Rising egg prices and high demand are prompting consumers to rent or buy chickens, but experts warn the move may not cut costs
Rising egg prices and high demand are prompting consumers to rent or buy chickens, but experts warn the move may not cut costs
As the bird flu outbreak impacts egg shortages and prices, some people are turning to renting or buying backyard chickens.
If you ever want to spend more on eggs and poultry products, getting chickens is a great option. It isn't cheaper by a long shot when you factor in your time and proper care.
The reason why eggs can be as cheap as they are is because the poultry farms do not give a shit about the birds and feed them the cheapest they can and don't concern themselves with avian healthcare.
If you want cheap eggs, be friends with someone who has chickens. Most birds will lay 1-2 eggs a day when they are in their prime. So 6 chickens will make a dozen eggs every other day. After a month you have 12-15 dozen eggs. The family probably eats 40-60 eggs a month, so you can see how the difference works in the favor of friends.
Yeah but chickens are awesome pets. It's like having a herd of miniature dinosaurs.
They have unique personalities (chickenalities?), too. That might be in my imagination because sometimes I like to get high and hang out with them and give them dialogue.
My sister got chickens in her adulthood. We didn't grow up with them or anything. I went over a few years ago and saw her chickens all meandering wherever they wanted in her backyard while she tried to herd them all to their pen I was able to catch one of them and put her in their pen. It did kind of remind me of mini-dinos though.
If you ever want to spend more on eggs and poultry products, getting chickens is a great option. It isn’t cheaper by a long shot when you factor in your time and proper care.
If you want cheap eggs, be friends with someone who has chickens.
Note that the same approach also works well with boats and IMHO, albeit to a lesser degree, pets.
A boat is a terrible substitute for eggs.
An easy solution to high feed cost and an overproduction of eggs is to feed them lightly cooked scrambled eggs. Two birds with one stone. And a war crime.
That is valid, but selling them for $3 a dozen to people you know or feeding scrambled eggs to your dog and/or cat is a better use of them.
After a month you have 12-15 dozen eggs
Only enough for 2-3 breakfasts for Gaston.
The egg quality can be night and day though. The cheapest supermarket brand eggs I can get always seem pretty thin and watery compared to organic free range. We could also sell the surplus to neighbors (building up local neighborhood relations, which have languished is modern era).
rent?
Clean your links please! https://youtu.be/blqYeQ6qeLQ Thank you!
Chicks used to be $2.70, $3.00 for the fancy ones like Easter Eggers.
I just paid $5.40 each for regular old red chickens. Easter Eggers were $7.50 It's not like I'm NOT going to resupply my flock but damn, double price.
I was reading that a major constraint on chicken farmers in the US is that they have to rebuild their stock after huge losses in chickens, and you cannot just instantly magic up an infinite supply of new chickens -- takes a while to scale that up. It sounded like the companies that raise chickens are not the same as the ones that produce eggs -- like, if you're an egg-producing-farm, you're competing on the open market with individuals to buy chickens. So it's gonna drive up the price for random individual who just wants a chicken and buys from the same chicken-raisers.
All that being said, if a chicken is going for $6, I cannot imagine that the price of a chicken is a huge part of the price of eggs. Like, feed, a hutch, care, heating, maintenance of the infrastructure...that's gotta outweigh the price of the chicken substantially.
Yeah, the price of the chick is tiny. Once you have the coop the main cost is feed, except that if they use half of my property then I spend more in property tax for that half than I spend on chicken feed.
I don't know chickens... But it seems like buying one is cheaper than buying a dozen eggs... I get it needs a place to live and upkeep... Even if you needed to buy 12 it seems like once they lay eggs you would end up with more eggs than you knew what to do with them... Sell them to your neighbors for 3 bucks a dozen and bam free eggs...
Yeah, it's cheaper than buying eggs. I'm also using them to rehab the back yard. Before I moved in there was sort of a private junkyard back there, now the soil is in much better shape
Oh good now we are atomizing potential bird flu bird populations across the suburbs so Karen can save a dime.
Can someone explain why eggs are so fucking important for Americans?
Do you eat pancakes everyday?
you need eggs to make any box mix desserts, and eggs are in a lot of recipes, baked goods etc. eggs have also always been a relatively cheap and healthy source of protein.
The average American eats about 270-290 eggs per year, across all foods. It's a cheap, versatile ingredient.
The U.S. isn't even that far out of the ordinary among other nations, 19th out of this list of 185 (if you include Hong Kong and Macau as their own jurisdictions). Seems like most of Asia and South America eats more eggs than most of Europe, but it's not like there aren't European countries in the top 20.
The reason why there's a lot of coverage of eggs isn't because of the high number of eggs in an American diet or the high proportion of a household budget spent on eggs, but it's just that it's a commodity that happened to spike in price, more than triple what it cost 4 years ago.
Exactly this. That’s not even a lot really. Less than one egg per day, or a single meal of eggs (assuming 3 eggs) twice a week.
The big issue is the price hike of a previously cheap meal and protein source.
It’s weird all the anti-egg stuff in this thread, it’s not about the eggs per se. Various beans have gone up in price in recent years, various meats are much more expensive than they were prior to the pandemic, and in recent years now eggs have gone way up.
For people on tight budgets, it’s brutal. What do you do when there are no more cheap meals you can make to maintain your budget? Then you have to make cuts elsewhere, if that’s even possible.
I make low six figures now and keep my costs low, but in recent years even I’ve started bulk shopping via Sam’s Club to save money because going to the normal supermarket has me paying $500 a trip for two weeks of food for just me and my wife, and that didn’t include small supplemental trips.
Going bulk and being selective has cut that down to $600-$700 every 5+ weeks. But poor folks on tight budgets generally can’t throw that much on a single trip and will get nickel and dimed by this crap. I’ve been there; being poor is fucking expensive, and there’s a lot of shit in place to keep you that way.
It's not just that everyday American families eat eggs for breakfast every day. It's that eggs are essential ingredients in a lot of basic foods. Pasta, meatballs, breading...
A good comparison would be to bread prices and the riots that occurred due o rises in bread prices during the great depression and other times of instability in various countries across the centuries.
If the lowest ingredient prices go up, that makes everything go up, and impacts everyone. This causes panic and chaos in lower classes and eventual revolts against leadership.
This is more than just eggs
Sudden scarcity causes fomo. Demand is up for no rational reason.
do you eat pancakes everyday?
Have you not seen us?
Seriously we probably eat way more breakfast confections than you would expect. That's the vast majority of us are not making them scratch theyr getting them out of a box
The main thing at play right now is that the political stance of our right-wing fascist dictators was that grocery prices would come down and egg prices were artificially high with the last guy.
It was campaign after campaign on eggs being so expensive for no reason.
Their base was so big on why did Biden let eggs get so expensive It was honestly annoying as f. Now that their guy is in they're breaking open the textbooks and explaining to us that it's bird flu and a lot of the birds are dying and eggs are more expensive
The problem is, the last time this happened there was a great shortage of eggs. You could hardly find them the prices were high.
Now every store you go into is running over with eggs and the prices are twice as high as they were back then.
Ensure, sorry for the annoyance eggs being a dollar a piece is not the end of the world for us by far but it's an indicator that something is going wrong. And it's a nice distraction from all the Nazi salutes on our mainstream news
Eggs are used all over cooking... baking, many recipes call for egg, and yes, breakfast.
Eggs used to be $1.99/dozen. Now, even the cheap grocery stores they're $9.99
Here's Aldi:
I know that eggs are very expensive in US recently. However, I can very easily do without eggs in my usual diet and I know nobody who buys eggs in such quantities as Americans seem to do.
So what do you all eat? Pancakes every morning? Or fried egg? Or do you love baking so much? I'm just curious btw.
Because bacon and eggs for breakfast is ingrained in American culture through a massive advertising campaign:
https://americantable.org/articles/how-bacon-and-eggs-became-the-american-breakfast/
My breakfast is an over easy egg on homemade toast every morning. It's relatively low calorie and contains a good amount of protein to give me a feeling of fullness. Eggs are great sources of protein and aren't as damaging to the environment as something like bacon, ham, or sausage.
It's been built into the culinary culture of the United States. Just as much as beans for breakfast in the UK or pasta in Italy. Hell, even carbonara was born in Italy during the second world war because Americans asked italians to make hearty american meals with pasta and eggs. Its probably because America was/is so large that many households used to raise chickens for an easy source of protein when meat wasn't as easily transported in the 1800s and early 1900s. All you needed was a backyard, a coop to keep them safe from raccoons/foxes/hawks/etc., and food. Its not as common now but maggots are an excellent food source for chickens and it's super simple to build a "maggot farm" with compost. Plus you would get free dirt for the garden out of it.
My family has had chickens for years. The eggs are fresher and taste better and we know what they are eating. They are not less expensive but you can't eat money.
How often do they lay eggs? If I wanted to eat eggs every day, how many of them will I need to sustain?
It depends on the variety and how old they are. Leghorns lay almost every day from around six months old to around 18 months old. Then the moult and their laying drops off. Generally you rotate the birds so that you have enough birds in lay to supply your needs. Probably three birds in lay would provide a couple of eggs most days.
Stupid people don't know how to solve supply problems.
May not, but probably will
As a reminder to those who have never raised layers before, especially those in suburbs, layers generally start really slowing egg production around the five year mark. So if your seriously just getting them for eggs and being more "cost effective", your going to want to butcher them after a few years.
Why the fuck is no one just cutting eggs out of their diet?
It's not even like they're particularly healthy, if you eat too many you can risk high cholesterol.
Unless you have really strict dietary guidelines this is fucking insanity.
All you have to do is stop buying them and demand will dry up and prices will come back down (to an extent anyway, bird flu is gonna keep it higher than the old norm).
Are people really so egg addicted?? Do people really not understand economics and the nature of supply/demand?
Dietary cholesterol actually has little to do with blood cholesterol levels. It's almost all genetics.
Dietary cholesterol has very little to do with health effects, but you swing too far in the other direction by claiming it's "almost all genetics." Plenty of environmental factors that can affect blood cholesterol (or more relevant to health, VLDL and LDL cholesterol), including diet.
A big motivator behind the banning or restriction of trans fats in most countries is the clear link between trans fat consumption and cardiovascular disease, including a direct causal link to raising LDL (aka "bad cholesterol" and lowering HDL (aka "good cholesterol").
Some moderate physical activity has also been shown to significantly improve things like blood lipid profiles, at least compared to totally sedentary lifestyles.
And genetics can affect how much of an effect these environmental or lifestyle factors actually change blood lipids, and in turn how much those stats correlate or cause actual cardiovascular disease, but diet and exercise are still important for almost everyone regardless of genetics.
Why the fuck is no one just cutting eggs out of their diet?
All you have to do is stop buying them and demand will dry up and prices will come back down
You're not wrong, but on the other hand, plain eggs are goddamn delicious. Not like there's some kind of soy-based equivalent experience.
And I'm sure that people will cut them out of their diet -- the price will keep going up until the amount of demand at that price matches the number of eggs available. And there is some price where any given person will do that.
Hasn't hit that point for me yet, though. I love my eggs.
Unless you have really strict dietary guidelines this is fucking insanity.
I mean, didn’t you just answer your own question? T2 diabetic here with petty strict dietary guidelines, and eggs are a staple in my diet.
Even disregarding that, I can only think of a few baking recipes that require zero eggs. Most baked goods require eggs, or at minimum egg wash.
Eggs are also a good source of protein at a relatively low caloric intake. And until recently we’re much more affordable than other protein sources. You could get 5 dozen at Sam’s Club for like $10.
For things like cake, there's a lot of options you can use to replace eggs.
Further, things like brioche which require them aren't really a need. When people talk about "Let them eat cake" it was actually closer to "Let them eat brioche." If you can't live without brioche, you've got bigger problems.
Standard bread does not need eggs.
You can ask that very question about fast food. Something that's incredibly unhealthy, but people are fighting hard for cheap rates.