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).

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.