alt Hacker NewsEgg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
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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 infected chicken to a human is an opportunity for the virus to jump host, and adapt to better transmit amongst humans. The mutation (mammalian adaptation of the virus) can happen in the chicken before it jumps to a passing by human, or in the human once infected with the virus.
We are only a few minor adaptations away from this thing being BOTH extremely deadly AND extremely transmissible between humans. Worst case scenario. The latest strands found in Canada and now Nevada are extremely deadly, and just need the Human to Human adaptation. With enough at bats, it will have it.
The idea of dramatically increasing the number of humans exposed to sick flocks by having people start their own backyard chicken coops feels suicidal, for humanity.
The latest hospitalized patient in Georgia was exposed through a backyard flock, by the way.
The letter from Farm Action, linked at the top of the article, is pretty compelling in making their case.
A few highlights:
> As a result of the smaller flock, egg production has dropped slightly from 8.1 billion eggs per month in 2021 to 7.75 billion eggs per month in December 2024. Importantly, however, per capita production of eggs in the U.S. has not dipped below per capita consumption of eggs in any year between 2022 and the present. Meanwhile, the total value of egg production has risen significantly, from $8.8 billion in 2021 to $19.4 billion in 2022 and $17.9 billion in 2023.
Note the $17.9B 2023 figure obviously doesn't include the most recent price increases.
> Instead of using the windfall profits they are earning from record egg prices to rebuild or expand their egg-laying flocks, the largest egg producers are using them to buy up smaller rivals and further consolidate market power.
> Almost all shell eggs are marketed through contracts between producer firms and chain buyers where egg prices are based on weekly wholesale quotes published by Urner Barry, an industry consulting and data analytics firm. According to leading industry commentator Simon M. Shane, this convergence "on a single commercial price discovery system constitutes an impediment to a free market," with the benchmark prices released by Urner Barry potentially serving to amplify price swings led by the largest-volume producers and to prevent independent, competitive decision making by others.
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 documentary follow up to "Supersize me", and it looked like the chicken "mafia" controlled the business.[3]
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=eggs&inpu... [2] https://groceries.asda.com/search/eggs [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me_2:_Holy_Chicken!
To save money? Absolutely not. I'm keeping a spreadsheet on our 20 chickens this year. They're young, so input is very high while output is still ramping but I'm guessing it's $7-8 dozen in food costs alone (the highest end organic feed tho), never mind the initial buyin.
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.
Been raising chickens for years. You certainly can get eggs "for free" by selling excess eggs. But, on top of actually protecting and caring for your hens you will also need to cull unproductive hens. Failing to replace and cull unproductive hens older than 2 years will result paying to feed freeloaders without getting anything in return. I feed my chickens everything out of the kitchen. Their run space is filled with wood chips and is my primary source of compost for the garden. Garden waste goes to the chickens. Its is beautiful cycle.
If I maintain my flock of 18 and get decent feed prices ($0.26/lb) my cost per dozen is ~$3.50 in the winter (2-6 eggs a day) and less than a dollar in the summer (8-15 eggs a day). If I free range them feed cost is even lower.
I think everybody that can should have chickens. They need about 1/4 lb of food a day. A family can maintain a small flock on kitchen waste alone.
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 paid a year ago.
Sadly, because the soil are too polluted by PFAS, it is adviced against to eat your own eggs (by medical authorities) where I live (larger paris aera)
https://www.iledefrance.ars.sante.fr/polluants-organiques-pe...
Interestingly(to me), for the first time in my life the local backyarders and farmers are selling eggs for less than grocery stores. Much better quality, too.
If you build a pen out of anything other than otherwise garbage materials and a small roll of the cheapest fence, you are going to be spending even more money.
Also whats with people buying like a dozen chickens? Do you eat an entire dozen eggs every single day? No? Then you don't need a dozen chickens. 2 chickens will often result in people giving away tons of eggs because they have too many. Maybe a few years down the line when they lay a few less eggs you can add another one or two. If you don't eat 90%+ of their eggs, you will once again be losing money.
Also unless they are free roaming over a very large area, you do not want any roosters. Roosters in a small coop and/or yard often get aggressive and they will attack you. Yes you can cow them down if you are quick enough to grab them, sometimes mid-attack, but most people aren't because they don't want to get stabbed with their spurs. Also buying sexed chicks are not a 100% guarantee you won't get a rooster, ive gotten multiple roosters out of sexed chickens and often the only right choice is to kill them because you don't want a bunch of roosters fighting either each other or attacking people.
> Family-sized egg operations create resiliency
This would probably create resiliency for egg supply, but given that a source of bird flu is wild birds and transfer to and from humans would increase mutations wouldn't it likely increase probability of more bird flu and more human cases?
Build vs buy. You can be me and build an in-house flock, pay $100/mo in feed, $500 for a livestock guard dog, $100/mo for dog food, $500 for a solar electric fence, and then $500 for a few coops, etc. It'll pay off before I'm dead, I think! -- right?
Right?!
Wild birds will bring bird flu to your backyard flock too.
It takes a lot of eggs to pay for even a $200 coop + bedding and buying the actual birds.
I don't regret it 4 years in, but don't do it for the economics.
Backyard chicken farming is a great hobby, and surprisingly tech heavy.
My Coop controller, which is hand build by grumpy bearded East Germans, even has modules to integrate into a smart home system and supports remote monitoring via cellular network.
https://jost-technik.de/PHB2.0-Klappensteller%20+%20Steuerun...
It would be interesting to know the actual economics and legalities of franchising "Farmer McEgg" setups, to rural folks who wanted a side gig. Once someone had (say) 150 chickens set up and going, what would be spread between their weekly operating expenses, and weekly gross sales? How many hours/day would that typically take?
EDIT: Please read the article, especially the Feb. 19th update note at the beginning of it. Bird flu may not be so bad as it's been portrayed. And if the costs for comparatively tiny chicken farms were low enough, then their economics don't need to look good to Wall St. They're may-be-profitable little hobby farms which help local communities, while putting pressure on the greedy Big Egg oligopoly.
I've been considering getting a few hens for a while. The cost of setup, feed and the work involved for "free eggs" are quite a bit. However, it's more worth the cost now than it's ever been, especially considering the increased self-reliance.
There are ways to offset the feed costs by growing your own feed or tapping into waste streams like food/produce scraps.
Backyard chickens are great if you have the space, time, and patience, but they're hardly a solution to systemic issues... The real fix is a more diversified, resilient supply chain... And not just pushing food production onto individuals
> “Instead, dominant egg producers . . . have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power.”
Who would have thought that not enforcing antitrust regulation will lead to corporations so large that they can just do whatever they want with impunity because there is no meaningful competition any more?
Due to living in an HOA, our family is considering raising quail for their eggs instead of chickens. The HOA would likely still consider it a violation, but I don't see how we can get in much trouble other than having to get rid of the birds. I understand that they are nearly as productive as chickens, but don't make the noise that chickens make. The only thing stopping us is the summer heat in in a desert area. I'm not sure that 105 degree weather is humane for even birds to live outside in.
Should I cohabitate with and routinely handle disease vectors that I have no prior experience caring for?
So, how is it possible for the virus to get into a high-tech barn? Simple: the birds still need to breathe, which requires a ventilation system of some kind, which allows an entry point for the virus. Phillip Clauer, a professor emeritus of poultry science at Penn State, explains: “In the Midwest, they are working the fields in the fall, and you’ll see dust coming up from the fields, and the geese will land there to glean the extra corn, and they crap in the field. The dust goes aerosol, and that dust travels a long distance. We had one infected layer house in Pennsylvania, and they could tell you exactly what air vent the virus came in from. And then it spread through the whole flock.”
My wife and I would love to have some backyard chickens, but ironically we live in a small farm town in Iowa where backyard chickens (both hens and roosters) are banned by town ordinance. A couple years ago a 5th grade student went before our city council to ask for an exception so she could raise chickens to show at the county fair for her 4H project; the council granted the exception, but not without raising concerns about creating a slippery slope!
https://www.nwestiowa.com/news/sibley-makes-chicken-exceptio...
Having grown up with chickens, they are also a great way to get rid of food scraps. Chickens especially love watermelon rinds.
We had them, then they found PFAS in many backyard eggs. Now most people I know are getting rid of them (in the Netherlands). It’s a shame but I have to say it’s easier to travel and not have to arrange care for the chickens.
Farm Action letter Figure 2 description:
> Biologically, it takes between 3 and 5 months to grow replacement lawyers, from their hatching to their productive stages.
Impressive growth rate for lawyers. Editors take much longer to grow unfortunately
> - Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
Please, PLEASE tell us this story!!
My backyard chickens drastically lower my grocery bill, barely require feed, and their eggs sell to friends for $6/dozen.
They also replenish their numbers when I eat them. Get chickens.
Since the title is a question: no, no it's not. Because the primary driver is bird flu, so the odds have never been higher of you buying birds only to have to cull them the next week. Now is the worst time to get your chickens, and the best time to just go "whatever, it's not like we need eggs, we'll start buying them again when we actually have enough chickens in this country to lower prices again".
Backyard chickens FTW! I sold my last company iCracked (W12) and have been automating my coop for fun for the last 15 years. I have always wanted to build a company at the intersection of smart home / AI meets backyard agriculture with the end goal of building the world's largest decentralized food production system. So we started Coop with the goal of making backyard chickens approachable to anyone with a backyard. We built camera systems that do crazy cool deep computer vision and have gotten to the point where we can tell our customers, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons detected outside the coop, the automatic door is closed, all 6 of your hens are safe, and you have 5 eggs that can be collected. We've trained our model on 25m videos from customers and are pushing new models every week.
We built this for the family that has always wanted chickens, but doesnt know where to start. We also include 6 chickens with every coop, which I think is hilarious. The plan is to vertically integrate everything from the supply chain (feed, treats, supplements, vet visits, etc) and make it SUPER easy to have a backyard flock. It's been a fascinating and fun company to build - If you want to see some of the stuff we're doing on the tech side feel free to check out www.Coop.Farm - Also one of the things that we track where we think our thesis is playing out is how many people use us that haven't raised chickens before and we're at 71% of our customers are new to backyard ag. Also, we make standalone cameras for existing flocks and other animals and I have been super surprised to see the amount of people using our predator detection and remote health monitoring models for rabbits, goats, pigs, ducks, etc. Super fun company to build.
I live in an urban area and have ten chickens. They are nice to have but it is a hobby and nowhere close to economical. And with bird flu I had to spend another decent chunk of money on a much larger & covered run, since we no longer let them roam our yard during the day. We bought nice Omlet coops so there are certainly ways to do it more cheaply than we did, but even so it will take most people years to break even, and chickens need at least weekly maintenance.
Prices "soaring" like everything else? I'm sick of these articles that pick one product in isolation and ignore the fact that we're in hyperinflation and it affects products unevenly. (Egg farmers have likely been unable to mitigate bird flu because they artificially kept costs low to avoid shocking the public into abandoning eggs entirely, but now they need to overcompensate because of this random event).
No. The answer is to stop consuming eggs. Better for yourself, the animals and the planet.
How many eggs do most people even buy? Almost every story is talking about eggs and how much of a burden it is on the public, but what are we talking about here? I can buy 18 fancy Vital Farms pasture raised eggs for $12. How is such a small purchase so important in the financial press?
The whole thing is just completely silly. The focus should be on the true cost drivers like healthcare, insurance, child care, and housing.
I am going today to buy 6 chicks, as i was told all 4 hatcheries in my area were producing chicks for sale this week. I was told they would be $5-$12 depending on the breed.
I was concerned because of the culling last year (over 130,000,000 fowl culled in 2024, before the election, even! weird!) that it might be hard to get new chicks, but as i was told
> Chickens lay a lot of eggs
in the US farm to table is 60-90 days for eggs, that's why we wash them and refrigerate them. Yard eggs you don't wash, and only keep "cool" like room temp, until you're ready to use them then you wash them with a foodsafe sanitizer (or dawn if you're making boiled eggs) and prepare.
130 million chickens et al killed prior to november of 2024, and 90 days to the home? looks like this will let up around mardi gras.
I wonder who will take credit? because, here's the secret: It's the chickens.
Tofu is cheap and high in protein and is great scrambled with some mushrooms and spices. You don't Need eggs!
Wow, no one is talking about the smell. Have you got any idea how terrible is the smell of a chicken coop? You do know that you have to get in there to clean it, right? This ain’t no fun activity. I prefer to get fewer eggs per month than to clean it myself (sometimes every day, it also depends on the weather too).
I’d say I can’t do it cause I live in NYC, but theres a very famous “Chicken House” in Bedstuy that disproves that. They got a whole chicken coup in their front yard. I got know idea how they keep away stray cats and rats etc, but somehow they’ve been doing it for at least a decade.
So maybe I could
Feed costs money. Unless you live in an area where feed is very cheap, or grow your own feed, this isn't going to be economically viable. Having said that, some people enjoy keeping chickens as pets, and in that case economic viability takes a back seat. Plus there's a certain psychological satisfaction akin to tending to your own (also not economically viable) garden, which should not be underestimated. When I had a garden my every morning started with tending to it, and that was basically the most psychologically enjoyable thing I'd done in the last 30 years, especially when there's something to harvest. Plus, when AI neo-feudalism takes over, I won't starve. :-)
The first egg from my flock cost me well over $1000. Now that was a golden egg!
> Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen
That sounds.. pretty cheap?
Here (Switzerland), 10 eggs (instead of 12), cost at least 4.20 CHF (almost 5 USD): https://www.coop.ch/de/lebensmittel/milchprodukte-eier/eier/...
These are the lowest quality eggs available.
Regular eggs are around $1 each and it's been like this for at least a decade now.
My grandmother would tell me stories about how when she was growing up, they had backyard chickens. Unfortunately my state has laws preventing anyone from even having a hen unless you have over an acre of land.
With the bird flu epidemic, that probably is the worst idea I have ever heard.
A friend of mine has kept chickens in his backyard for years (not for egg-cost reasons). He said he did the math recently, and given just the cost of feed (not including the up-front cost of building the coop, or ongoing costs to maintain it), eggs would have to go up to ~$11/dozen for it to break even. While I have seen eggs that high recently (at a small convenience-store type place in a relatively HCoL area), that's certainly still not common.
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.
My family must be odd, we probably consume about 4 dozen of raw eggs per year. What is everyone else eating that requires so many eggs? Do you cook eggs daily?
Kind of off topic, but instead of culling flocks infected with the flu, are there any farmers just seeing which chickens survive and then letting them breed?
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 can become quite tame. They can purr.
- I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
- It's fantastic to get ~8 free eggs per day (from 13, 3 are not laying this winter)
- Morally/ethically, it seems like the best way to eat eggs if you're caring for them in a loving manner (compare to factory farms)
Consider the downsides:
- You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation. It still ranks among the worst things I've ever had to do in my life. Imagine euthanizing your dog or cat by hand...
- Predators, foxes and hawks, you need defenses
- Veterinary services can be harder to find. Most vets don't want to deal with chickens. However, it also tends to be cheaper than a vet for a dog/cat.
- Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
- If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them.
I think there are more upsides than downsides, but you should think about these downsides before taking the plunge. Don't let it dissuade you. Overall, they have enriched our lives immensely and I would recommend it to others!
1: https://www.anthonycameron.com/projects/cameron-acreage-chic...