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Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

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Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#591

Post by cortesoft »

atlgator wrote: post #458
redcobra762 wrote: post #436

I genuinely don't understand why the focus is on egg prices. Who out there is paying more than a total of $3-$5/month more in eggs? And no, even to the absolutely poorest among us, that's not a meaningful amount. Yes, egg prices, as a percentage are going up a lot, but as an absolute value? I can get a dozen eggs from Walmart right now for $5.46. That isn't, by any measurement, a lot of money more than I would have p…

Egg prices are artificially inflated from the massive culling of chickens by producers due to bird flu. Nevertheless, egg prices are being pushed as a negative economic indicator for political reasons.

I don't think 'artificial' is the right word there... more like 'temporarily' or 'from supply shock', but it isn't an artificial increase

Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#592

Post by alistairSH »

noah_buddy wrote: post #477
stickfigure wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything loves a chicken dinner. Unless you live in a city where the predator population has already been driven out, you are faced with the decision to either let them free roam (and accept a small but steady rate of predation) or keep them penned when not under direct supervision. There's not a third option.

Some sort of goat maybe?

Goats can be territorial, but I'm not aware of them having any particular inclination to guard chickens or livestock.

Livestock guard dogs work better, but then you're dealing with a large dog that isn't a pet and isn't socialized like a house dog.

Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#593

Post by gbear605 »

animal-husband wrote: post #541
partitioned wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life. The constant meat eater trolling about how its natural to eat meat and animals do it, ignore the fact that its not natural to keep animals in pens where they cant turn around for their entire life that is basically pure torture from birth to death. If all meat was produced…

Were that the case, you’d see vegans advocating for eating classically-husbanded animals. But I for one have never seen such a thing. And when I’ve spoken with vegans about this very topic, they’ve insisted that no animal can possibly be raised/slaughtered humanely – the belief seems almost axiomatic to them.

I’m generally a vegetarian, but I eat chicken, beef, and pork from local farms that raise the animals ethically.

Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#594

Post by aylmao »

iinnPP wrote: post #547
abtinf wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is expensive. Typically at Costco, 5 dozen eggs is under $12, sometimes as low as $8. Currently it is closer to $20, which is about your price.

Canada Costco sells 24 eggs for $6.79 CAD. $3.50 for 12 off-brand is available in grocers Google says today $6.79 CAD is $4.78 USD or ~0.20/egg USD

Just for the sake of sharing prices in the context of North America— in Mexico 12 eggs go for $2.21 [1], 18 for $2.46 [2] and 30 for $4.90 [3]. This is just a normal supermarket, and the brand is just a common local one, not the cheapest and not the most expensive.

[1] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-12-piezas/65002...

[2] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-18-piezas/39041...

[3] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-30-piezas/65002...

Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#595

Post by adrian_b »

pjerem wrote: post #290
qq99 wrote: post #93

As someone who once built a large coop [1] then just bought a pre-built shed for the 2nd coop, it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution. You will probably lose money overall for quite some time. I'm still probably underwater. BUT, there are definite upsides: - Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and…

I do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong. They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multi…

As a small child, I used to spend a part of the summer vacations with my grandparents, who had some land cultivated with a variety of crops and trees and they also raised some animals, including chicken which roamed freely through a big garden.

I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when called and sitting down, waiting to be petted, and standing up upon commands. (Because those chicken were used to roam freely, they were shy of human contact. Normally it was difficult to catch any one of them.)

My grandparents and their neighbors were astonished, despite the fact that they have kept chicken for all their lives, because they believed that chicken are too dumb to act like this.

Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#596

Post by PaulHoule »

whycome wrote: post #309
pjerem wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong. They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multi…

It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.

Some people get used to it. We did some work to prepare our barn for chickens but never quite 'pulled the trigger' because between our tenants and other friends we are swimming in eggs. (It was funny as hell that some of our chicken-keeping friends had a fox family living in a stump in front of their house. Their chicken house was solid but they'd catch the mama fox on the game camera every night bringing home a chicken from somebody else's flock every night.)

Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.

Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.

Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#597

Post by shagie »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #507
shagie wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is a difficult problem for schools. They need to have food that meets the standards (as they are defined), appealing enough to 6 through {age} range to have them eat it, something that can be prepared with relatively low skill demands, and something that can be prepared easily in the quantities needed with the kitchen staff provided. That really gets down to reheated chicken nuggets, pizza, and other c…

100%; I'm not blaming schools, just pointing out to non-parents how this happens. A lot of non-parents don't have the context. The kids get used to eating it at schools and birthday parties where people go for "safe" choices like pizza. I, too, remember in my elementary school days in the 80's, that we had real, cafeteria prepared lunches (shep's pie was my favorite). But it was also a small rural school. > They don'…

That is an interesting rabbit hole to go down...

https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2003/10/07/fussy-eating-ma...

> Scientists at the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Unit, University College London, wondered if children were reluctant to eat any unfamiliar foods, or whether they were selectively rejecting certain types – perhaps those most likely to pose a threat to heath. Early in human history, the presence of toxins within many plants made eating fruit and vegetables risky for children, while meat carried a high risk of food poisoning.

That was from 2003... article from the same author in 2005: Age and gender differences in children's food preferences - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15975175/

And the term to look for is Neophobia (related article from 2022 Neophobia—A Natural Developmental Stage or Feeding Difficulties for Children? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9002550/ )

> 4. Causes of Food Neophobia The source of food neophobia can be traced back to evolution when a neophobic attitude protected mammals from consuming potentially poisonous food. As an omnivorous species, to survive, humans had to distinguish between safe and poisonous food. Although this ability has lost its value today, it can still be observed in children around 2 years of age (sometimes earlier), when unfamiliar foods or foods served differently than before cause anxiety in the child, and a relative preference for familiar foods is apparent.

Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#598

Post by PaulHoule »

adrian_b wrote: post #595
pjerem wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong. They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multi…

As a small child, I used to spend a part of the summer vacations with my grandparents, who had some land cultivated with a variety of crops and trees and they also raised some animals, including chicken which roamed freely through a big garden. I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when ca…

My understanding is that birds are about as intelligent as mammals.

Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.

Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#599

Post by scotty79 »

nemo44x wrote: post #323
whycome wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.

I don’t know, farmers always had dogs on the farm but they didn’t eat them and continued to eat the chickens. Chicken is really great and succulent. Hard to resist frying one of them up and sucking the meat off the bone. Absolutely no desire to do that with a dog.

Dogs are hard to keep for meat at any scale. We only eat easy animals. Sympathy has very little to do with it.

Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

#600

Post by aziaziazi »

slothtrop wrote: post #548
aziaziazi wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that a whole food diet is better than the “boxed” one but I have no comparaison point for the US. I’m from France and many people value whole food, “good products” and cook at home however even those gets diabetes, intestinal and blood cancers and other problems that would be easily avoided with more vegetable consumption. The fact is meat is often the central peace of the dish, second the carbs and then sala…

> diabetes This scales principally with excess weight gain. > The fact is meat is often the central peace of the dish, second the carbs and then salads, cabbages and roots. This is one meal, dinner, and the fact that it is more protein-heavy is not the problem. Nevermind ratio , some diets are devoid of fiber. The secondary "carbs" are just pasta, white bread, crackers, etc. If you consume a whole-foods diet, with a…

> If you consume a whole-foods diet, with a dinner that has a larger meat component, you will easily, easily have enough fiber.

I mostly agree but not with the easy part: you thirst has a maximum and people can’t ingest as much food they want without a limit. If you have a large meat component there’s less space in your belly for the vegetables. The point for carbs is the same (they cut your satiety and you’ll be less hungry for the cauliflower). Thought I get your point that a diet including meat isn’t bad in itself, but if you look around the biggest meat eaters are not the fittest, however the opposite might often be true.

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