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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?

#751

Post by 0x457 »

maxdoop wrote: post #215
awongh wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution Does this also take into account the current price of eggs in the same product category? i.e., organic, free-range eggs? For current Erewhon prices, 8 eggs a day is $11.30 in free eggs a day, so $339 in eggs a month? https://erewhon.com/subcategory/33022/eggs - $16.99 a dozen

Erewhon is probably THEE most expensive place lol

Yeah, using erewhon to gauge price of anything isn't going to yield anything good. Well, it will reveal how much people willing to overpay to avoid seeing "poor" people.

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

#752

Post by algo_trader »

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…

good luck with this

how hard would it be to break even with 200 chickens in a typical European town (excluding land costs)? i am just imagining if a small company decides to raise its own chickens-eggs for lunch time...

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

#753

Post by adolph »

philco wrote: post #703

This feels like an insane proposition to me, I'll explain: 1. Soaring egg prices are due to culling + deaths related to the proliferation of H5N1 (Avian Flu). 2. The reason we have been proactively culling is to minimize spread AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, to minimize the number of exposures H5N1 could have to Humans. 3. The reason we want to minimize exposure between chickens and humans is because each exposure of an infec…

> With enough at bats, it will have it.

viral pun

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

#754

Post by nightfly »

ramesh31 wrote: post #467
nightfly wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not who you're replying to... but: it cost me $2-2.5k to build my coop two years ago which houses 5 hens, and they cost roughly $10-20 per month to feed, change bedding, etc. Realistically my household eats 4 dozen eggs a month. Even with current egg prices I'm not saving any money for a long, long time. Still absolutely worthwhile for my mentally though and one of my major life goals

>I'm not who you're replying to... but: it cost me $2-2.5k to build my coop two years ago which houses 5 hens These numbers are absurd. You need a wooden box and some chicken wire, and chicks cost less than $1/bird. I don't understand why this always comes up on HN, where people are spending thousands of dollars on chickens. It's the simplest animal you can possibly own and they should pay for themselves almost immed…

Chicken wire doesn't actually protect chickens from predators... Half inch or smaller hardware cloth is needed to keep them safe. The coop itself is a 4x8 (about 4' tall) building on stilts because that's roughly the minimum space that's healthy to keep in the winter if they get snowed out of their run. And I dont know where/when you've seen chicks for less than $1 per bird lately, last time I saw that was on broilers last year when the local feedstore accidentally ordered like 3000 instead of 300 and they were literally giving them away. Otherwise chicks are $4-5 each

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

#755

Post by Server6 »

notfed wrote: post #738
philco wrote: post #703

This feels like an insane proposition to me, I'll explain: 1. Soaring egg prices are due to culling + deaths related to the proliferation of H5N1 (Avian Flu). 2. The reason we have been proactively culling is to minimize spread AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, to minimize the number of exposures H5N1 could have to Humans. 3. The reason we want to minimize exposure between chickens and humans is because each exposure of an infec…

Let's say I have a few chickens in my backyard that don't have bird flu, and we (myself or my chickens) never come into contact with any other chickens. Aren't we safe? If not, what are the possible vectors? Is it from random birds flying in my yard? My visits to grocery stores?

No, you're not safe if your chickens are exposed to wild birds. If they're outside feeding on seed that other wild birds also have access to they're at risk.

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

#756

Post by joenot443 »

PastorSalad wrote: post #624
seizethecheese wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The two-decade war between my Dad and the local foxes cannot be understated. The chickens are fully enclosed, naturally. They currently have a (completely buried) overturned concrete igloo under their feet. There’s a dual perimeter fence, the outer one is regularly coated in all manner of larger mammal’s urine he buys online. Team Fox is currently tunnelling to map out the concrete igloo, convinced there’s an opening…

That's awesome. My father has been waging a similar war with the coyotes in the woods behind our farm for maybe 5 years now. Your foxes sound way more intrepid though, the coyotes here haven't tried burrowing, yet...

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

#757

Post by kelnos »

vengefulduck wrote: post #537
georgeecollins wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.

I think the problem with this argument is the assumption that nature is inherently good. Nature is cruel and uncaring. Moving beyond it is a good thing imo. We’re just lucky that as a species by the roll of the dice we were given the power by nature to usurp it.

Nature is not cruel, don't anthropomorphize it. Nature has no free will or emotions or intelligence. It is indeed uncaring, because it doesn't have the capacity to care. Nature is neither good nor bad. It just is.

Whether or not it is moral or ethical to eat animals is an arbitrary decision made by emotional beings. There is no right or wrong there, only what people feel.

Someone who is vegetarian or vegan for moral reasons is making a choice, not living some sort of universal truth. Someone who eats meat is also making a choice.

Someone who eats meat but criticizes others for eating the "wrong" kind of meat is a hypocrite.

Certainly the way we farm animals for food can be sustainable or unsustainable. I wish people would focus more on that aspect than pointing fingers and making it a moral issue.

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

#758

Post by adolph »

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.

> More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.

Why do you think that people abjuring consumption of emotionally observable animals is more likely that the opposite: growing an acceptance of eating other sentient beings as part of the cycle of life?

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

#759

Post by jeffrapp »

michpoch wrote: post #748
jeffrapp wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to the price spikes, it was relatively easy to find a dozen eggs for around or below $2.

In what conditions are these eggs being produced? Are these also codes 0 - 3, similar to the European ones, with different classes of the chickens living conditions? $2 per dozen eggs is cheaper than in the poorest countries in Europe.

Honestly, terrible conditions. Factory-farmed style eggs. The “better” eggs were already at the $3-7+ price point depending on the feature set you’re looking for. Organic pasture raised eggs? Closer to the $7+. Plain brown organic eggs were closer to the $3 mark.

The egg industry in the US is a mess of marketing words that aren’t really regulated. Words like free-range, cage free, “access to the outdoors” often have little impact on the well-being of the chickens.

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

#760

Post by canucker2016 »

lsaferite wrote: post #693
threetonesun wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising animals to eat for meat is a very different endeavor than raising them for milk/eggs. Especially if you eat meat daily (or more than once a day!), do some mental math on how many animals you'd need to sustain yourself.

Not to mention, raising meat chickens is sad. We've bread them to gorge themselves so they bulk up fast. That results in essentially morbidly obese chickens. We ended up with two on accident and they couldn't even climb the ramp into the coop after a few weeks. The just gorged and sat around in the dirt. It was very sad. Raising non-meat chickens takes a lot longer and the meat output is much lower.

Picture in the following article shows the difference in size of chickens since the 1950s.

see https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/how-chickens-tripled...

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