Eggs US – Price – Chart

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

Seems interesting a bit but surely the economics are rather brutal? Even a traditional coop has an ROI of years and years and years.

It's a good question - From what we've seen most suburban people that raise chickens don't do it to lower costs of eggs - they do it to have better control over the quality of food they eat, to teach their kids that you take care of the chickens, they take care of us. To eliminate food waste (avg family throws out 200+ lbs a year of food that can go to chickens, and because funnily enough most backyard farmers treat the chickens as family and pets vs just little egg-factories.

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.

From an absolute financial standpoint it might be hard to justify eggs from backyard chickens, though once you realize that they can eat something like 25% of their feed can be grass or clippings, and that some percentage can be redirected household waste (think: peels, food waste, etc) it becomes much more favorable.

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).

It's a good thing we don't make every decision in our lives from an absolute financial standpoint. We'd all be eating gruel and porrage.

We in fact do make most decisions in our lives based on finances, you're just not aware of most of them.

Try living your life the other way around for a while.

I agree with the sentiment but keep in mind that being able to do that is a luxury, not the baseline. Too many people in the world, very developed countries included, have to take decisions based exclusively on their finances, having no more room for the niceties than you have for a yacht.

Agreed.

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.