Yeah, bird flu is really bad.
replies(7):
Prices for organic eggs have somewhat returned to pre-bird flu levels but the regular sales and discounts have stopped. Non-organic eggs are still significantly higher.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wan...
https://agr.georgia.gov/pr/highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza...
https://www.wusf.org/health-news-florida/2025-02-02/deadly-h...
https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/01/21/134m-poultry-and-c...
edit: I'm not being facetious, and don't welcome flippant replies. I'm genuinely interested, since I haven't seen any updates and have well-founded reasons to be skeptical this is getting the necessary attention.
This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.
[0] https://www.salon.com/2025/02/02/administrations-communicati...
Were the organic eggs already free range? That would explain the price stability there and variation of the non organic.
The more deliberately twisted shit they can make you believe, the more dependent your entire cognitive architecture is on them.
OTOH, the US egg industry has a history of price-fixing, and other dirty tricks.
For instance: https://apnews.com/article/egg-producers-price-gouging-lawsu...
This isn't a boast or schadenfreude, but is an observation that the protected, stable industry (supply management), which itself yields smaller, less industrialized operations means that while bird flu is a problem, it's hitting smaller clusters rather than gigantic mega operations where gigantic numbers of birds get culled.
So while our eggs are more expensive at times, there are benefits.
>"I don't care that working people find things expensive"
Literally no one is saying that.
> When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One
These are his own words. What happened?
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/28/economy/trump-inflation-p...
1) The president doesn't have a magic dial to bring down prices, and
2) Trump loves tariffs which have inflationary effects no matter how you spin it
So all the complaints about high prices was just for show since they don't actually care.
EDIT: 3) Inflation was a global phenomenon and the U.S. was actually outperforming most countries in bringing the rate of inflation down.
Weird that the size of the farms aren't being regulated if you know from other countries that it makes containment easier.
I joke that they are the most expensive organic eggs you can buy. ;)
Also I store eggs outside the fridge. It works fine.
Notwithstanding that Biden was punished for inflationary spending, all Trump had to do was lean on the perception that people "had it better" in his term. You don't need to lower prices if your wages go up, and notwithstanding that this lags, the perception has been that wages have not kept up. Obviously the intuition was that electing Trump would lead to better outcomes, not some nefarious hidden motivation behind every voter.
> So all the complaints about high prices was just for show since they don't actually care.
That is not what it shows. All it telegraphs is that expectations are distorted. The polls were clear that inflation was the #1 motivating factor.
Black, hispanic, and Asian voters all shifted right. Harris did ok with whites. Is that because those voters do not care about prices? Is that because you think those people of color are stupid? Be serious.
It wasn't obvious to the voters. And at the risk of repeating myself, calling people stupid is not effective.
> it's hard to see how you interpreted it that way.
Try in good faith.
> Literally no one is saying that.
"but egg prices!!!". They might as well be.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-collapse-of-bipartisa...
"Trader Joe's is transitioning to carry only cage-free eggs by 2025."
https://www.allrecipes.com/trader-joes-egg-shortage-2024-874...
I was more reacting to the "first time" anecdotal evidence.
The California Dept. of Food and Agriculture has numerous alerts on their site regarding H5N1 spreading in non-commercial backyard flocks.
But more meh for the consumer that’s more liquid/dynamic/reactive and can easily substitute ad hoc if something gets too expensive.
It’s an industrial subsidy at more than one level.
Hopefully store prices will come down as the year goes on and flocks bounce back.
It would be very uncharitable to extrapolate that to "the people joking about eggs don't care about working-class people". The people joking about it largely are affected by grocery store prices. That is, of course, not the point. The "culture war" has a lot of stupid things about it, but also real, unavoidable things that would be unrealistic to expect even level-headed people to ignore.
Edit: Perhaps a more straightforward example: I am personally affected by grocery prices. Some of my closest friends and family are impacted severely by grocery prices. If a wealthy person says to me, "egg prices don't matter", I'm going to say, "Fuck off, they matter." If another person says to me, "Vote for <insert the scariest politician you can think of>, he says he'll lower egg prices," I'm going to say, "because of the egg prices? are you crazy?", even though I think egg prices matter. Relativity matters to actual humans. Some percentage of people in poverty who are desperate enough will feel forced to take that trade-off, especially if they haven't seen the hatefulness (or if they share it, but that's moot), but that doesn't mean the people making jokes about the egg price promise don't care about those people. That's not how humans work.
And that is, if they even have any eggs at the store. I've been to Wal-mart and Kroger when the entire section is empty with a sign saying there are egg supply issues.
It's also winter so my 'chicken farmer friends' are low on eggs, when it's cold the chickens don't lay nearly as many.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2024/12/18/m...
cheaper and resilience are not proportional here. in fact, cheaper is proportional to efficient, which large producers are better at (apart from questions of healthiness, etc). i can't argue against resilience though, although that comes at a cost. speaking as a backyard-chicken-raiser of some years.
Just keeping predators out alone is an ongoing effort, weather events damaging it, then the smell/near constant cleaning, sick chickens/vaccinations/health checks, and you better figure who is doing all of this if you ever want a vacation or are sick yourself.
If you're a full time farmer, this is just your normal day, and a personal chicken coop isn't even a blip. But people with no farming/livestock experience don't even have an idea of what they're signing up for. I've known two different people that didn't last two years and were out thousands.
And when the price of eggs go back down, taking it out is also work.
PS - Check local zoning/rules; for example some have size/chicken limits or require it to be XYZ feet from the property line (due to smell/noise).
This means that they don't store as well or as long, and really should be refrigerated. It _might_ reduce salmonella.
10 years back, we were getting eggs at something like 25c/egg in feed costs. But we had a bunch of birds that only laid every 2 or 3 days, so they were no where near as efficient as a first year dedicated layer. OTOH, they all had names, we had most of the egg colors, and the bantam eggs were so cute. And the one hen that basically only laid double yolkers.
No one is saying these people can't complain about high prices, but that we can't lie to ourselves about the solution. It was obvious to many that Trump would not fix this on day one and possibly make it worse. Now we're seeing the start of a potential trade war.
0: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are...
I put it to you that the conservative opposition and bigots are very uncharitable at the outset, in interpretation of messaging from the other side. In this case they didn't have to do any work, it was literally said for them.
Don't forget that working people and moderates are the ones you need to convince. If people didn't change their votes, election outcomes would always be the same. Educated people tend to be more committed to a worldview (and overconfident), whether left or right. They are listening when you mock egg prices.
Both methods work, but the washing process removes a protective layer from the eggs, causing them to require refrigeration and generally last not as long
In just the last 3 months over 30 million chickens were killed, which is about 10% of the total US egg laying chicken population. Overall the US has lost so far something like 40% of its egg laying chickens.
We have had chickens in the past, and while I fully support anyone wanting to do their own chickens, the level of effort to keep them clean and healthy, safe from predators, and the labor to take care of them is non-trivial. They were the most expensive and labor-intensive "free eggs" we ever had.
But uh... I don't see that happening.
I have half an idea to create something like a personal inflation tracker, but I'm still thinking about it.
It's entirely possible that these goons will start fiddling with official statistics around things like unemployment and inflation to tell us that inflation is not actually happening any more and that therefore we must cut interest rates, or some such.
Most of it had no bearing on my point in the first place, but your claim that voters "didn't actually care" was refuted and you haven't offered a credible reason to believe it.
> It was obvious to many
Not to Trump's voters.
>It’s an industrial subsidy at more than one level.
It's food security. There have been times Canadians were almost convinced to eliminate it to pander to the US, but in the face of the idiocracy taking hold down South, and its boom-bust agricultural sector (one that yields enormous numbers of farmer suicides)...yeah, it isn't ever going anywhere.
This is only true if the composition of the electorate never changes, which of course it does: people become, and stop being, eligible voters all timhe time, and those that remain eligible change constituencies. Even if each individual’s voting behavior was constant, election results would change all the time.
Not a fan of credits to buyers (just inflates prices further) but I'm a big fan of credits to developers, streamlining permitting, and making some federal land available for development.
Regardless of whether you think these are good policies or an effective platform, it is patently false to say no one would run on such a promise.
It is a lot of work, but after my last group was killed off 2 months I have not impressed by store eggs, so I'm planning on re-enforcing my coop so I can get another group of them soon.
I don’t think we need to vaccinate all our chickens. But we clearly need to vaccinate a resilient core to stabilise egg prices.
(The author also said “Americans in border states were driving to Mexico to buy eggs and bringing them back home,” nothing that “this is illegal, so please don’t do it.” Egg prices, like housing prices, are a policy choice. Not an act of god. In the case of eggs, we favour protecting domestic production over consumer prices.)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chicke...
But a lot of restaurants in my area have been price gouging under the guise of “inflation, it’s out of our control” and have much more room to absorb price increases, to a point.
Bird flu comes from wild birds, not factory farming. Chickens get it when wild birds land near them due to free range laws.
The solution (possibly temporary) is to confine the chickens in sealed buildings so they can't contact the wild birds.
Edit: the toilet thing is what I've seen for transport in open-trucks. For most of their lives they're just crammed horizontally.
I disagree. The egg criticism, while sarcastic (something almost universally bad) is not unclear. It obviously does not imply people should never care about grocery store prices. Effectively nobody makes that argument - obviously.
And just as obviously, political opponents of the people making these jokes will characterize them that way, as always (something both sides do all the time). So, you may certainly make the argument that people shouldn't be making these jokes for politically strategic reason, to avoid that comparison. But to suggest that the comparison is rational and honest isn't convincing to me.
This is a very common line of disconnect in tribalism. Another high profile example was people saying that the phrase "BLM" meant that other lives don't matter. When a tribe has a catch-phrasified position, the opposing tribe is motivated to convince those in their tribe of a bad-faith interpretation. The degree to which the bad-faith interpretation is genuinely, mistakenly believed, vs a knowing uncharitable interpretation, is certainly arguable. But it's not convincing to argue that the bad-faith interpretation is broadly true.
Is that what's happened here? It looks to me more like the billionaire/PE class's drive to capture rents through monopolies is a more accurate lens to view the situation through. Especially as it's the trope namer for chickenization
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...
A second reason is because chickens get sick by contact with wild bids, due to free range laws for egg laying chickens.
Meat chickens don't go outside, they are kept in large barns, although without the pens and egg collection of their egg laying sisters. So they are not affected.
It's why we see "pasture raised" as the more premium marketing term. It still doesn't mean much without looking into the specific farm.
16% in 2024 for the uk, but thats probably due to heating costs/the odd cull
I've personally not seen a massive spike this year
15 weeks!
https://tellus.ars.usda.gov/stories/articles/how-we-store-ou...
1. Simply drop the topic and ignore it / drop the topic (arresting Hillary, china tariffs, etc).
2. Declare the problem fixed and again ignore it.
3. Blame the boogieman of the moment.
And as usual just behave like children in order to fill the airways / distract.
Every step you take that makes food more expensive, some use cases of food are no longer possible (say, free eggs in all elementary schools or something).
How many of these uses are we ok eliminating so the wealthier population has a more consistent/resilient supply?
The whole washing thing causing problems, that multiple people have replied is a myth. They spray the eggs with mineral oil afterward which works just as well. There's nothing magical about the natural coating, it's just oil.
Trump administration rolls back U.S. inspection rules for egg products.
https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/commodities/trump-ad...
A local farm that produces on a large scale and sources grain from the same farm charges $8/doz. Seems totally fair, if not a little too cheap.
If people in Minnesota (same population) aren't regularly buying eggs from out of state, then the comparison with Denmark holds.
This is also hopefully a catalyst to get people to petition their city for backyard chicken rights. Raising chickens is relatively easy and can be rewarding. Even if you don't want to personally, support the right of those around you to, please.
Free range birds are able to interact and spread the disease more easily than the caged birds which can be quarantined. At least in my location all the cage free inventory is totally wiped out.
I don’t see what benefit they would gain by not testing, anyway: if their flock is infected and a significant portion of the birds die, they are going to lose revenue the same way a massive egg producer would. If anything, I’d imagine them to want to be more cautious, since they have fewer eggs in their basket as it were (fewer total chickens).
Canadian and Mexican egg producers vaccinate their chickens [1].
This isn’t a story about industrial farming. It’s about animal vaccine requirements and trade protectionism banning Canadian and Mexican eggs from the American supply chain.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chicke...
I pretty much eat the same thing everyday: packaged peanuts (spicy ones), microwave single piece of batch baked chicken, frozen vegetables, brown rice, throw some terriyaki and soy suace on it boom, lazy meal. The peanuts are $0.69 each
I’m not a fan of factory farming. But this isn’t a story about that. It’s a story about American (a) producers favouring cheap production by avoiding the cost of vaccination and (b) regulators favouring a policy of trade protectionism that keeps our neighbours’ cheap eggs off our grocery-store shelves.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chicke...
Meat/eggs/dairy mostly destroys food energy. I guess you could argue the set pricing ensures food security for the animal.
I’m not saying that they are less expensive to produce or that they will remain less expensive at the store during normal times. However, paying the extra costs during normal times means those farms stay in business, which means I can still get eggs for the same price right now as I can in normal times.
Finding out an adult is preoccupied about egg prices means finding out they’re extremely susceptible to propaganda, and not very close to household finances.
I think framing it as an either/or is a bit of a mental trap. They are sometimes in opposition, sometimes not.
For example, those farms which were not resilient are not maximizing their profits, since they've had more than a year of warning of avian flu. They were operating to minimize work and costs, not maximize profit, and they are losing out on a ton of it right now.
Those operations which built with resilience, or got lucky, are swimming in profits right now.
Curious to know what differences do you discern between store and fresh eggs? Not doubting you, just curious to know.
I'm not advocating for one or the other, just explaining. Even cage free chickens will come into close enough proximity where they will all die if just one chicken picks up the flu. It's incredibly virulent.
Thus stuff is not related, wild to see people trying to conflate it.
Source? Why is it only American free-range egg farms are being affected, while Canada and Mexico’s are being spared?
I hope this bird flu thing is a push for other places to re-establish demand for local eggs and chickens. As someone else pointed out, it’s also a great opportunity to push your local legislators to allow backyard chickens.
Are they getting bird flu at a higher frequency?
Edit: This is an interesting problem that ChatGPT can't quite hatch. It immediately gets confused and thinks 100 eggs fit in a 5L mixing bowl!
Edit: I guess also the birds are indoors much more anyway, given the winter. It's 11 F here today, so probably they're huddled up inside :)
Vegetarians don’t eat meat (including fish, although some religious sects have a marketing deal with fishermen to count fish as a vegetable for some reason), do eat animal products.
Vegans don’t eat meat and also don’t eat animal products.
Again, not at all. It's said when instead of actually working to help the average American this administration is starting trade wars with our allies and taking time out of their day to remove gender identity language from all federal websites. Try in good faith is some advice you might try to follow your self.
For critical services like food production, that's a problem. "Well, we don't have food, but it's okay because screw production went well" doesn't make sense socially, but our system makes it so monetarily.
But luckily that isn't actually the case. The price difference between cage-free and "caged" eggs is negligible. I'm in New York City, not known for its local egg production, and I can still get cage-free eggs for $4/dozen. Kroker/Walmart is just ripping you off.
That said OP is asserting local costs haven't changed without evidence. Even if that were true (and I don't think it is- local farms are also being hit hard eg duck farming in NY) it probably speaks far more to small operations having a harder time changing their prices. Or the cheap eggs are just places who haven't been hit yet.
You would say "we're going to build more housing."
They can be but they’re not. Canadian and Mexican factory farms are not being affected sufficiently to raise prices. The cause of the price rise is not factory farming. It’s vaccination practice and trade policy.
We have enormous amounts of these crops, are hyper-competitive in them and fully self-supplying, and moreso they're very quick to turn around: A single season can yield enormous stockpiles of beans and oats.
That isn't true for dairy farms, egg operations, and so on. These don't scale up nearly as quickly. If Canada allowed the unrestricted flow of US options in these industries, US booms and mass industrial operations would wipe out Canadian suppliers, leaving us hugely vulnerable.
Like in the near future we might have an entire collapse of trade between the countries (as some new nonsensical exercise of brinksmanship is pursued, with new and ridiculous demands). We could wipe out 100% of foods that the US sends to Canada and be...perfectly fine, including, thankfully, poultry, milk and eggs. There are a lot of countries where this sort of food security independence isn't true.
Recent events have amply proven how critical Canada's protection of these industries are, making it all the more ironic that they're such a target. For obvious reasons.
I definitely don't advise raising chickens in an apartment or some such.
Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully. Those who did not take risks into account lost their bet. Eggs are priced higher for some, but are pretty much available everywhere still, and have not dipped below some sort of minimal level of availability. In California, past shortages were far far worse than this one, and even then the egg shortages were in no way catastrophic to the economy or health of humans.
Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine. Instead, our abundance of high calorie food is the biggest risk to the health of Americans.
So I would like to understand your point a bit more if you have the time to elaborate.
Now keep that thought in mind... and now acknowledge that that hypothetical government is actually the current one.
Pay close attention to what your mind is doing and let us know if you notice any interesting contortions that somehow draw a line between the obviously fucking insane hypothetical government you were imagining a second ago and the current real one. Report back!
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/02/05/n...
In previous egg shortages over the years the couple of farmers I use would sometimes impose limits like 1 carton per customer or something like that. But not jack up prices.
Food budgets would have to go back to the 1940's or earlier - where they were a significant fraction of take home pay. Now they are almost a rounding error comparatively.
I don't necessarily think that would be a bad thing. A lot of the asset price inflation like homes can be tracked to food and consumer goods taking an increasingly lesser portion of the family budget. Re-balancing this seems wise to me.
Wikipedia has a nice table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Varieties
Because we don’t let them grow (and for some reason don’t believe in shelf-stable products).
Biggest dairy exporter on the planet is New Zealand, I’d be more worried about them than USA. But we could’ve been NZ. Supply management kneecaps your ag industry. Lost opportunity if you’re good at it, which Canada generally is.
the labor is somewhat enjoyable and the chickens are incredible child-leftover disposal machines. but when you factor infrastructure and labor youll probably never recoup your “investment” in eggs.
for anyone dealing with land predators, get electric poultry net. it’s magic.
We spent 2 years building and designing a AI / smart coop and it's been a fascinating company to be able to build. We've trained our computer vision model on around 25 million videos and have gotten extremely good at doing specific predator detection, egg alerts, remote health monitoring, specific chickens in a coop and behaviors etc. We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback. If you're interested in seeing what we're doing we're at www.TheSmartCoop.com
It is not egg specific. The countries that wash their eggs have atypically strong standards for bacterial contamination hygiene in food processing. Many food products from Europe are prohibited from import into the US due to insufficient safeguards against bacterial contamination during processing. There is an entire business where Scandinavian factories process food from distant parts of Europe to satisfy US food safety requirements for export.
As a general principle, the US does not create exemptions in food processing regulations on the basis that the existing process is "traditional" or has a long history. Many other countries do.
But once you do that, you can maybe get to a reasonable place. The upfront cost being ignored, at today's egg prices, you can basically break even.
I have 9 egg laying chickens. They go through about $30 of food per month. They need another $20 in bedding supplies. $50 / month basically. Plus I spoil them with meal worm treats, so add another $30 per month for that (but I'll ignore that in my numbers below).
In winter, I average about 5 eggs per day out of my 9 chickens. In summer, it's closer to 8 per day. So we'll assume the best case here.
8 per day * 30 days per month = 240 eggs
$50 per month supplies / 20 dozen eggs = $2.50 / dozen
We can't eat through all the eggs though, so we try to find nice people/places to give them away (single moms, food banks, etc.).
Ultimately, raising chickens is just for fun. They are pets and enjoyable creatures. Highly recommend if you have the land for it (and no HOA rules).
This is from Australia, but whatever:
"In Australia, indoor and free-range poultry, are at risk of contracting avian influenza due direct and indirect contact with waterfowl who may carry avian influenza virus in their nasal and eye discharge or faeces, farming and biosecurity practices.
Indoor (barn or shed) systems limit poultry from direct exposure to wild birds, but these are not immune to avian influenza risks due to indirect contact. This is because equipment, vehicles and human movements between farms can introduce the virus indoors, in particular when on-farm dams or open water sources act as a permanent residence for waterfowl.
Birds with outdoor access (free range) are at risk of coming into direct or indirect contact with wild waterfowl. Vegetated range areas may attract waterfowl, in particular if poultry are given feed or water outdoors. In free-range production systems, producers should therefore focus on managing these systems to reduce the risk of avian influenza."
https://kb.rspca.org.au/knowledge-base/what-is-the-risk-of-f...
Granted, I don't know much about chickens, but a lot of this is common sense. I'm not sure what you think I'm wrong about.
I've read that some of the farms are having a hard time keeping up with both the increased demand from groceries and also trying to keep eggs available for their regular farmstand customers and such, but it seems like so far there is enough slack in the system that it's working out okay.
"Avian flu experts have called for caution in implementing cage-free requirements, noting that poultry exposed to the outdoors have a higher risk of contracting the virus."
https://www.wattagnet.com/poultry-meat/diseases-health/avian...
"Incorporating lasers that deter wild bird populations into biosecurity protocols can help prevent the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) between commercial poultry farms."
> Why is it only American free-range egg farms are being affected, while Canada and Mexico’s are being spared?
Mexico immunizes their birds, which is highly labor intensive, which they can afford due to low wages and the US can't.
Canada is far north and the infected wild birds have not gone that far in large numbers (although the numbers are increasing).
https://www.albertsonscompanies.com/amc/
The email request is at the bottom. mediacollective at albertsons
I know people love to blame "big anything", but it's just not true here.
Here's a source:
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/virus-transmission/avian-in-bir...
"Domesticated birds (chickens, turkeys, ducks, etc.) may become infected with avian influenza A viruses through direct contact with infected waterfowl or other infected poultry, or through contact with surfaces that have been contaminated with the viruses."
The one I love is the "there will be mass famine" if everyone goes vegan narrative that meat-heavy eaters like to talk about.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/supply-management-eggs-1.67...
https://globalnews.ca/news/10981016/egg-prices-us-bird-flu-c...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-u...
Can you point me to some sources on your claim? The post you linked originally doesn't mention Canada.
Locally sourced chicken also is reasonably priced and often on sale. There was BOGO (mix and match) last week so I got a whole chicken and a 2lb pack of breasts for $12 total. Both beautiful quality. With a bunch of minor cheap produce, herbs, and pasta..that's chicken soup + a chicken one pot meal that'll last us all week. Sometimes those whole chickens are on sale for 99c/lb!
so the birds get a point for each level of protection they receive. each group needs two points to be safe.
i mainly raise geese, which are tough, not going to be bothered by a hawk. geese (turkeys similar) start with one point. an electric fence is one point, a fully enclosed coop is one point, night light (.5?), guard animal (.5?). chickens are always inventing ways to die, so they start with 0 (should probably be -1).
fingers crossed i haven’t lost any geese to land predators in three years and only one chicken that flew the enclosure. hawks have taken a few chickens, but never when the geese are around.
"We may have short-term, a little pain, and people understand that,"
Nobody is disagreeing with this and I can see only a single [flagged] [dead] comment which actually does this.
(The _third_ WW2-era bomb design, an impractically long plutonium gun-type. Much like Vance, it was rather pointless and impractical, and was never really heard from again.)
In any case where are talking about a virus which an antibiotic won't touch at all.
Modern large farms have very strict bio controls. Things like: You shower before entering the barn (there is a shower in the barn entrance). Then you wear only approved clothing. Your shoes are disinfected as part of this process. then when you leave you reverse the process. If you enter one barn you are not allowed in a different barn for a week.
Store: Rochester NY and Buffalo NY -> 365 by Whole Foods Market, Large Brown Grade A Eggs, 12 Count, 24 oz, $4.19
Notably, if I put in Downtown LA as the store location, I actually get even cheaper eggs offered. Not sure where this market's getting their prices from:
Store: Downtown Los Angeles, 788 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA -> 365 by Whole Foods Market, Grade A Eggs Cage-Free Plus Large Brown (12 Count), 24 oz, $3.79
Using: Whole Foods - Eggs [1] with a local store selected
[1] https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/products/dairy-eggs/eggs
A dozen large eggs there right now is $7.90, which is right in line with what their costs have been for at least the last year (they are one of the more expensive local brands).
Unfortunately I just went to the grocery last night, so I don't have any reason to swing by today, but next time I do I'll try to remember to snap a pic of the egg section to share.
I've seen a bunch of posts online from the farms about how they're doing biosafety protocols, keeping groups of chickens isolated from each other, etc. I'm sure that increases their costs somewhat, but whatever they're doing seems to be keeping them insulated from the worst of the flock die offs, and regardless, their prices haven't really changed.
Avg hen lays about 250-270 eggs a year depending on breed. So 6 chickens (our coop is designed for 6) throws off about 1500 eggs a year. Avg American eats around 291 eggs + egg products per year (which is crazy!).
Most people build their coops or buy one from Tractor Supply or Amazon for $300 and day-old chicks are around $4 each and feed is inexpensive (50lb bag at Tractor Supply is $21). You can make the economics work super well if you want to but as most backyard chickens are treated as pets (I am leaving out large farms and homesteads, etc) a lot of people pamper and spend $ on their hens because it's more than just getting a lower cost egg if that makes sense.
What you really want to look at is costs, income and profit margins in the supply chain, which prices are a direct result of.
What’s worse for the community, eggs from factories going way up in price due to supply shocks, or rapid and pervasive infection in the community?
Access to cheap food would be wonderful if it were healthy! Unfortunately the cheapest food is typically the worst food for your health.
As you mentioned, most treat them like pets which means they get to learn how long-lived chickens can be, and how egg production levels off in the later years.
But even then, if you're buying less than half the feed needed, you can probably break even for quite awhile (especially now).
There is no infrastructure to protect there – only infrastructure to build (irrigation), for better resiliency.
TLDR: 1) we still have a bird flu problem, but have smaller flocks in the farms, so the impact of having to do a cull is far far less and
2) we have supply-management for poultry and eggs and dairy (basically a form of central economic planning around a quota system) ... which in good times is a rip-off for consumers [and some farmers] but in bad times... turns out to provide some value (which is why it was rolled out in the first place)
You should try leaving washed eggs out on the counter for 20+ days (incubation for a chicken) and see.
Sure. My point is, what optimizes for average production and profits doesn't necessarily optimize for worst case production and profits. There is a level of care that doesn't pay off most of the time.
Only marginally more expensive than store eggs, but a lot fresher, unwashed (will keep for a long while on the counter), and you can see exactly where (and from whom!) the eggs are coming from.
We have a very reinforced coop and an automatic coop door so we've never had any issues.
Here's a scientific looking study about adjusting incubation temperature in Korat Chickens. [2]
TLDR: higher than standard temperature results in similar hatch percentage, but more genetic female, morphological male chicks. Lower than standard temperature results in a lower hatch rate, but more genetic male, morphological female chicks.
I saw some less scientific articles that attributed higher surviving female chicks at lower incubation temperature to male chicks being less likely to survive in those conditions, but since this paper did genetic analysis, it appears there's some amount of temperature dependent sex determination in addition to genetic sex determination. I didn't look around to see if I could find a paper showing this in more typical US livestock breeds of chickens, and at least from these results, it seems like while the proportion of female to male chicks increased, the number of female chicks at 5 weeks after hatching, did not due to differences in mortality.
I also saw a news release about giving the mothers stress hormone and seeing more female chicks, but that artificial hormones is not acceptable practice in the poultry industry, so they were looking for other ways to induce that reaction. [3]
I also saw some references to determining (presumably genetic) sex before hatching, which could lead to earlier intervention, which may be more humane. It didn't look like there was anything definite there, but I'm going to stop going down the rabbit hole here.
[1] https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/ipd/frostonchickens/exhibi...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645652...
[3] https://www.poultryworld.net/health-nutrition/stressful-bird...
https://chcoc.gov/content/initial-guidance-regarding-preside...
The order is to remove gender ideology, i.e. trans. Switch gender back to sex (binary).
I don't know why you're saying this. Imagine I'm investing.
If I "take risk into account" and select stocks anyways, I may lose a bunch of money one year. But I expect to make more on average than bonds.
Looking at a year where bonds excel compared to stocks doesn't mean that I failed to "take risk into account."
Likewise, a conventional producer of eggs that has now had a significant downturn in production may be having a bad year, but this doesn't mean that they're not following a profit maximizing strategy or not taking risk into account.
> Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine.
I think this is making the same kind of mistake: looking at today's outcome and assuming that reflects the risk picture.
We're not observing too much famine right now. But we could certainly have a more of a risk of the most catastrophic possible famines now because of things like monoculture, critical links in production, climate risk, etc. Just looking around and saying "all is great today" or "conventional egg producers are having trouble today" or "stocks are down 15% for the year" does not capture the picture of risk, particularly for rare events.
The best we can do is try to interpret sentinel events like this one and think about what else can happen.
And you can get an automatic coop door to make your life easier.
I really hate throwing food away now, really pains me!
I don't think there was ever any information, outdated or otherwise, that suggested that the hurricane was going to hit Alabama. The theory I've heard that the makes the most sense is that Trump saw a report about the damage it was going to inflict on the Bahamas, mixed up Alabama and Bahamas, tweeted condolences to Alabama, and the administration tried to defend his mix-up by concocting fake information to explain it.
(In many respects, if he had just quietly dropped the matter, it would have been largely ignored since it was cleared up pretty quickly; it was the childish response to try to justify why it wasn't a mistake that made it such an issue.)
That's a theoretical problem that could occur, but is extremely unlikely. The worst we'll see is what we have now (eggs are spendy) or a certain type of food disappearing for awhile (tomatoes one year were gone from almost all fast food places).
If we have to substitute one food for another for a year or two that's an inconvenience. But preventing famine by trying to guarantee that the price of eggs doesn't go up is likely far, far down the list. Better that money be spent on improving the supply chains and if necessary bulk storage of long-lasting caloric sources (cheese and flour reserves, perhaps).
If a small farm gets an infected bird, they can't just raise the prices of their eggs. Those eggs will just disappear from the stores because all the birds are dead. If they are doing rigorous isolation, like hiring totally separate people taking care of completely isolated flocks, that should increase their prices. Farms that are spending more money on isolation and chosing not to increase prices are still at high risk- they just haven't been unlucky yet.
The "generic egg" have gone from $0.25 a dozen during some price war 6-7 years ago to $6.99. That price has caused the local eggs to sell out first where they used to always be available.
> "We feel very confident that, based on the once per shift that we have them there, we'll still be able to verify that they're producing safe product," he said.
So, what's the issue here?
This isn't true, some types of antibiotics are routinely used as a preventative measure on chicken farms.
> Both FDA and the World Health Organization (WHO) rank antibiotics relative to their importance in human medicine. The highest ranking is “critically important.” Antibiotics in this category are used sparingly to treat sick birds. Antibiotics in other less-important classes may be used in chicken production to maintain poultry health and welfare, including for disease prevention, control and treatment purposes.
https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/questions-answers-ant...
Also their bedding makes fantastic compost for next year's veggies.
It's a nice system.
As you mention, they'll impose limits (or perhaps offer "shiny brown eggs for $1 more") rather than piss off the customers, who 90% of the time have cheaper options already.
no reason not to hike up the prices: a. if everyone is doing it b. if the demand > supply
I suspect that the combination of our and other anecdotes in the thread may suggest though that there is some merit to the hypothesis that small, local farms are more resilient to this kind of mass pandemic, although it may vary from region to region, especially with the number and quality of local farms, which is probably much higher where I live than some other rural states and/or in major metropolitan areas.
That could be a side-effect from slower winter laying though since we don't use an artificial light.
In Europe, poultry vaccination against Salmonella is the preferred method. In most places Salmonella occurrences are exceedingly rare.
In general, Europeans believe that USA has atypically weak standards of food safety and that all the cases when certain kinds of European food are prohibited for import into USA on grounds of food safety are just cover-up stories, because the real reason is to avoid competition.
It is weird that USA has a phobia of vaccines even for poultry, because in this case there is no doubt that vaccines would have prevented the great financial losses caused by bird flu.
This is often why small businesses survive until the owner dies/retires, because the were making much less money than needed to continue. The biggest one is ignoring location costs because they own the building (avoiding rents or mortgage which would immediately put the business way underwater).
Combine the above with small farms often ALSO being the home of the owner, and it gets quite flexible.
in the end statistics is a science, and results can be cross-referenced with independent sources.
you may get away with a bit, but not with much [1].
[1]: https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/argentina-loses-bid-...
Regardless, we have continued to see the availability of all the usual local eggs with very little fluctuation in price. Perhaps they have all been lucky.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep...
Like when the BLS overstated payrolls by 818k!! in March of last year, the largest negative revision in 15 years? And then the Fed did an emergency 50bps rate cut in September just as payrolls unexpectedly went up 250k and inflation seems to be coming back.
The unemployment and inflation data has been inconsistent for a while now.
Amusingly enough, rural towns are more likely to prohibit backyard chickens than suburbs of major cities these days. This is because if you want chickens in a rural area, the assumption is you'll buy just outside town; the people who moved into town don't want to hear roosters (which are often banned or severely limited even where chickens are allowed).
Might not be well defined but I’m sure it’s defined enough to be law.
I think the industry has decided that a dozen eggs are going to retail for $5, just because it's a nice round number that will have "support." A few months of paying $8-9 for them will make it seem like a drop to $5 is going back to normal, and make $2 eggs seem like a misremembered dream.
https://www.newsweek.com/kroger-executive-admits-company-gou...
https://apnews.com/article/egg-producers-price-gouging-lawsu...
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edit: (2023) https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action...
> The first case of avian flu in a commercial table-egg layer facility was detected on February 22 in Delaware. Over the ensuing Spring season, avian flu outbreaks would be reported in 10 states and result in the loss of 30.7 million egg-laying hens. After the end of May, however, avian flu discoveries would slow down dramatically. Notably, no hen losses were reported after the beginning of June except due to sporadic outbreaks in September, October, and November. All in all, the total number of egg-laying hens lost to avian flu in 2022 was around 43 million birds. Although these figures seem to support the theory that the avian flu outbreak of 2022 was significant, its actual impact on the egg supply was minimal. After accounting for chicks hatched during the year, the average size of the egg-laying flock in any given month of 2022 was never more than 7-8 percent lower than it was a year prior –– and in all but two months was never more than 6 percent lower.
> Moreover, the effect of the loss of egg-laying hens on production was itself blunted by “record-high” lay rates observed among remaining hens throughout the year. With total flock size substantially unaffected by the avian flu and lay rates between one and four percent higher than the average rate observed between 2017 and 2021, the industry’s quarterly egg production experienced no substantial decline in 2022 compared to 2021.
> [...]
> Contrary to industry narratives, the increase in the price of eggs has not been an “Act of God” — it has been simple profiteering. For the 26-week period ending on November 26, 2022, Cal-Maine reported a ten-fold year-over-year increase in gross profits — from $50.392 million to $535.339 million — and a five-fold increase in its gross margins. Notably, Cal-Maine’s gross profits increased in lockstep with rising egg prices through every quarter of the year — going from nearly $92 million in the quarter ending on February 26, 2022, to approximately $195 million in the quarter ending on May 28, 2022, to more than $217 million in the quarter ending on August 27, 2022, to just under $318 million in the quarter ending on November 26, 2022. The company’s gross margins likewise increased steadily, from a little over 19 percent in the first quarter of 2022 (a 45 percent year-over-year increase) to nearly 40 percent in the last quarter of 2022 (a 345 percent year-over-year increase).
Our neighbor's chickens were devoured by black bears twice. They had one wily chicken that managed to escape both events however.
But what I'm guessing happened is that the less-strict diet came first (at least in the modern era), so got the "vegetarian" moniker, and then we just needed another work for the strict no-animal-products diet so had to come up with "vegan".
But the more the chicken can "graze naturally" the more likely it is getting everything it wants, which may improve health and taste.
RE: roosters, a lot of cities that permit backyard chickens do not allow roosters as they're considered a bit of a nuisance. As I'm sure you're aware(though I've found many people aren't), roosters are not required for the keeping of chickens nor the production of eggs.
That is because of the strict rules regarding salmonella. Danish chicken farmers will test for salmonella and kill any population of chicken found to have salmonella, leaving our eggs "guaranteed" free of salmonella. Any other country that wish to sell eggs in Denmark will need to be able to make the same guarantee. This is one of the few exceptions for the free movements of goods within the EU.
Note the wide variety. When you're doing a backyard chicken coop, you can pick whatever you want, for whatever reason (Rhode Island Red for hardiness, say, or a combo for variety). So not only do you have feed variation, you have breed variation, which can contribute to taste differences.
You also have freshness, as you use the eggs within a day or so of laying.
But they can keep laying for quite some time.
You can reduce the feed costs by letting them graze (though even a few chickens will lay waste to an average sized backyard if given the chance) and/or using household food waste.
The passive voice is disingenuous. Do you buy local farm products? You vote with your wallet. Make your choice, like everyone else.
But there's probably more going on that just sick chickens being killed of.
That's generally what happens in Africa. It doesn't work as well in North America because consumers here are too rich to switch to barley and oats when wheat is expensive.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm
Still happening. We sure have been suddenly wild unaccirate with the job market while the Feds need to keep saying "everything is fine but...".
And the specific section of the law defining 'cage free' for Michigan:
https://www.legislature.mi.gov/Laws/MCL?objectName=MCL-287-7...
There may be some flexibility in consumers' understanding of the terms, but of course the legislature has actual rules.
I'd love to get some chickens one of these days. Four eggs a day would be enough for us to regularly give away dozens while supplying all of our own egg needs.
Part of it is also that "cheap" tends to lead to monocultures and other patterns that are more easily disrupted.
An example being the Cavendish banana, which for most of the western world is the only thing they know of when the word "banana" is mentioned. And now the banana supply of a large part of the world is in danger of going extinct [1]
And there's also ecological health. "Cheap" tends to promote mass production in certain areas and shipping everywhere. "Cheap" tends to promote less sustainable farming practices. That sort of thing.
They're essentially clean rooms with animals living in them. It's kind of amazing. We only see the ones that are bad.
But like I said. No animal deserves to be crated all day every day for its life.
Sorry to all the tinfoil hats, it closely matched official CPI.
The fun thing is - nobody knows exactly why this happens. There's a bunch of hypotheses, but they're exceptionally hand-wavy.
And yeah, you don't need one to "get them to start laying" though if you want to try to actually hatch some eggs you will need one (or buy the eggs ready to go).
Now I've heard that the roosters in Kansas/Nashville, them do lay eggs ...
That's a little deceptive. The antibiotics widely used by the industry are used for growth promotion. I don't know how it works, but I don't believe it's because they're keeping the birds healthy--i.e. treating infections. Some sources suggest part of the mechanism is by suppressing otherwise healthy or benign gut microbiota that compete for calories. Antibiotics have been used this way for nearly a century. There have been attempts to phase out subtherapeutic antibiotic use, but the practice is standard operating procedure in the US, and the US is a major chicken exporter. It's banned in the EU, though.
(Many common small businesses are lifestyle businesses, because they're individual service businesses, like plumber, contractor, etc.)
Not only do you have reduced waste, you have reduced packaging (no need to put the eggs in cartons if you're just carrying them to the kitchen).
People usually thing you need pigs to eat waste, but most farm animals will take some or all (the biggest risk is accidentally giving an animal something it shouldn't have).
I generally agree with you about centralization and monocultures, just in this case I don't think it's really going to change things.
What matters is how does it spread.
I think what's confusing you is that there are diseases where a single infected animal does NOT mean all animals will get it, and in those cases the more concentrated the farm the higher percent of other animals will get it.
That exists. But it's not the case here. Here it's 100%, doesn't matter if it's a concentrated farm, or a pastoral farm with chickens walking in the house.
Most people don't get that eggs usually are 30-60 days old when you buy them at the grocery store and they have to travel up to 1000 miles to get there in cold storage.
Want to know how old your eggs are? On every egg carton there's a 3 digit number from 1 to 365. That is the day of the year the producer of eggs handed them off to the distributor. Producers have up to 30 days to hand it off to distributor and the distributor has an additional 30 days to hand off to retailer. Kinda wild!
They successfully tricked you into thinking that their prices are set by supply and demand. They're probably not the only company fooling you either. For just one other example, literal tons of unsold/unworn, perfectly wearable and desirable clothing gets shipped overseas, burned, or thrown into the ocean or landfills. The excess supply of clothing is so vast that it's now a form of pollution (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/chile...). If clothing prices were set by supply and demand they'd be paying us to take the clothes off the rack. Supply and demand are a good explanation of economics for grade schoolers, but it doesn't explain the world we live in.
https://www.bls.gov/ces/notices/2024/2024-preliminary-benchm...
They're usually within +/- 0.1% for the estimate, that time it was 0.5% off
You might think that this isn't a very satisfying answer for those who aren't already onboard.
I'm not saying that this is a steel-man rational argument for Republicans, but I think it is a popular narrative to quell cognitive dissonance within their ranks (applied to other issues as well).
The pain is easier to endure if you truly believe that the pain is for your own benefit.
That's literally the opposite of your original claim.
> We went from Biden to Trump: do you want to explain that with electoral composition?
If I wanted to do that, I probably would have actually claimed that particular change could be explained that way.
capons? We've been doing it for millennia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capon
EDIT: possibly you meant non-feasible since it's too expensive anyway, which it probably is.
We can talk about the sports issue, the bathroom issue etc. But how many of us have had said issues? How often do these issues occur? Is the resolution in favor of the status quo actually better on the whole if it costs the personal expression of say 10,000 people? 100,000? How many people should be told what to wear and which doctor to see before you are satisfied to have squashed the "idealogy"?
Unless you have the idea that local farms can make up all of the sales that are done, then you are arguing for a practice that will result in a lower supply of goods. With a lower supply, you expect prices to rise until the demand adjusts down to a lower value, as well. No?
Hence, this is great advice for anyone to try. But if everyone does it, things get more expensive as you lose out on the very advantages that led to the "at scale" solutions in the first place.
Besides all the arguments around diverse food supply and economic SPOFs, it just feels so much better to shop this way.
i think the opposite, i would like to hear a good argument why you can't.
> according to trading on a contract for difference (CFD) that tracks the benchmark market for this commodity
You aren't buying eggs on a commodities exchange, you're buying them at the grocery store. There's a lot of overhead between the eggs being sold wholesale as a commodity and the eggs making it to your front door in neat little cartons.
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31120958/questio...
These are a swingy group that could go either way. This podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/will-tariffs-end-trump...
describes polls that make it clear that Americans think that Republicans care about the issues that matter to them and that Democrats don't. "Woke" talk contributes a lot to the latter.
The good news for them though is that now that they see Republicans in power talking crazy like this, Democrats will look more normal to people. But if people on the left muzzled their own fanatics years ago we'd have woken up in a different America.
Biology is hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Still works fairly well as long as capital owners are smart and use insurance (who in turn advise their users on how to reduce their risk).
Please do not escalate into a flame war.
Back in the 1960s parents got worried that their kids turned into hippies, but hippies managed to supply their own drugs and didn't need to get an Rx from a doc.
I can tell you there’s already been critical guidance from the FDA on clinical trials that have been removed because they have the word “diversity,” as in “a clinical trial’s population should aim to reflect the diversity of the population to which the drug will ultimately be marketed.”
Despite what you hear on social media, "seed oils" and margarine (which doesn't have trans fats anymore) are still preferable to butter.
People who really want butter and other foods to be good for them tend to have a blind spot where if they convince themselves that X is bad, then butter is good because it's not X. And because of this, they weaken their epistemic standard when it comes to proving that X is bad, often satisfied with story-telling about how it must be bad, because it's connected to their belief that not-X is good. Just something I've noticed in the seed oils social media fad.
Tastes more eggy and hearty than real eggs. And, like eggs, it's a good base for throwing in other ingredients like chopped tempeh, seitan, some sort of grain, mushrooms, etc.
It's a good gateway recipe into eating tofu in general.
Wintrobe's book [1] has an analysis of a tinpot dictator who wants to steal everything a country has but has to spend some resources on buying people off and some on repression so that he can get away with it. Bill Clinton made a similar maneuver around 'triangulation' that amounts to trying to share as little of the spoils to mass supporters as possible so that he can really give as much as the spoils as he can to donors.
In the case of Bill Clinton he got the full court press from [2] so he could say he was under so much pressure from the right that he didn't have to do anything for the left.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, made a clear show of disdain for the activist faction of the party but they were supposed to vote for her because, hey, she's a woman. She also hoped to win by default against Trump.
Harris didn't show the activist fringe much love, but she didn't show disdain for it either. She was also hoping to win by default, which didn't happen. Because she didn't define herself, she was defined by Fox News. She would have had to have broken visibly with the activist fringe, however, which seems like it could have been a risky move although the dirty secret is that the activist fringe may not actually vote and if it does vote it is concentrated in places where their vote doesn't count.
For now, Trumps's salvos in the culture war are 'cheap talk' that pleases certain people but doesn't consume resources that are coveted by donors. I suspect it will be unpopular too, since people are going to blame you for things once you get in power.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Political-Economy-Dictatorship-Wintro...
Local food production is quintessential socialism: it is quite literally the workers (the farmers) owning the means of production (the farm).
When people hear that, they so often reject it with some variant of "no, that's a business; that's capitalism". Businesses (and markets) existed millenia before capitalism and exist in every economic system.
The defining characteristic of capitalism is exploitation by capital owners. In the eggs case, it's Cal-Maine Foods (or any other large company) owning the land and in all likelihood employing undocumented workers because they can pay them sub-minimum wage. At least that's how the likes of Tyson produces chicken.
It's also worth adding that something like avian flu is used to justify price hikes well beyond what the supply change would otherwise warrant.
The idea that you can defeat greedy corporations just by treating customers better is a fiction. There's always more money to be made by screwing over everyone at every opportunity, and there's no shortage of greedy people willing to do exactly that. It's why we need the kinds of laws, regulations, and enforcement that even the playing field and allow ethical companies to thrive.
You can't jump into the middle of a rigged game where the referees have been bought off and expect to win by following all of the rules. You have to stop the cheaters and the cheating first to even have a chance.
You have one party’s “extremism” which takes the form of bluehaired Twitterati saying stupid shit and, I guess, not getting sufficiently disowned by actual political leaders?
On the other hand you have an ongoing ACTUAL ideological purge of our government’s personnel, records, budget, and data, complete with watchwords (like “women”) and loyalty tests.
Rarely ever, IMO, are worthwhile goals entirely profit optimized or resiliency optimized. Some blend tends to be best, and sometimes you can even have both simultaneously (they’re not always inherently mutually exclusive, although those taking in the winnings may want it to be).
But yea, if other cost rise, they will need to rise prices.
It seemed to be based on taking your post (“scrub all mentions of the word "women"”) at face value.
You understand now that that isn’t true? That the word “women” is not being scrubbed, and nobody has asked for it to be scrubbed?
Unless you are suggesting that raising prices today is better (normative sense, since you used the word "should") than raising prices when you don't have a choice. In which case, can you explain more your reasoning?
It makes you really realize how fragile supply can be, even for domestic products.
what myth are you talking about?
The study found that washed eggs had higher bacterial counts in their contents after storage compared to unwashed eggs, particularly at higher temperatures. Key findings include:
Cold Storage (4°C for 8 weeks): There was no significant difference in bacterial counts between washed and unwashed eggs.
Warm Storage (30°C for 12 days): Washed eggs showed significantly higher bacterial contamination, suggesting that washing increased the likelihood of bacterial penetration.
Bacterial Types: The number of hemolytic bacteria and coli-aerogenes was also higher in washed eggs.
> This intersects with Craig’s main point — if we started vaccinating chickens, it would kill our poultry exports:
> The biggest sticking point is around trade. The US exported more than $5 billion in poultry meat and products on average every year for the past three years. The USDA enters into trade agreements with each individual country it trades with, explained Upali Galketi Aratchilage, a senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Each agreement outlines specific biosafety and production requirements that both countries agree to follow. The USDA said, in an email to Vox, that many of those agreements do not allow bird flu vaccination.
Right now, buyers are probably shopping around a ton. You can probably get customers who normally wouldn't be interested. After they try it, some of them may decide they like it and could become long term customers.
https://nutrition.basf.com/global/en/animal-nutrition/our-pr...
Years ago I worked on Farmforce that is basically this. In America we have centralized agriculture. Over the ocean, small-holder farmers in Africa provide lots of food to lots of markets. Keeping track of all of these farms, their herbicide and pesticide usage and weather-based yield projections is already a solved problem.
So either your area has low incidence of bird flu, low regulations around bird flu, or both.
We have high prices because the regulations are strict around dealing with bird flu detections. I wouldn't necessarily interpret low prices as a good thing without the big picture.
recently there was a massive flock of ducks that were culled at a farm in long island. all 19 million people don't eat eggs, but there are enough suburbs with green space surrounding the city that each of those neighborhoods could easily support their own egg production. that could surely help.
i have a big spreadsheet of farms within a day's drive of NYC if you would like me to help you find fresh eggs. i can share the distributors too, that would be a good resource if you want to help supply the 19 million people of NYC with fresh eggs.
> Where can the NYC metro area get fresh, local eggs to feed the 19 million people that live there?
trying to reduce this to something like "there is NO WAY this could ever work" isn't a strong argument.
Companies use opportunities like bird flu outbreaks to rip off consumers while deflecting blame. When the nation's largest supplier of eggs didn't have a single bird infected they still jacked up their prices and colluded with other farms to keep prices high and supply low because the news was constantly telling consumers about bird flu and setting an expectation that prices would be higher.
When the pandemic came, there were legitimate supply chain issues and many companies took the opportunity to appeal directly to their customers saying "We hate to increase prices at a time when every household is suffering, but we have no choice because of the supply chain! We're all in this together!" and because consumers knew we were in an unprecedented situation, while they still weren't happy about the price increases, they didn't blame the corporations for it.
The corporations however took advantage of the situation and continued increasing prices far higher than they needed to and for much longer than they needed to. Consumers didn't start to catch on until much much later when the news began reporting that all these companies were making record breaking profits the entire time. Meat packers for example had their profit margins increase 300%. Unfortunately by then they'd already been working hard to plant the idea that their high prices were caused by the disaster relief checks that went out to households during lockdowns. Then they blamed the "inflation" their own greed was feeding to justify raising their prices even higher. The more the news talked about inflation the more companies could rip you off because the expectation of higher prices was set.
The truth usually comes out eventually. Mostly when we finally see what the profit margins look like. They can hide some of it with clever investments and hollywood accounting, but it's harder to hide the money they make for shareholders and while they're doing everything they can to trick the public into thinking that we should feel sorry for them and sacrifice more for them, they're also busy telling investors that they're pulling in record profits and their pockets are overflowing with our cash.
[1] https://www.dsm-firmenich.com/anh/products-and-services/prod...
then there are the few occasion where you miss with the hatchet and it cuts half its neck, its head hanging down, attached by a quarter of the neck from it's body with the blood jumping out and the chicken running in circle for quite a lot of time.
it's also rare but sometimes even when you cut perfectly, the chicken will manage to get out of your hand and again you got to watch a headless chicken running in circle for some time.
If you are the kind of animal loving people in city, i'm not sure it's worth it.
bonus point, in summer you get a lot of fly because of the chicken shit, they reproduce in that. you can get in there and clean it everyday but it's a lot of work, and fly traps barely works when the heat is shinning strongly on the chicken shit. fly reproduce too damn quick.
Also chicken have hierarchy where all the up top chicken will bite on the ass of the chicken under it, so if you are the top chicken you got a nice ass but the one at the bottom it has a bleedy ass and sometimes they manage to kill them.
if you got to buy another chicken to replace it, it may not be accepted by the old one and so again -> bottom hierarchy, death by ass biting lol. it's funny but it significantly decrease the economic worthiness when you got to replace you chicken once in a while.
Beside i don't know what you do with chicken corpse in city, you aren't going to put it in recycling can.
Support your local farmer.
A good option for those people might be Coturnix quail. Quail eggs are especially delicious, and so are quail (if you can stomach cleaning them, it is pretty easy). These birds take up a very little space and are extremely quiet. Eggs are about 1/3 the size of chicken eggs. It's a really good way to sustainably have top quality eggs in a suburban setting (and possibly even indoors).
We keep chickens and wouldn't go back to store bought eggs even if they were 50 cents a dozen. Not the same egg. It is a little bit of work, but not bad once you are set up. It helps that we are also avid gardeners and so chickens get a lot of waste and greens (which also makes much nicer eggs).
Chickens suck because they poop on everything, and it dries into a glue-like substance caked onto things. The straw ends up caked in poop, the walls get caked in poop, the floor gets caked in poop, the chickens poop on each other. Getting it off requires a paint scraper, and getting way closer to it than you want. It's also liquid-y. It's a lot like bird poop on your car, but bigger because the bird is bigger.
The horses were less bad. Their poop was fairly "clean" as far as things go. They stayed pretty structurally intact (it's basically a ball of half digested fiber, kind of like a hairball) so it wasn't a big deal to get them with a pitchfork, and they were almost exclusively on the ground. It's not a job I wanted to do, but it wasn't awful. The heat in the non air conditioned barn was honestly worse than the work.
Alternatively, use a very sharp kitchen axe against a wooden plank. Place the chicken's neck between the axe and the plank and hammer the axe. This is the slow approach
Alternatively, use a long sharp blade to sever the neck the same way you would slice a cucumber, with a fast sliding cut.
EDIT: Cannibalism is more frequent when there is some malnutrition. Of course, sometimes you have to sacrifice the worst offenders.
it’s crazy how many eggs they lay.
I have no idea what the fair market price of a t-shirt would be in a world where no one had to compete with the practices of the current industry. I do know that it'd be worth every penny. The price being paid now in environmental harm, inequality, and human suffering is way too high.
You are demonstrating your privilege. I am pretty frugal and my INDIVIDUAL food cost is like $100 a week, or 10% of my take home pay, and while I make peanuts compared to most in tech, I make more than the average adult.
USDA stats say the average numbers are closer to $500 a month and 11% of gross salary, and also:
>households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $5,278 on food (representing 32.6 percent of after-tax income).
I think it's pretty clear that they do explicitly discuss fixing prices with each other, but there's no actual need to do that.
https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action...
edit: also, check out frozen potatoes https://jacobin.com/2025/01/french-fry-price-fixing-antitrus...
US eggs are generally vaccinated against salmonella and washed. The vaccination part isn't mandatory but it is cost effective so producers do it anyway. The effectiveness of the salmonella vaccines is middling at best and unpredictable -- eggs are still a major source of salmonella outbreaks in Europe. The benefit of washing eggs versus vaccines is that it produces a reliable result whereas the vaccine effectiveness has high variance. Also, this isn't a "European" thing, some parts of Europe also wash their eggs for the same reason. The US only started washing eggs in the 1970s, in a successful effort to reduce salmonella incidence.
Salmonella vaccines that work consistently and effectively in poultry are still an active area of research, it isn't a solved problem.
Regardless of what you believe, US food regulations regarding bacterial contamination are significantly stricter than Europe outside of Scandinavia. There are a number of well-known cases where European producers modified or upgraded their production processes to meet US sanitary requirements to enable exports. Scandinavian countries notably don't have to do this because their standards are similar to the US.
There may be other dimensions of food safety that are better in Europe but mitigating bacterial contamination is famously not one of them.
Is this a requirement? My friends parents keep chickens and dont kill any of them.
They dont have fly problems as the chickens spend most of their day outside of the coop letting them shit on the ground like nature intended. This disperses the waste preventing it from piling up into a fly trap.
As far as the pecking order, yes, there were issues with birds attacking others but they dealt with this by splitting up the pens. The chickens sort of form clicks around roosters and the in-crowd is safe while outsiders are harassed. So they identified the clicks by watching who follows who and moving them to the other pen. In some cases they had protective garb, chicken clothing, that protected chickens rear ends from further harm or aggressive rooster mating.
> Beside i don't know what you do with chicken corpse in city, you aren't going to put it in recycling can.
NYC sanitation has a composting bin program (granted it's not popular) which would likely be the best method of chicken corpses disposal. My only issue in cities is chickens should be raised on green land and most is paved allowing little to no ability for the chickens to feed off the land.
I spoke to my uncle about this when he was convalescing in a nursing home. We live in New York, neither of our votes counted. I voted for Harris, he voted for Trump.
He did not see it as a black or white thing, he saw it as a comparison. He didn't see Harris as giving any reason why he should vote for her other than, maybe, she is a woman. The message that you shouldn't vote for Trump didn't resonate. Personally I saw Jan 6 as worse than Sept 11 but actually most people don't. Probably the best explanation I see for this is talked about in this podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/will-tariffs-end-trump...
where Americans were asked "What issues matter to you?" and "What issues matter to X party?" and found that the lists mostly lined up when X=Republican but that people didn't see Democrats talking about the issues that mattered to them.
This is connected to my argument above because the reason why Democrats fall into that trap is the same thing that has ruined center-left parties everywhere in the world: that they make a lot of cheap talk to impress their base while reserving the spoils for their donors.
The good news is that people will be pretty sick of the Republicans in 2 years and if the Democrats were a normal party they would take over the house of representatives pretty definitively then. They've got an amazing way to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory though.
Also notice how the prices don't move up and down with incidents of potato blight or whatever.
Further: for this to be explanatory, you have to show why, after HPAI outbreaks subside... prices come back down.
I posted that, not because it is an unbiased source, but because if even that biased of a source admits it, then it's hard to dispute.
I have eaten genuinely year old (and older) eggs with no issues. That doesn't mean it is a myth that eggs only last 5 weeks in the fridge, it just means that I was putting myself in extra danger out of a weird sense of frugality and laziness.
I've also eaten pounds and pounds of raw cookie dough and not gotten sick, but that doesn't mean raw cookie dough doesn't have an inherent salmonella danger (ironically for this conversation it mostly comes from the flour!)
People used to spend ~30% of their income on mass produced basic staple foods with very little meat they cooked at home. You can live like that on like 1$/day. Median household income is over 80k today so we are talking more than an older of magnitude price reduction.
Get regular meal delivery etc and sure you can spend crazy money but it’s not really spending that money on food itself.
But from a quick search, it looks like I've happened only to live in egg-exporting countries within the EU, which explains why I've never seen it. Even so, whole eggs don't seem to be transported great distances — most imports and exports are liquid or dried egg.
[1] https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/biological-safety/food...
Like these people? https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/closed-settl...
> for this to be explanatory, you have to show why, after HPAI outbreaks subside... prices come back down.
It doesn't matter if prices sometimes go down, what matters is why. As it turns out, the answer to that is collusion. https://apnews.com/article/egg-producers-price-gouging-lawsu...
When companies work together to set prices they can lower them a little sometimes (while still increasing their profits) and ruthlessly gouge the hell of out consumers the rest of the time hopefully without raising too much suspicion.
I agree if the pricing wasn't basically the same I wouldn't have even attempted the switch.
I just happened to notice the cost of eggs going up again and saw fake eggs at the same price and thought, well I'll try those, why not!
[1] https://www.hobbyfarms.com/black-soldier-flies-free-self-har...
My experience is that without at least one rooster the hens won't lay well, you won't have chicks, and frankly the hens aren't safe from predators. But, nobody likes roosters, especially other roosters and neighbors. That's what kills chickens in the city for me.
A bunch of people said stupid shit on Tumbler, so I guess the republicans just had to go tear down all our institutions and grift every dime they can?
It's pathetic, but par for the course for the party that insists on "personal responsibility", yet blames Democrats for the deficit despite being empirically responsible for most of it.
"You had extremists" nope, none of those people screaming on tumbler were invited into the Party's cabinet.
Winning the next election is the most realistic plan. Maybe not that hard in 2026 for Congress, we might win earlier than that since there are 3 special elections in the queue already and 6 per year on average. Flip 3 seats and the Republicans no longer control the House. The thinner the margin it is the more some lunatic who is offended by the idea of having a budget can throw sand in the gears.
Winning all the elections from 2025-2028 is the thing to be thinking about, and thinking about the loss in 2024 is key to that.
Literally the definition of "not local"
> help supply the 19 million people of NYC with fresh eggs
This sounds like it could be one of Kramer's schemes on Seinfeld, where he's loaded his rusted-out jalopy with 5k eggs to bring into the city to sell for a profit, but somehow they end up all over the freeway and chaos ensues.
Ukraine is at war, minorities are being oppressed at home, an economic tidal wave is about to hit us vis-a-vis Chinese imports, the economy is on the ropes, and big brother is literally banning the government from saying words like "sex" and "gender" - but, oh boy, can you believe the price of these eggs???
Is every person in this country eating thousands of eggs a week and I had no idea?
I wonder how (where) they are able to get so much data. Maybe they are paying for data?
lol that's hilarious. you can keep arguing about the semantics of that while panicking about the factory farmed egg shortage. it won't bother me because i'll be feasting on food grown by farmers i know, all within a day's drive from me. if you are lucky then the regional distributors will pick up the slack thanks to the "not local" farms.
This is just not true. Hens will lay just as many eggs with or without a rooster. And a rooster doesn't do a whole lot to fend off predators, from my experience.
You’re not just paying for food here. One possibility is you’re talking things you buy at the grocery store here, but laundry detergent is’t food.
So what’s the actual deal here.
Now prices have gone through the roof, but it is not a big thing anymore.
Meanwhile, $9+ at commercial supermarket for bottom of the barrel factory produced eggs -- strange times...
And then of course there's this line:
"These differences between unwashed and washed eggs are not significant."
Buy a t-post (any 3-5 foot rigid metal pole will do but a t-post has perfect geometry). Next, you'll grab your chicken, lay her down on her back or stomach [1], once she has settled down you're going to lay the t-post gently across her spine just a bit behind her skull.
Now place your feet on either side of the t-post to secure it, grab her legs, and in one swift motion pull and stand up.
You will very quickly decapitate the hen and once you do it a couple times it'll be very low stress for both you and the chicken. This latter part is key, if you're stressed, unsure etc, the animals will be the same.
You can improve this further by keeping an upside down traffic cone around, drop the bird into it once slaughtered and that'll contain the flapping/running around you mention.
In my experience, for novices, this is the easiest method for all parties and reduces the risk of slips, mistakes etc.
[1] Back is sometimes easier, they'll often go into a trance. Sometimes you can lay them on their stomach and trace a line to relax them, there are youtube videos of this.
Even assuming you’re spending twice as much on eggs it just doesn’t add up to over 20$/day. Flour is 0.50$/lb, lettuce is 3$/lb, butter is 5$/lb, etc. Even a 3,000 calories per day you’re well under that.
would you like to see my spreadsheet of regional distributors who move food into NYC from small farms in the northeast? it's possible you've eaten this food. or would you like to see demographic and usda farming data when small farms were the primary food producers during a time when the NYC metro had a similary large population, before CAFOs and the centralized ag we know today? or were those people fed because they went egg foraging?
However, we do have a large yard where they are free to range around – I think this is key.
In my experience there is no need to kill a chook after 3 years. Average lifespan for a chick is 8-10 years. Egg laying frequency does decrease with age, but there's no need to kill them just because they're slowing down a bit. Our oldest chook is 8 years, and laid her (probably) last egg only a few months ago.
When it does come time to kill one for whatever reason, the broom stick method breaks the neck instantly - easy and clean, just a bit of flapping around. As for the body, we just bury them if we are not going to eat them.
I think the heirarchical behaviour depends somewhat on the breed and the environment. Our chooks do have a clear hierarchy, none of them have died as a result. We have a mix of breeds - Australorp, Plymouth Rock, ISA Brown and one other mystery breed.
Flies probably depend on your environment – in Australia here we have a ton of flies already, I don't think the chooks make much difference!
Some of our chooks have a lot of personality and are almost pets, especially the early ones we basically hand raised as chicks – although you don't want to be too sentimental about them either. You have to be OK with killing them if that becomes necessary - it's still a sad time when I have to do that though.
If you have enough yard space and like the idea of being connected to the creatures that supply some of your food, I'd totally recommend giving chooks a go.
* edit: should have added, we don't keep a rooster which probably changes the dynamics too
I have posted previously about the Russian genocide on the Ukraine people and I agree with you about the rest. Some people can't see past the tip of their nose, though, and care about eggs.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To be clear, if you cook food you have processed it. If you mechanically separate food it is now processed. If you chemically treat any ingredient for any reason(bleaching, cleaning, etc) it is now processed. The term is meaningless without context. Do you also say there are "chemicals in water"?
Just because something is "processed" does not mean it is bad. "Fake Eggs" are "processed" because they're mechanically blended and have a pretty standard emulsifier in it. There are no health trade offs here. The product is not "bad" because it's been blended or has an all-natural emulsifier. It's just nonsense to call something like that "highly processed".
Most "highly processed" vegan products are about as "processed" as a loaf of standard bread you'd buy in the aisle at the store. If mixing flour with oil is "highly processed" then you have no idea what you're talking about.
The hysteria towards veg products being "highly processed" is nonsense from the beef/dairy/carnivore misinformation machine. This is up there with the myth that "vegan diets are more expensive", lol.
Be aware that when you say the things you said, you're appealing to the misinformed crowd. The words lack meaning and context. These words, "highly processed" and such, are used to evoke an emotional reaction. It isn't based in data or science.
Context is extremely important. Without context you're not saying anything intelligent. It's the same thing that flat earthers or anti-vaxxers do. They appeal to emotion, not reality.
Furthermore, even with the hysteria around "high processed vegan foods", they're STILL associated with better health outcomes. That's the funny part of this. When put into context, even the "bad vegan foods" are still much better for most people than the "all-natural animal products". You can even expand on this further by including the environmental cost. Vegan products are about 20x less resource intensive from an environmental viewpoint than animal products. So, better health, cheaper, better for the environment. Wins all around.
Same here. Local eggs have gone up a bit, but it's mostly the cheap (caged) eggs from large producers that have shot up in price or are unavailable.
We eat plenty of eggs and haven't felt the effect of the "egg crisis". But then again, I buy local eggs and don't shop at Walmrt/Kroger/etc.
Derek Sarno has some really good vegan breakfasts, too, if you haven't tried them.
Also, shocked to see people hoarding multiple boxes of 50 eggs. Hoping it was for a commercial purpose and not someone panic-buying like they were for TP during the pandemic.
The theory that optimizing for the lowest price might other negative effects isn’t exactly novel: we’ve seen that in many other areas, and if you’ve ever been anywhere near a factory farm it’s enough to put you off of eating eggs.
The biggest exception was in the case of disease, which we managed with fire. Burning diseased bird coops along with the corpses of dead birds was very cost effective on our small scale.
Nobody is going to pay you anywhere near the amount of money you'll need for the energy and equipment to do this.
"Well shit, coyotes got one of the chickens" and then...just go get another chicken for...about $5 each. There's no data you could possibly collect that would interest people enough to buy your company.
The whole point behind chickens is that there are some manageable startup costs but then they're cheap to "run" - if you have a big enough property and free range 'em or use a 'tractor', even your feed costs are cut.
> I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables.
It's not decentralized if everyone has to use your app (I'm guessing your plan is to get a cut...) This stuff already exists. They're called "farmers markets."
It's also called "talking to your neighbors." That's been going on for hundreds of years.
> build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture
Hammer, meet nail that does not exist.
* Maybe 0.25 birds/square meter? There's ~12 total (we raise some for slaughter now, so it fluctuates) and they have a large enclosed outdoor area attached to the much smaller (6m^2, perhaps a bit more) indoor coop.
* Several acres. We let them free roam during the day with someone to supervise, but otherwise they have to stay secured (coyotes.)
* Inside the coop, the standard way is the "deep litter" method. You cover the floor in several inches of pine shavings and turn it over with a rake daily. Add a new bag of shavings here and there, and cycle it out completely maybe twice a year. The old bedding makes for good compost. If it doesn't smell, then you're good. For the outdoor area, we just auger it over and add mulch/soil around the same time the bedding is replaced.
(Note - tending to the birds hasn't been in my wheelhouse for a while, so don't take this as gospel!)
Then a disease will arrive that will make the entire population vanish because their immune systems never had to interact with anything.
I assume you don't have ISA Browns? We just had 3, gorgeous girls, but they all started laying lash eggs at about 2yo.
The ISAs are bred to lay, and -- turns out! -- 300 eggs/year isn't sustainable for a poor little chook's insides.
Don't get ISA Browns. It's heartbreaking and, if you decide to treat it vs. letting them die (we did), expensive.
We loved our girls to death. Chickens are amazing pets.
I don't dine out, I don't drink, and I have some lifestyle + allergy restrictions for some things, but I tend to believe those restrictions actually make it more expensive than not.
I am also not in a VHCOL, but still quite high since I'm quite close to a major hub in an expensive suburb.
That number is insane to me. I would have to go high end on every single meal to get to the same number. I don't think I debate quality all that much either. I don't feel I cheap out either generally. Food is a fair bit less than 5% of what I make annually too.
We've had chickens - up to about 20 at times - and have never done this. We're not farming them. Once they become too old to lay they can still hang out with the other chickens and scratch around. We don't mind that they're "retired".
I have had to dispatch sick chickens, or ones that have been attacked by foxes, but that's maybe one a year if that and I typically do it by wringing their necks.
//edit// And if you have a rooster, it stops a lot of the intra-hen fighting, especially if you introduce new hens into the flock.
Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition). They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture) that is often incredibly wasteful (except when it comes to paying their laborers a living wage).
"Modern farming practices" mostly translates to "use a tremendous amount of energy and really bad wages to produce a respectable surplus in calories and large profits for a few actors within the supply chain".
And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving. In 100% of cases lack of food is due to it not being made available by choice, i.e. because nobody is willing to pay for it, or it is actively withheld in war, etc.
Source: degree in development studies and more hours on African (and European) smallholder farms than I can count.
I've found, in my own life, that when I'm hyper focused on optimizing things for cost I often get far less "out" of things. I end up not eating my whole dinner because I don't like it. But if I let go a bit, things are actually in aggregate more financially efficient when I'm getting more of what I pay for, if that makes sense.
It only works for people who are built this way though. Not hedonists.
"You will very quickly decapitate the hen and once you do it a couple times it'll be very low stress for both you and the chicken."
Best giggle I had in years!
You do with it the same thing you do with a turkey carcass after thanksgiving: throw it in the trash.
"City folk" throw away meat trimmings, spoiled meat, or other meat products in volumes greater than a single chicken carcass every day.
Put it in a bag, put that bag in an another bag, and throw it away. It isn't magic or esoteric wisdom.
>There’s a reason antibiotics are so widely used
Yeah, for bacteria that's in their gut biome. Not pandemic viruses.
We have not experienced the massive increases in pricing on eggs. The supply management system effectively works to keep farms roughly below a certain size, and seems to have helped avoid large impacts on certain staple foods.
The usual rhetoric against this is that we should be getting cheaper prices by letting in foreign competition. This ignores that doing so would allow foreign subsidies to wipe out our local supply of critical foodstuffs, then making us dependent.
It's not an ideal system but it seems to have yielded some tangible results when things like bird flu are making their rounds.
It's expensive to be poor and this is why. It's not just hedonists, a chronically empty stomach changes the way you think and how far and wide you're seeing.
If you care about animals this is still infinitely better than 99.9% of the industrial production which basically amount to concentration camps. But yeah, the blood is on your hands, it's much easier to forget about it and abstract it away.
I believe most people would be vegetarian if they had to slaughter and prepare a pig, or even a chicken
Definite difference between "city people" and rural people though. We had cousins stay with us for a week or so the one time, granted they were a little younger, but they didn't realize milk comes from a cow. So of course we took them to the local farm we got our milk from so they could see the cows up close.
The times I have to explain people "It's just not meat" is through the roof.
As if this isn't known?
No, I'm telling you that your examples, the "strategy" of getting financial efficiency, and calling it "hedonism" are disconnected from the reality of the people who suffer from this the most. Unlike you those people don't leave dinner on the table because it was too cheap.
> As if this isn't known?
It doesn't sound like you know know. You're telling a blind person how to get around better by just "looking around".
Your perspective above is the modern version of "let them eat cake" [0]. "You don't have enough money? Try to live like you have enough money".
I’m kinda surprised you never tried to do this considering how easy it is and how much your comments seem to suggest that you care. Possibly we’re talking past one another and you wouldn’t find any clothing companies that meet your ethical standards.
My parents have had chickens for the last 40 years, never once slaughtered one. They either live to old age, or a predator comes along and grabs a slower older one or two.
The world does not have caloric food insecurity. We might be insecure in terms of specific nutrients or specific foods, but the modern world is not insecure in terms of human food calories.
For the same reason that the main guidance during COVID was "be outside if with other people" and not "stay inside if with other people".
But as soon as the election was over the economy was suddenly great and none of that mattered. Despite consumer prices having either not moved at all or gotten worse thanks to bird flu, looming tariffs which look to extract straight from people's wallets and a proposed tax policy that is about the same for everyone who isn't mega rich. The egg price thing has become a, "guess we know what people really voted for." I was looking forward to the tax cut that'll probably never come.
Regarding this smart poultry startup, where I'm from I often hear from poulty farmers chicken should be able to roam free and have a wide space to lay around eggs and reproduce. I'm curious how this limitation is addressed to backyard herders?
But muh efficiency!
This sounds intelligent, but is extremely wrong perspective.
For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high). This severe under capitalization is already a reason why we shouldn’t imitate their example. Anyway, all the development agencies run very active program to promote use of fertilizer, with very limited effect.
If you consider insufficient fertilizer use, then yeah, maybe they get good yields in the context. But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.
> They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture)
No. Their yields are horrible, and in no way comparable to modern industrialized agriculture.
> And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving.
This is true if you define “starvation” as “literal famine involving mass death”, but if you are trying to say that there has been no severe, persistent, widespread malnutrition due to insufficient caloric intake, then you are extremely wrong. Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector. It was only alleviated (and only in some places) by modern, western style development.
It's still weird that it got so dramatically out of hand in the US this time.
Thanks for taking the time to write it.
i do respect vegans though - many people don't live by any principles so it's nice to see them on display. my principle on this topic is that if i'm not willing to do it myself, then i probably shouldn't offload it to someone else and still consume the end result.
all bets are off though if you consider chickens pets, instead of livestock.
basic economics for me: 20 chickens, a dozen eggs a day, 30 dozen eggs a month. decent non-organic feed is $20 a bag, organic is $35 a bag. one bag per week if you have the space to do daily free ranging on a decent sized chunk (half acre chicken yard in my case). Round up $0.50 per dozen for incidentals (bedding, repair, replacement chickens semi-regularly due to predation). That's $3 a dozen for non-organic, $5 a dozen for organic.
Drop productivity in half, organic eggs start costing $10 a dozen, and you have to work for those eggs. Cut productivity to 25% and you are even more expensive. In my experience, you are at 50% productivity within 3 years depending on the breed.
Also slaughtered old hens make good soups :)
My advise is that many not I'm that situation, maybe you, act and think as if they do need to, but in reality don't.
Others are straight hedonist.
I'm saying don't be either.
That's because strong acceptable use polices based on the "E" in "DEI" meant that organizations ranging in size from Meta to Hacker News deleted comments when they turned into "kill the dirty ch**ks" during COVID.
It is now acceptable on Meta to post comments calling trans people mentally ill sexual predators.
Why do you think that, given a crisis requiring a boogeyman-du-jour, it will not one day very soon be acceptable to call for the deaths of the "dirty bat-fucking ch**ks"?
It's already acceptable to use the n-word on twitter.
I'm an upper-middle class property-owning married straight white male with children. Also dogs. And a veteran. And a small business owner.
>>>I<<< am safe.
Everyone else is up for scapegoating, all it takes is for the current trans boogeyman to lose its effectiveness.
Yesterday, eggs were not sold out at my local grocery store. There was a sign saying they may limit purchases. The crappy bottom of the barrel eggs were selling for 9 dollars a dozen. Pretty much all the eggs that touted organic or farm fresh on their containers were going for 4 to 5 a dozen, which seems reasonable. I assume those are from the local farms.
Were focused on cutting coupons and not growing food in victory gardens.
We do a performance, a performative version of cost savings that is veiled in corporate marketing tactics and such.
If you were truly focused on minimizing cost you would learn to be self sufficient. Sometimes that's costly, but pays off.
We now frame things in terms of corporate marketing and our whole economic "complex"
It's like you think you are saving money by buying generic soda, then you realize you don't even need soda.
Logic yourself there.
Calculate a cost of your time, maybe it's your salary, maybe you come about it a bit differently.
Then if you spend 10 mins saving 8 cents on Ramen, and you like the cheaper Ramen less, you have a paradigm within which you can objectively (not emotionally) determine if you are wasting your time (therefore money) on a false optimization, or actually doing good for yourself.
Humanely dispatching chicken is probably among the most mundane, natural, necessary, and arguably righteous aspects of what humans do to survive. While this part of the modern system is certainly not a "bad thing", I still think about my friend's opinion that everyone who eats meat should kill and process a living creature at least once in their life. If they can't handle it, then they shouldn't eat meat
I have had the opportunity to hunt twice in my life; both times I harvested a deer. I would happily do so again. But while I disagree with the sentiment of the GP, I do agree that there is something profound about killing an animal (for food or otherwise) such that talking about it nonchalantly can be startling.
I'm probably just nitpicking here.
Send help. Most of us didn’t sign up for this.
But like you and the other poster said, killing an animal for food is a deeply ambivalent experience. For me at least.
First thing you'll notice is much lighter they are than they look.
Second thing you'll notice is how hot their feet are.
A tangible lesson in the importance of surface area vs volume wrt mechanical, thermo, aero systems.
1. Scale also comes into play: We only have 8 hens, and are able to significantly supplement their feed with scraps from the kitchen, which are effectively free. The chooks are free ranging over a similar area (~half an acre), so the lower density means more free-range food for them, I guess. As a result, our feed costs per egg are actually much lower than if we had more chooks, and keeping a few old hens around is a negligible cost for us.
2. We regard our chooks somewhere halfway between pets and livestock - it's not a binary choice. We enjoy having them around so they have some intrinsic value for us, but at the same time if they were getting too expensive to keep, we'd be OK with occasionally cooking one up.
That said, I'm not that emotionally attached to them – I like them, care for them, but if I thought they were seriously sick I would put them down. We're all different :-)
> For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high).
Capital constraints are an extremely common problem for African farmers, not "a small amount of cases". It could easily be remedied with the right support. Or simply by regulating international trade in a way that does not allow excessive subsidies in the E.U., U.S. and elsewhere completely destroy the local market for agricultural products on the continent.
At the same time, fertilizer overuse is extremely well documented in "modern agriculture" across the world. It has extremely bad externalities, from CO2 emissions to over saturating local water reserves, which of course Big Ag usually does not have to pick up the tap for.
If you internalize the costs of fertilizer use, "modern" agriculture quickly becomes uncompetitive. You can see this in many European countries (i.e. Netherlands, Ireland), where the enforcement of nitrate regulations has basically put whole sectors of the agricultural industry out of business.
> But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.
No, but we should learn from it what we can. Especially with climate change rapidly leading to less availability of water and restrictions on using fertilizers.
> Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector.
Again: both the calories and the nutrition to adequately feed the entire population of the world is easily available, including in most cases locally or regionally. If it doesn't reach specific people, it is not an availability problem, but a distribution problem.
Most emergency aid organizations have long since started sourcing both calories and nutrition for disaster relief regionally because they can.
Is Africa's agricultural sector terribly inefficient? Yes, of course. Is there nothing to learn from African smallholders? Hell no!. Will "modern agriculture" have to change radically, including by incorporating lessons and practices from smallholders from around the world if we want agriculture to stop messing up the climate and literally killing the lion's share of natural diversity? You bet!
Then you see everything as a piece of meat.
Sentiment in the media, all media, including social media, turns into dead bodies if the rhetoric is allowed to get extreme enough.
It's been this way since the invention of public speaking.
> Nobody is disagreeing with this
Perhaps, but they obtusely cling on to the idea that there's no possible way that snark couldn't be well interpreted.