Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

Build vs buy. You can be me and build an in-house flock, pay $100/mo in feed, $500 for a livestock guard dog, $100/mo for dog food, $500 for a solar electric fence, and then $500 for a few coops, etc. It'll pay off before I'm dead, I think! -- right?

Right?!

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).