Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

What’s missing from all the calculations so far is the worth of the time you put in. Maintaining chickens isn’t free on a daily you spend around half an hour, sometimes more to tend to your chickens. Even by minimum wage standards, you’re spending quite a bit more just in labor than buying a dozen eggs for $2 more than what it was 2 years ago.

First, you can't put a price on food security. When you can't get these things from the market because the shelves are bare, you will still have a source available. That's a big perk that can't be understated.

Also, the shelves have been bare with eggs for quite awhile. Locally here we largely only see the large packs being sold. Its been 6 months since I've seen a dozen pack on the shelves.

Its far more than $2, where I live a pack of eggs is competing for a pound of pork or choice beef.

Last Saturday iirc it was 23.99 for 24 eggs, and there were only two packs on the shelf (both with broken eggs).

I would agree, except it’s not food security. Eggs not necessarily a mandatory food source. Like you said, if a pack of eggs is the same as choice beef or pork, then eat that? Both are nutritionally better options than eggs.

If we really want food security, we’d each probably need at least a 10 acres of land per person in the household, grow our own vegetables and grains, raise chickens, have our own cows/pigs/goats, and more.

A nominal human diet requires a certain minimum amount of protein, and related essential amino acids, and vitamins.

Eggs have until very recently been a cheap source of protein as an inferior good compared others.

The problems in shortage are when the prices of all necessities are being driven up across the board to the point where you can't afford food, where government SNAP programs cannot keep up.

This is the point where it becomes food security, and yes you can go further into bootstrapping your own dependency grid given more resources. At a bare minimum it provides goods you can trade for other goods which is more food security than you had when you were completely dependent on others and the currency retaining a stable store of value.

Wow.

Relatively rural Michigan, my local grocer had a dozen pasture raised for $6 this week. Prior to that, it had been $4 or $4.50 for cage free. Plenty available.

I wouldn't be surprised if they are more on my next visit though.

it sucks but you can live without eggs

You can't live without food. Eggs are a food.

So you can live without eggs, but when you have no other food, you can't.

this article is 100% about food security

> So you can live without eggs, but when you have no other food, you can’t.

If you don’t have any other food except your backyard chickens, chances are you won’t have those backyard chickens for long.