The egg price is due to the H5N1 epidemics, which also means that this is the least indicated time to get a backyard chicken. The US should have dropped battery caging, like the rest of the world did 15 years ago.
California, which dropped battery caging years ago, has been on of the states most hard hit. The real reason is that the US doesn't vaccinate it's chickens, which it mostly doesn't do because if it did, it couldn't export to several countries.