Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

> the highest end organic feed tho

Maybe feed them your food scraps? Or bulk buy and prepare your own grains/pulses?

It's a recent experiment, we were on the more reasonably priced organic feed until I discovered my local feed store had this stuff over the holidays, so we're trying it out. The quality of the eggs is absolutely miles above what I already considered really good eggs though.

I'll probably get around to making our own someday, but I'm not there just yet.

I've seen someone just chuck a load of split peas in a plastic barrel and submerge with rain water. It naturally ferments with occasional agitation and this is supposed to be good for the chickens. So not so hard to do when you get to that point of wanting to try it.

That sounds like the level of effort I'm after, thanks neighbor.

> The quality of the eggs is absolutely miles above what I already considered really good eggs though.

I must drive past a dozen (lol) honesty boxes on the way to work offering the sale of eggs and this is my general experience as well.

Its amazing how individuals can produce and sell a product as cheap if not cheaper than mega corps with such staggeringly different quality.

We have fresh egg vending machines along the road by farms in the Netherlands!

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/ne3ivw/i...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Ui4zmqyxY

https://www.fietsnetwerk.nl/en/places/farmers-vending-machin...

https://www.deboeropautomaat.nl

Here's a German company that will sell you your own egg vending machine:

https://vendy1.de/en/blog/egg-vending-machines/?srsltid=AfmB...

I'm sure drive-through egg vending machines would be popular in the US! (And drive-by egg delivery too.)

I mean if you add everything up - land value, labour, food costs, etc - I'm fairly sure they're selling eggs at a net loss, however, it's not a capitalist endeavour unlike the industrial production. And IMO that is the key difference, that is, they produce for themselves and sell the excess and earn some money off of it, it's not their primary goal to do so.

This makes me wonder - would chickens grow more efficiently if you cook their food for them?

When we invented cooking it gave us a massive advantage because of the nutritional efficiency, yet we feed animals just random raw stuff. Would feeding them porridge instead of grain lead to higher output?

These vending machines exist where few people are

Your proposal may give interesting results in a couple hundred generations of chickens, when evolution has had some time to take profit of the cooked food. But, concerning the hens that lay the eggs I'm supposed to eat, please refrain from experimenting with them, thanks!

Exactly, even with it being excess, I think the motivation is to reduce waste versus produce money in these situations. They have uses for the waste, it can be eaten by an animal, but that’s also true if it doesn’t get sold

Yeah "fermented chicken feed" is the search term you are after and it really does work with all kinds of grains and chickens love it.

My chickens feed is a grain mix that can be boiled or even fermented, often called silage with the larger livestock.

The chickens love some warm mash on a cold day like today, they'll get some yogurt too.

> When we invented cooking it gave us a massive advantage because of the nutritional efficiency,

I was reasonably confident cooking reduced nutrition but reduced food-based disease way more.

Or they're using "surplus" resources (like their backyard, and domestic food scraps) that they'd still have otherwise. Which is something that is not commercially scalable. Unless, I guess, someone tries "Uber but for chickens".

What makes you reasonably confident? Cooking leading to better nutrient absorption and our IQ growth is mainstream science so making a wild contradiction like that without something to back it up isn't very helpful. Helping with food-based illness is an interesting thought though.

OTOH for shop bought eggs you also have to add transport (fuel/truck maintenance), storage, commercial land rent/interest costs, electricity, and of course the mark-ups along the way by processors, distributors, and—most of all—the shops themselves, that use their monopoly powers to reduce the margins for everyone else. And if we're doing like-for-like, you have to buy certified 'Pasture Raised' eggs.