Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper.
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.
This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.
Totally agree with this. After selling my last company (iCracked W12) 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. I've always wanted to build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture and we decided to start with chickens. I have been raising chickens for 15 years and automating my coops with Arduino's, automatic doors, cameras for computer vision, etc.
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