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.
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
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.
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).
I really hate throwing food away now, really pains me!
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.