We only have 8 hens, and are able to significantly supplement their feed with scraps from the kitchen, which are effectively free. The chooks are free ranging over a similar area (~half an acre), so the lower density means more free-range food for them, I guess. As a result, our feed costs per egg are actually much lower than if we had more chooks, and keeping a few old hens around is a negligible cost for us.

2. We regard our chooks somewhere halfway between pets and livestock - it's not a binary choice. We enjoy having them around so they have some intrinsic value for us, but at the same time if they were getting too expensive to keep, we'd be OK with occasionally cooking one up.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#792

Post by ammojamo »

jen729w wrote: post #701
ammojamo wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 love…

We do have some ISA browns which are 2-3 years old, but no lash eggs yet – they all seem pretty happy – I guess it just depends.

That said, I'm not that emotionally attached to them – I like them, care for them, but if I thought they were seriously sick I would put them down. We're all different :-)

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#793

Post by tfourb »

xyzzyz wrote: post #751
tfourb wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition). This sounds intelligent, but is extremely wrong perspective. For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave f…

Nowhere did I say that we should just transplant African smallholder farms and their underlying (and often deficient) systems worldwide. That would obviously be stupid. Just as stupid as arguing that there is nothing to learn from people who have mostly succeeded (because most of them are still alive and their populations are growing) feeding themselves from their own land despite having the worst starting position imaginable.

> For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high).

Capital constraints are an extremely common problem for African farmers, not "a small amount of cases". It could easily be remedied with the right support. Or simply by regulating international trade in a way that does not allow excessive subsidies in the E.U., U.S. and elsewhere completely destroy the local market for agricultural products on the continent.

At the same time, fertilizer overuse is extremely well documented in "modern agriculture" across the world. It has extremely bad externalities, from CO2 emissions to over saturating local water reserves, which of course Big Ag usually does not have to pick up the tap for.

If you internalize the costs of fertilizer use, "modern" agriculture quickly becomes uncompetitive. You can see this in many European countries (i.e. Netherlands, Ireland), where the enforcement of nitrate regulations has basically put whole sectors of the agricultural industry out of business.

> But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.

No, but we should learn from it what we can. Especially with climate change rapidly leading to less availability of water and restrictions on using fertilizers.

> Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector.

Again: both the calories and the nutrition to adequately feed the entire population of the world is easily available, including in most cases locally or regionally. If it doesn't reach specific people, it is not an availability problem, but a distribution problem.

Most emergency aid organizations have long since started sourcing both calories and nutrition for disaster relief regionally because they can.

Is Africa's agricultural sector terribly inefficient? Yes, of course. Is there nothing to learn from African smallholders? Hell no!. Will "modern agriculture" have to change radically, including by incorporating lessons and practices from smallholders from around the world if we want agriculture to stop messing up the climate and literally killing the lion's share of natural diversity? You bet!

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#794

Post by DiscourseFan »

iancmceachern wrote: post #770
hattmall wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not make sense,to me, can you elaborate? I know I spend too much time / effort cost optimizing. Interested in reasonable ways to justify not doing so!

Just let go of it. Logic yourself there. Calculate a cost of your time, maybe it's your salary, maybe you come about it a bit differently. Then if you spend 10 mins saving 8 cents on Ramen, and you like the cheaper Ramen less, you have a paradigm within which you can objectively (not emotionally) determine if you are wasting your time (therefore money) on a false optimization, or actually doing good for yourself.

Optimization of optimization does not escape itself, clearly.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#795

Post by aucisson_masque »

cco wrote: post #653
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…

Having slaughtered my fair share of chickens on a relatively small but not back yard operation, there is a much easier way! Buy a t-post (any 3-5 foot rigid metal pole will do but a t-post has perfect geometry). Next, you'll grab your chicken, lay her down on her back or stomach [1], once she has settled down you're going to lay the t-post gently across her spine just a bit behind her skull. Now place your feet on ei…

That's actually very clever.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#796

Post by aucisson_masque »

picture wrote: post #775
Yajirobe wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all so brutal. I can’t believe you people are discussing such things so nonchalantly

I think your sentiment encapsulates the hypocrisy of modern people where the systems have developed over thousands of years to further and further insulate us from all the less pretty aspects of life, to a point where we largely forget the fact that we shit and kill things for food and greed. Our meat comes pre-portioned on a polystyrene tray and wrapped under cellophane. Just abstract blocks of yummy protein. We als…

All this kind of city people thinking goes out of the windows once you're very hungry.

Then you see everything as a piece of meat.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#797

Post by snakeyjake »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #788
snakeyjake wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a minority (Asian) I feel the opposite of oppressed. That's because strong acceptable use polices based on the "E" in "DEI" meant that organizations ranging in size from Meta to Hacker News deleted comments when they turned into "kill the dirty ch**ks" during COVID. It is now acceptable on Meta to post comments calling trans people mentally ill sexual predators. Why do you think that, given a crisis requiring a b…

Oh my gosh, this is just such nonsense. You think the whole world is about meta comments? Which demographics do you think say the most terrible things about South-East Asian people? This demographic does better in this country than any other and yet you think the parent does not feel oppressed because a recent social media site (in the history of this country) used to have more comment moderation? Is this real?

>You think the whole world is about meta comments?

Sentiment in the media, all media, including social media, turns into dead bodies if the rhetoric is allowed to get extreme enough.

It's been this way since the invention of public speaking.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#798

Post by gadders »

not_the_fda wrote: post #776
gadders wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

Its certainly an option. Chickens can live 7-12 years so that's a lot of feed for a chicken to not produce eggs. More economical to make soup. Their livestock, not pets.

I think I can afford the lifetime cost. Some of our hens are rescued battery hens as well so I'll take the financial hit for the good karma.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#799

Post by arresin »

gadders wrote: post #798
not_the_fda wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its certainly an option. Chickens can live 7-12 years so that's a lot of feed for a chicken to not produce eggs. More economical to make soup. Their livestock, not pets.

I think I can afford the lifetime cost. Some of our hens are rescued battery hens as well so I'll take the financial hit for the good karma.

Thanks for this. Appreciate counterbalancing anecdotes of egg farming without butchering.

Re: Eggs US – Price – Chart

#800

Post by ca98am79 »

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…

I have chickens also and, like with most other things, you don't have to cut off their heads if you don't want to.
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