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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?

#611

Post by aylmao »

asciimov wrote: post #555
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…

There was a time in my life where our household of 2 was regularly going through 3 dozen eggs a week just for breakfast. Back then that would total $5 a week. Today that same amount of eggs are just under $20. It’s not just the eggs, all grocery prices have gone up massively post covid. But eggs prices are easier to spot because they are super inflated thanks to bird flu, and are easy to understand as a necessity.

+1. I think eggs prices are easy to spot since:

- they're sold everywhere

- they're bought by everyone

- they happen to be exceptionally high at the moment

It makes them an easy poster-child for inflation.

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

#612

Post by joering2 »

I spent quite some time on farms and while chickens are adorable, the amount of poop you have to deal with is going to be a killer to most people. So in the spirit of HN, and if this upward trend of eggs' price continues, I have 2 business ideas:

- Uber for eggs. One household in the hood does all the chicken chores and sale eggs very locally to only some small ZIP code. Of course considering cost on a small home scale, eggs would be most likely at 15% price of shelf ones. Also bigger farmer could not just come and order thousands at such low price because the owner would not have capacity.

- diapers for chicks. If you can invent cheap diaper for chickens then 90% of chicks pollution is gone. you still have to deal with food, water, etc, BUT the major turn off will always be amount of excrement they produce.

Considering the price of eggs today, if nothing gets changed and flus will prevail, these are a billion dollar ideas :)

Edit: unless of course someone is doing that already :) I haven't checked.

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

#613

Post by stickfigure »

thijson wrote: post #603
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.

We had racoons, skunks, and foxes paying nightly visits. Occasionally one would find a way into the coop and there would be a massive kill off. We got a dog, and just the scent of the dog around the coop has been enough to eliminate the skunks and racoons anyway. The fox still does come by from time to time. We had to put a net over the roof of the coop because of hawks.

Our coop is impenetrable; we never lost any chickens that way. But they would get picked off during the day by hawks, coyotes, and bobcats. One every month or two.

We've given up and are switching to bantams in an enclosed run.

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

#614

Post by dbtc »

crazygringo wrote: post #372
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.

People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them. Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.

This is about when people starting realizing such farms are contributing to planetary environmental harm.

Also, as gruesome as a backyard slaughter might seem, it's nothing compared to the industrial equivalent.

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

#615

Post by munificent »

erellsworth wrote: post #426
crazygringo wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them. Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.

It makes sense to me. If you grow up seeing animals slaughtered on the regular you probably won't think much of it, especially when the adults around you treat it as completely normal. You grow up in an environment where you might think meat comes from the magic meat factory, when you see an animal slaughtered for the first time it's likely to be shocking enough to turn a lot of people away.

Put another way: If 99% of the animals you see on a day to day basis are pets and not livestock, it's hard to not think of all animals as potential pets instead of resources.

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

#616

Post by seizethecheese »

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 grew up with backyard chickens. It was great, but youre missing one downside: the smell. Chickens shit a lot. Also, the predator thing is understated. You don’t just need defenses, your defenses are likely to fail. If this happens, you may wake up to the sound of your pet being mauled to death and your yard covered in feathers.

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

#617

Post by schwartzworld »

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…

> Who out there is paying more than a total of $3-$5/month more in eggs?

You don't think a family of 4 can get through a dozen eggs in a single meal?

> I can get a dozen eggs from Walmart right now for $5.46.

This is literally your least expensive option and it's over the arbitrary $3-5 range you yourself defined.

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

#619

Post by unglaublich »

marifjeren wrote: post #610
crocowhile wrote: post #463

The egg price is due to the H5N1 epidemics, which also means that this is the least indicated time to get a backyard chicken. The US should have dropped battery caging, like the rest of the world did 15 years ago.

> The egg price is due to the H5N1 epidemic No, it's not. But that's what the egg companies want you to believe. In truth the number of egg laying hens is only down about 5% total since the beginning of the epidemic.

You don't know the elasticity of the market. I can imagine restaurants, food producers and consumers are very eager to get their weekly box of eggs. So even a 5% drop can cause a price jump that's way more.

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

#620

Post by morsch »

marcus0x62 wrote: post #440
crazygringo wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chicken tenders are chicken tenders, not nuggets. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with nuggets. Nobody criticizes Italian meatballs, which are ground-up beef in balls. But then for some reason ground-up chicken in a different shape isn't "real chicken"?!

You’ll find the “ground chicken” in a typical industrially produced chicken nugget to be quite different than the ground meat found in a traditional Italian meatball.

McNuggets are 45% meat (specifically: Chicken Breast Meat) -- at least they are in the UK, where they have to give out this information. Presumably the US recipe is at least similar.

https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/product/chicken-mcnuggets...

I'm sure there are many traditional Italian meatball recipes, but as one example, I had an AI convert the US measurements from Chef John's recipe, and it estimated 900g meat and 494g other ingredients, so 65% meat.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/220854/chef-johns-italian-...

Of course the ingredients differ in a lot of other ways than just the percentage of meat. That's just what I looked at.

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