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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?

#681

Post by janalsncm »

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.

When you’re hungry, you tend to care less about deep ethical questions and more about being fed. There’s the old trope about wealth and food:

Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good.

Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.

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

#682

Post by cindylmcindy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #596
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.

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 chic…

[flagged]

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

#683

Post by cryptonector »

Texas has a law that you're allowed to have up to 6 hens and 2 beehives in your backyard. Hens are fine because they're not roosters (though usually one hen will take on some of the role of a rooster). I'm not sure about the wisdom of keeping beehives in a suburban backyard though because when your neighbor mows their lawn nearby they can get irritated and attack -- the hives really need to be 20ft or more away from the fence.

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

#684

Post by zoky »

shkkmo wrote: post #552
zoky wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. After Spurlock lied through his teeth in his first film, why would anyone trust him ever again?

"lied through his teeth" isn't an accurate description. His openness about his history of drunking wasn't ideal and did damage his credibility. However other people have partially reproduced the health effects of what he did and his level of drinking is pretty common in the USA so it's not like he's some crazy outlier.

> His openness about his history of drunking wasn't ideal and did damage his credibility.

That’s a euphemism if ever there was one. He was a raging alcoholic, and his alcohol consumption (which he denied entirely) accounted for pretty much all of his negative health effects during the film.

> However other people have partially reproduced the health effects of what he did

But nobody has been able to reproduce it entirely, or even account for the weight gain and ill health effects he experienced based solely on his food consumption. And several people recreated his stunt and were perfectly fine, or even had their health improve. It’s not about what food you eat, it’s about how much and your overall lifestyle.

> and his level of drinking is pretty common in the USA so it's not like he's some crazy outlier.

He was reportedly drinking a fifth of vodka per day. That is excessive by any metric.

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

#685

Post by bamboozled »

sanp wrote: post #121

[flagged]

That’s why I almost thought this was satire. Didn’t people just vote for for lower grocery prices and emergency economic improvements ? Rather than doing democracy we’re now going back to farming for our own food during a bird flu pandemic ?

“Weird”.

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

#686

Post by joshstrange »

memsom wrote: post #184

Wow! I wondered about this article - US centric. I wondered because eggs are not expensive here. I just looked [1] [2]. I can get a dozen free range for about US$4 at the current conversion rate. They are a supermarket own brand, but even the "fancy" ones are something like that for 6, but some are actually still close to $4 for 12. The US chicken market (not necessarily eggs specifically) was in the Morgan Spurlock…

Some data points from Lexington, KY, USA:

18 eggs today (February 20th, 2024): $8.19 [0]

18 eggs ~1 year ago (March 2nd, 2024): $3.34 [1]

18 eggs a tiny bit over a year ago (February 2nd, 2024): $2.74 [2]

18 eggs, oldest order I can find (April 9th, 2023): $2.33 [3]

A 2.5x increase in a years time. Just insane

[0] https://cs.joshstrange.com/05JYvxsf

[1] https://cs.joshstrange.com/lVlCFcRs

[2] https://cs.joshstrange.com/w5zQcZ2l

[3] https://cs.joshstrange.com/kZ8VjPxP

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

#687

Post by dylanz »

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…

Great points! I agree with everything you said here with exception to the point about it not being a monetary solution. I've built an "extremely" janky coop for almost no cost in the past. At one point I got absolutely sick of eggs because there were so many than I ended up trading neighbors for other goods. The whole thing ended up making/saving me a ton of money in the end. Let me reiterate how unsafe this coop was however... it was as spacious as it was dangerous (very).

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

#688

Post by crazygringo »

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.

Will you find it to be different?

Honestly, ground meat is ground meat. What makes you think ground chicken is "quite different"? Why are you putting it in scare quotes? The chicken breasts used to make McNuggets are literally no different from the standard chicken breasts sold at your average grocery store.

And in both cases the ground meat/chicken is mixed with binders and flavorings to keep it together and keep it moist and make it even tastier -- variously including flour, breadcrumbs, water, salt, spices, etc. depending on the recipe.

Obviously nuggets are battered and fried. But then so are traditional Italian delicacies like arancini.

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

#689

Post by lsaferite »

alwa wrote: post #621
PaulHoule wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends how they’re raised… impressionable creatures. Though IME some roosters especially are just plumb mean. A mean rooster has a surprisingly high terror-to-size ratio, and can easily draw blood with its spurs. And they carry grudges, and they’ll stalk you.

Can confirm. We used to own a mean rooster and he would certainly stalk me when he was out of the run. Not sad that a fox ate him. Would have preferred the hens not also been eaten though. Our current rooster is pretty chill and just ignores me. He even consents (begrudgingly) to my young daughter picking him up and holding him.

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

#690

Post by indoordin0saur »

throwup238 wrote: post #544
indoordin0saur wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So weird how people freak out over winter storms in NYC. In the decade I've been here I don't think I've seen a single snowstorm had enough of an impact to close grocery stores.

Probably because no one wants to be on the street with a bunch of drivers that only see snow once a year just to pick up some eggs. More than a quarter of accidents happen in such conditions even though most of the population only sees snow for a short time out of the year so it’s not unwarranted.

But in NYC people don't really drive, hence why it's in particular weird that they have the same behavior as suburbanites. If you were really starving food is just a 3 minute walk away.
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