Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them.

Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.

It didn't stop me and my family. (Chicken katsu is still one of my favorites dishes.) To be sure, we did not eat our own chickens (just their eggs). Somehow we were able to still mentally distance ourselves from ours and "the others".

I was living in San Jose in a dense suburban neighborhood. It became legal to have backyard chickens so I jumped at getting three chickens. (We had three young daughters, see.)

One mysteriously died. Of the remaining two, the bossy one decided she was a rooster and started crowing, of a sort, in the morning hours.

So we had one asshole neighbor complain and I was obliged to send them off to live with a friend who had some property in the Santa Cruz mountains. Sad. And afterward, neighbors strolling by said they missed the chicken sounds in the neighborhood.

I'll spare you the unfortunate ends for the two. I'll say the Santa Cruz mountains represent more predators and require someone with a little more responsibility than my friend showed. (I don't blame him. It was really my fault — having more or less dumped them on him.)

I have grown up with chickens through out my childhood and I strongly disagree with that take. If anything, it makes it more reasonable to eat chicken given that backyard hens are more sustainable and more natural than processed food bought in the store. Chickens reproduce at a very fast pace, and it is not like one is going to eat the oldest and nicest ones.

It does however makes factory farmed animals much less fun to eat, both in term of taste and the knowledge of how much better backyard hens has it. It is like buying clothes manufactured from countries with less-than-stellar working environment.

Some people get used to it. We did some work to prepare our barn for chickens but never quite 'pulled the trigger' because between our tenants and other friends we are swimming in eggs. (It was funny as hell that some of our chicken-keeping friends had a fox family living in a stump in front of their house. Their chicken house was solid but they'd catch the mama fox on the game camera every night bringing home a chicken from somebody else's flock every night.)

Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.

Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.

My aunt names all her chickens. She will also grab one and twist its head of with her bare hands while carrying on a casual conversation with you.

I told the kids not to name the roosters, but we eat them regardless. Once again, humans excel at holding contradictory thoughts.

The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating. They have to work too hard physically for their food. It makes their meat tough.

That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.

> More people will start to find...

...that roosters are total assholes.

There's room for exactly one in the flock, and I have no emotional difficulty turning the rest into stew. The "chickens are cute" narrative only works in a carefully curated frame.

My understanding is that birds are about as intelligent as mammals.

Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.

    > That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.

My kids prefer nuggets over the whole roast chicken my wife and I eat. The salt, MSG, and seasoning of the nuggets along with the fat from the oil tastes better to them. Sadly, nothing I say will convince them otherwise.

> That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.

It will depend on whether the whole chicken is chicken proper, or one reassembled from nuggets.

eggs are homogenous in nature, so a blind test between two eggs can reveal the superior quality of one type of homogenous product. Especially when it is an egg, which is entirely "natural"

a chicken nugget is not the same thing as whole chicken, because it has many chemicals, additives, flavouring agents, msg, organ meat, etc and is then battered or crumbed and deep fried before being packed. It also has a different texture altogether, and is eaten with the hands which children find easier than using cutlery.

compare a child tasting two different varieties of dark chocolate in comparison to a milk chocolate with caramel filling, or two varieties of whole milk to chocolate skim milk, et cetera.

Nuggets are mostly skin and cartilage, so maybe that preference stems from the nutritional needs of a growing child.

Taste (and health) are two things the market doesn’t select for.

Anecdotally I have regularly switched between store-bought eggs and eggs from my friend's little farm over the last 20+ years, and try as I might, regardless of consumption method, I have yet to taste a difference. I have also asked many friends over the years if they notice any difference and all have agreed with me.

It doesn't matter though, I still prefer my friend's eggs to store-bought ones, I'd rather not support that dirty industry.

I cannot tell the difference between backyard eggs and fancy store bought (organic, free-range) eggs, but I can tell the difference between that set and industrial store bought eggs.

Anecdata also, but I can compare the eggs at home (homegrown) vs. any normal restaurant around and there definitely is a notable difference in looks and taste.

That said, this applies to scrambled or fried eggs.

Omelettes not so much, as seasoning might play quite a big part, and even less with cakes, baked goods, etc. in which eggs are just one more ingredient.

Honestly, does it matter? If raising the chickens that yield your eggs makes your breakfasts more enjoyable, is physical vs psychological causality relevant? The important thing here is enjoyment of our food.

This backyard chicken and that backyard chicken does not have to be the same tho

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£1 egg is quite expensive tho: 10 free range eggs at Tesco cost like £3 or so.

Eggs are still pretty cheap in the UK, free range ones for £1.50 or so.

Hahaha - possibly!

I think it is the distinction between "livestock" and "pets".

I would also be very surprised if any vets ever managed to treat a hen successfully. They tend to hide any illness until very sick.

It makes sense if someone likes chickens in general but doesn't care much about any individual chicken.

The geese we put to bed every night, and let out in the morning so they are generally locked away when a fox would come. A friend of ours has about 15 geese and pretty sure they have lost goslings to foxes.

They good at deterring delivery drivers though, and generally alerting people.

According to this website [0] you just need to register with the Animal and Plant Health Agency.

[0] https://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/maintain-the-garden/ke...

There is some paperwork now in that you have to register your flock. I dread the day though that we are told to kill our hens because of an outbreak.

It was bad enough keeping them undercover for one winter.

Murder is also part of the “circle of life”, whatever that may mean, given that it’s pablum that means nothing. As is disease.

We rightfully find these immoral and don’t engage in them.

That’s not a defense of the immoral act. It’s just words to describe the immoral act.

> It's a natural and normal part of life

So is dying of smallpox.

Wikipedia:

> Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence.

Completely natural, and completely normal.

That doesn’t mean we should be engaging in it in 2025.

The naturalistic fallacy is not justification for killing living things.

Ease cannot be used to ethically justify an action. But even so, you ignore that, according to research, people who eat meat have worse health than people who don't.

> being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.

That’s like saying you kill chickens to eat eggs. You don’t kill a plant to eat its fruit. In fact, plants benefit from animals eating what they produce, be it oranges or tomatoes or something else and crapping the seeds somewhere else for proliferation.

Harvesting crops is materially different from slaughtering animals, and calorie for calorie, plant-based nutrition involves less termination of life than getting calories from animals (if you're grouping insects and non-animal life into the "forms of life" being killed).

If people don't like killing in general, or killing animals more specifically, they can live a wonderfully health(y|ier) life by going plant-based, be responsible for less killing, and today do it without having to give up the textures and experiences they've be conditioned on.

It's difficult in 2025 to conclude that a person who doesn't choose to eat this way is particularly opposed to killing, in the way that you propose.

Being against child slavery doesn’t exclude you from benefitting from child slavery when you use your phone.

I guess you should just be pro child slavery and enslaved some kids to do your housework then?

Cars kill 50k Americans a year. I guess we are just ok with killing peoplr and therefore shouldn’t be against murder either?

It doesn’t even take philosophy 101 to understand there’s a significant moral gulf between killing deliberately and incidentally.

> People don't like to kill in general.

I used to believe this.

Then I came up with a twisted question to ask people (I am fun at parties)

The question is something like, if you had to come up with a name for someone to kill within twenty four hours can you do so? The conditions are you get a full and unconditional pardon. It won't be held against you at all. If need be, we will even arrange it such that the person can't protest. However, once you agree, you must come up with a name and you must follow through. You must kill this person no matter what within a short time frame (make something up like a month).

I expected people to answer no. You can't come up with a name in a day! However, over half the people I have asked have said they have a name right now.

I grew up the same for much of my childhood tho it was never hidden or explicitly stated all the time. I bear absolutely 0 resentment about any of that tbh. I just fed the chickens, petted the goats, waved the bees away from fruits and helped pluck the chickens

In the end it makes me feel like the people eating their nuggets but have a traumatic reaction to what created them are the odd ones.

My friend would spend summers at the family farm, and the youngest kids would be issued a rabbit as a pet for the duration. They'd then make the kids watch the rabbits be slaughtered and cleaned, and serve them up at the end of the vacation...

Straight psychopath approach to child raising. The adults were all convinced this is how you made kids grow up tough

Pea gravel. Lots of pea gravel in the holes. Blow it in with water.

You can't tunnel in pea gravel.

That's awesome. My father has been waging a similar war with the coyotes in the woods behind our farm for maybe 5 years now. Your foxes sound way more intrepid though, the coyotes here haven't tried burrowing, yet...

Farming changed radically after the 1950s, so pretty recently. It's pretty reasonable to believe it will. If you've been anywhere near mega livestock operations of any kind then you would know.

It means waiting 150 days after eliminating all the chickens in an area for any virus remaining in that area to no longer be viable.

Not exactly cost concerns but it’s definitely economic in nature. The US exports a lot of poultry (broilers, not eggs) and the importers test for avian flu with tests that are incapable of differentiating between a vaccinated bird and an infected one. If we were to vaccinate our birds, the broiler farmers would lose access to the much more lucrative export markets. Since the market is so competitive domestically, that would essentially spell the end for much of the industry (which is a national security concern, aka never gonna happen).

Instead the US performs cullings and reimburses the farmers, which has the knock on effect of wiping out all the egg laying hens our own domestic market depends on to protect the broiler export markets.

Probably cost previously, certainly ideology now

That wasn't a sample though, it was a hypothesis. (And it brings the question: do cages help?)

Wouldn't that situation be fairly common for backyard chickens? I feel like most people who keep chickens in their backyard aren't going to have contact with other chickens.

The exception would be a neighborhood/community where a lot of people have backyard chickens. But even then, wouldn't the chance of infection still be low?

Good point. I didn't imagine a lot of egg imports happened.

Just for the sake of sharing prices in the context of North America— in Mexico 12 eggs go for $2.21 [1], 18 for $2.46 [2] and 30 for $4.90 [3]. This is just a normal supermarket, and the brand is just a common local one, not the cheapest and not the most expensive.

[1] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-12-piezas/65002...

[2] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-18-piezas/39041...

[3] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-30-piezas/65002...

Europe vaccinates their chickens for salmonella I think (vs pasteurization in the states). They might be vaccinating them for bird flu as well, the USA just culls an entire flock if they find an infection in the flock.

That’s as may be, but if Spurlock is a fraud then you need to provide more substantial evidence than whatever Spurlock says. That’s kind of the point I was making, actually. Supporting your thesis with evidence from a known and provable liar pretty much undermines your thesis in its entirety. So, maybe don’t do that?

> His openness about his history of drunking wasn't ideal and did damage his credibility.

That’s a euphemism if ever there was one. He was a raging alcoholic, and his alcohol consumption (which he denied entirely) accounted for pretty much all of his negative health effects during the film.

> However other people have partially reproduced the health effects of what he did

But nobody has been able to reproduce it entirely, or even account for the weight gain and ill health effects he experienced based solely on his food consumption. And several people recreated his stunt and were perfectly fine, or even had their health improve. It’s not about what food you eat, it’s about how much and your overall lifestyle.

> and his level of drinking is pretty common in the USA so it's not like he's some crazy outlier.

He was reportedly drinking a fifth of vodka per day. That is excessive by any metric.

Costco is culturally insane. There's a certain kind of person (cough prepper cough) that shops at Costco; these people hear one whiff of societal instability and they immediately buy ten dozen eggs, manage to eat half of them, and then throw the other half out. Its super cringe and its the reason why I cancelled my Costco membership last year.

Meanwhile you just go to a Kroger or Walmart down the street, pay nearly the same price, and they always have stock. It was the same thing with toilet paper early in the pandemic; we swing by Costco, utter madhouse, line out the door, everyone has cartfulls of toilet paper. I tell my friend "lets skip this and go try Target" -> Shelves weren't fully stocked, but they had some, no crazy crowds, we're good and the butts are clean.

Costco's prices aren't even that spectacularly great anymore, especially once you factor in the membership, and if you do a little legwork on coupon clipping (which is so easy nowadays with all the apps). E.g. the Kroger near me almost always has meat like 30% off on Fridays because, idk, its nearing the last day they can sell it or something. Stock up for the week then, way cheaper than even Costco.

Actually we do sort of know from the 2014-15 avian flu. In the 2014-15 avian flu, a 12 percent decrease of egg-laying hens was accompanied by a 220% price increase in 2014-15:

- https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-... - https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2015/06/economic-implicati...

Compare that to the current epidemic in which a 5 percent decrease of egg-laying hens is accompanied by a 600%+ price increase.

The size of the EGG LAYING population of chickens is only down 5% since the beginning of the epidemic.

160M chickens with "more culled" is not correct. 115M of those affected have been culled.

Furthermore it doesn't make sense to talk about absolute numbers culled over the course of years when the rate of replenishment of the egg layers is on a shorter time horizon (chicks grow to egg laying maturity in just a few months, which is why we saw a total recovery from the 2015 avian flu in just eight months). That's why it makes more sense to do a year to year comparison of the size of the egg laying population.

If your theory is that the bird flu has decimated the egg laying hen population and therefore egg production is down a staggering amount, answer the following question and decide whether the number is staggering:

How many eggs were produced in Jan 2021? How many eggs were produced in Jan 2025?

> Most U.S. trading partners won't accept exports from countries that allow vaccinations due to concerns that vaccines can mask the presence of the virus.

For what it's worth, America also bans vaccinated poultry imports. There were talks by the USDA to relax the ban when it comes to live animals, but I don't know if it passed.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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!

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.

The labour and land step up from tending chickens to growing grain is a very large step. If you are organized enough to grow grain, and you're near a farming area, you'd be farther ahead to try to buy right off the field grain at harvest time for cash. Mechanized grain harvesting is an immense labour saver that is unavailable to people growing feed for backyard chickens.

It's two 40lb bags. We don't have enough square feet to grow that much feed per month (and still have room for the other stuff we grow).

How much land would you need to grow that much grain? Probably a lot more than most backyard chicken flock owners have.

"Around here our eggs are averaging about $9 per 12 on the shelves, "

What state are you in, that's crazy pricing. Article says, "Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen—an all time-record." So you are stuck 2x the national average price.

What are your thoughts on a more communal approach? Say we have a neighborhood of 20 single family homes that all participate in tending a large garden and raising chickens. Would the cost and chore time drop to a level where it was saving all involved enough money to justify the effort?

I ask because I used to have a good sized garden at my old house, growing enough veggies to both preserve and distribute to neighbors because I grossly underestimated the yield. While it was nice to have the neighbors love me, it was also a lot more work than I had bargained for (especially when otherwise working 40+ hours per week) and it got me thinking about community gardens and whatnot, why those might make more sense these days

Yeah, I'd say two hours a week, maybe an hour. Feeding and watering and checking for eggs can be done quite quickly when it's below freezing out :)

The spreadsheet in isolation view does seem odd to farming types.

We have chickens, my father's still looking after them and he's had chooks since his birth in 1935 .. along with at least 10 fruit trees on any property we've had, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs, pumpkins, and all the usual stuff that you can sow and that grows pretty well on its own (we've all had other jobs .. but this all stems from either growing acres of grain in some wings of the family or raising cattle in remote parts of Australia far from regular shops).

Point being, chickens do well on picking through big piles of rotting down compost from everything else so feed costs are low, return on having chicken shit turned into soil that can be used for the next garden bed is high, value of having bugs kept in check is saving on sprays, etc.

By all means keep a spreadsheet, I'm fond of them also, but having had chooks for decades we see them more as an integrated component of a bigger picture.

If you think you're spending too much on the eggs then you're not perfectly happy. I grew up with chickens and my family also grew up with them. I'm just saying, something is really wrong with the way you're doing it if you think it's not worth the money. There are ways to do it economically. What do you suppose the big farms feed the chickens to make it economical to not only grow the chickens but also package and ship the eggs profitably for all involved, cheaper than you can do it without packaging and shipping and paying middle men?

Probably because no one wants to be on the street with a bunch of drivers that only see snow once a year just to pick up some eggs. More than a quarter of accidents happen in such conditions even though most of the population only sees snow for a short time out of the year so it’s not unwarranted.

Feeding a teenager going through a growth spurt a healthy diet is no joke, and even harder when they’re athletes. Anything that gets them to eat whole foods instead of junk food to fill that gap is far from crazy. Twelve eggs is on the order of 700-800 calories anyway, it would barely get a third of the way there.

Eggs are a cheap meaty protein. Meat is healthier, but more expensive. (Unfortunately, a side effect of that diet is--if sustained beyond growth spurts--it trashes your cardiovascular system.)

Worked great for me. I was on swim team and did weight lifting and got shredded.

Industrial eggs are tightly controlled. Homemade eggs are far more susceptible to infection. AFAIK, scrubbing eggs like in the US is generally a bad idea, and results in the need to refrigerate them.

Chickens are vaccinated in Europe.

lack of bleaching force owners to keep high standard (hygiene and vaccinations)

If you wash your eggs before using them, you will never get salmonella.