Eggs US – Price – Chart

Lots of people suggesting to build chicken coop. i have one, sure it's not much work. 2 minutes every day to grab the egg and bring the food and water, but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings.

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.

The axe blow is the fastest method when you have to kill several chickens.

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.

> but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings.

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.

Yeah, you want some separation from the house to the coop. Granma just picked em up by the neck and cracked the whip. Did it two handed on holidays. She knew which were sick, old, or just not laying. The feet did keep going for a while, and granpa did have to cut the heads and feet off. Removing the feathers after par-boiling was our (kids) job. That sucked.

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.

> My experience is that without at least one rooster the hens won't lay well

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.

Having slaughtered my fair share of chickens on a relatively small but not back yard operation, there is a much easier way!

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.

How many do they keep? It's not a requirement but after ~3 years they hardly lay, but still eat, and most people looking for serious production are not interested in running a chicken retirement home for X additional years of life as well.

Just to offer a different experience, we've kept chooks for years and it's been great.

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

The solution to an potential cross species epidemic is probably not to have a bunch of people live in closer proximity to the primary disease vector

Traffic cone nailed to a tree.

After reading that, I'm not only not want to build a coop, I don't want to consume eggs anymore lol. I guess I'm too "animal loving people".

> In my experience there is no need to kill a chook after 3 years

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.

>>but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings.

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.

You don't have to kill them if you're doing it for fun/as a hobby.

If you're trying to do it commercially you might want to.

Can I just say you've made my day with:

"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!

>Beside i don't know what you do with chicken corpse in city, you aren't going to put it in recycling can.

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.

> If you are the kind of animal loving people in city, i'm not sure it's worth it.

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

This is the harsh reality that a lot of people that have gotten used to the convenience store aren't ready for, but also we're in a slow revolution where people are becoming more conscious of the humane cost of animal products and are switching diets or changing their purchasing behaviour.

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.

If you're worried about a carcass stinking because you're too far from bin day, freeze the bag and then bin it the night before your refuse gets picked up.

In our setting predators do the job - hawks do lions' share (LoL) and foxes the rest. So agingn chicken does not happen. Although we had a rooster - a tiny one, which had incredible surival skills - was over 10 years, killed 2 bigger roosters himself, numerous unobedient hens, survived direct fox attack and dodged hell knows how many hawk strikes. Eventually went blind and had to part with his head out of mercy.

You don't have to slaughter them, if you get regular heirloom chickens. The ones bred for corporate mass farms, yeah they are better off dead because they are genetic freaks either bred to only be meat and turn into a solid mass of meat that can't really walk or to shoot eggs out like a gatling gun, both of which are horrible for any potential long-term health. But traditional chicken breeds you can just accept having less eggs as they get older. Really the super genetic bred chickens aren't good for backyard growers to start with, you aren't going to consume that many eggs or want to have them so fat and meaty they can barely walk after 3 months.

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.

Having chickens taguth me that the phrase 'pecking order' is a pretty horrible thing.

About 30 total. They are not serious about production and let them live out life so that makes sense now.

Use a traffic cone. It will be easier and calm the chicken down.

This is all so brutal. I can’t believe you people are discussing such things so nonchalantly

What do you do with chicken corpses in the country? Burn them?

Wow this is such a real life comment. Very much a breath of fresh air on a site devoted to software, business, politics.

Thanks for taking the time to write it.

it's hard to do, but easy to talk about. i've done my fair share of slaughtering and currently have a freezer full of meat birds. i don't like the process (you feel bad, you have to do things that also are instinctually gross to someone not used to it), but i will continue to eat meat because i think it's part of a balanced and healthy diet.

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.

there is absolutely a reason to kill your chickens that aren't laying - it costs money to feed them. if you don't optimize for price by slaughtering your older hens you will easily be paying > $10 a dozen for eggs.

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 :)

highly agree. after using a cone anything else seems haphazard and cruel.

Isn't the problem here bird flu? I'd be very afraid of raising chickens right now and inviting this kind of thing directly into my home. The solution here is to suck it and go without eggs while this thing hopefully blows over.

I think your sentiment encapsulates the hypocrisy of modern people where the systems have developed over thousands of years to further and further insulate us from all the less pretty aspects of life, to a point where we largely forget the fact that we shit and kill things for food and greed. Our meat comes pre-portioned on a polystyrene tray and wrapped under cellophane. Just abstract blocks of yummy protein. We also built garbage collection and sewer systems that lets most of us forget about the waste we produce. Out of sight, out of mind.

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

Its certainly an option. Chickens can live 7-12 years so that's a lot of feed for a chicken to not produce eggs. More economical to make soup. Their livestock, not pets.

Well said. I'll just add that even vegetarianism gets idealized as well. The farmers growing those crops do far worse things than humanely killing a chicken to vast amounts of wildlife that they perceive as pests.

I don't think hypocrisy is really the best word. The GP's objection may be uninformed or out of line with reality, but it is (likely) the result of the very distance between food source and consumption that you are talking about; ignorance not hypocrisy.

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.

Definitely can help, but I've found that for people that don't do it very often, it's very easy to make mistakes with a knife. The t-post method has very little opportunity for mistakes and really makes it a lot easier for people that don't have a ton of experience, i.e. backyard poultry owners.

Perhaps expected, but I have similar feelings towards people that work at slaughterhouses. So I definitely can understand where GP is coming from.

But like you and the other poster said, killing an animal for food is a deeply ambivalent experience. For me at least.

All good points, but I would add a couple of things:

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.

We do have some ISA browns which are 2-3 years old, but no lash eggs yet – they all seem pretty happy – I guess it just depends.

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 :-)

That's actually very clever.

All this kind of city people thinking goes out of the windows once you're very hungry.

Then you see everything as a piece of meat.

I think I can afford the lifetime cost. Some of our hens are rescued battery hens as well so I'll take the financial hit for the good karma.

Thanks for this. Appreciate counterbalancing anecdotes of egg farming without butchering.

I have chickens also and, like with most other things, you don't have to cut off their heads if you don't want to.

In the UK, a big sack of feed for chickens costs around £12, and that will feed 15 chickens for a week (roughly). So I could be wasting 80p/week per unproductive chicken.

Vegetarianism also reduces crop farming since most crops aren't directly eaten by humans (especially in richer countries):

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Wait till you see how they do it in slaughterhouses, you'll think this guy is a saint

It's a good idea to see where your meat, milk and eggs come from. If you can't stomach it, then why put it in your stomach?