Eggs US – Price – Chart

"Cheaper" varies by the costs of the various inputs. A local chicken farmer which sells to a local market has, aside from the costs of the land, chickens, feed, and labor, the costs of putting the eggs in a truck and driving the truck to the market. Larger distributors have the cost of collecting the eggs, driving them to a warehouse, storing them, potentially repeating that while optimizing inventory and locality, and then driving them to the market. The cost of gas, labor, electricity, and a variety of other factors can dramatically swing the cost calculations. Combined with the noted lack of resiliency in the system - the multiple additional logistical steps, the multiple points of failure in the system, the larger blast radius of those failures - and the "larger is more efficient is cheaper" calculus isn't quite as cut and dry, as we've seen over the last couple years.

Many of your small producers are not counting their full costs. They see they $ from selling eggs, but don't count the cost of the barn, their labor, the land the chickens are on... A real accountant would find all those hidden costs and figure out how you allocate the cost of the light bulbs in the barn to each chicken - only when you have all those numbers can you really see if it works out.

This is so common in small businesses. The biggest example I see is single-family landlords who are notoriously bad at doing the honest math.

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.

If the business lasted until the owner died, then it was making at least the amount of money it needed. Not all businesses need to grow or make tons of money, if they at least serve their owner's lifestyle. If I could make a business that supported me until I died, I'd start it right now.

Yeah, it's called a "lifestyle business" and you can't buy them, but you can start them (or sometimes be given one).

(Many common small businesses are lifestyle businesses, because they're individual service businesses, like plumber, contractor, etc.)