Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper.
This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.
This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.
Totally agree with this. After selling my last company (iCracked W12) I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables. I've always wanted to build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture and we decided to start with chickens. I have been raising chickens for 15 years and automating my coops with Arduino's, automatic doors, cameras for computer vision, etc.
We spent 2 years building and designing a AI / smart coop and it's been a fascinating company to be able to build. We've trained our computer vision model on around 25 million videos and have gotten extremely good at doing specific predator detection, egg alerts, remote health monitoring, specific chickens in a coop and behaviors etc. We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback. If you're interested in seeing what we're doing we're at www.TheSmartCoop.com
> I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network
Years ago I worked on Farmforce that is basically this. In America we have centralized agriculture. Over the ocean, small-holder farmers in Africa provide lots of food to lots of markets. Keeping track of all of these farms, their herbicide and pesticide usage and weather-based yield projections is already a solved problem.
We should not model our food supply chain on Africa. In fact, it is beyond absurd to suggest it. African small holders run very unproductive farms, with horrible yields despite high labor intensive practices. Most countries have been on the brink of starvation up until very recently (some still are), and this only improved via adoption of modern farming practices.
Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition). They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture) that is often incredibly wasteful (except when it comes to paying their laborers a living wage).
"Modern farming practices" mostly translates to "use a tremendous amount of energy and really bad wages to produce a respectable surplus in calories and large profits for a few actors within the supply chain".
And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving. In 100% of cases lack of food is due to it not being made available by choice, i.e. because nobody is willing to pay for it, or it is actively withheld in war, etc.
Source: degree in development studies and more hours on African (and European) smallholder farms than I can count.
> Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition).
This sounds intelligent, but is extremely wrong perspective.
For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high). This severe under capitalization is already a reason why we shouldn’t imitate their example. Anyway, all the development agencies run very active program to promote use of fertilizer, with very limited effect.
If you consider insufficient fertilizer use, then yeah, maybe they get good yields in the context. But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.
> They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture)
No. Their yields are horrible, and in no way comparable to modern industrialized agriculture.
> And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving.
This is true if you define “starvation” as “literal famine involving mass death”, but if you are trying to say that there has been no severe, persistent, widespread malnutrition due to insufficient caloric intake, then you are extremely wrong. Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector. It was only alleviated (and only in some places) by modern, western style development.
Seeing like a state (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State) is quite a famous book that has a whole chapter on this, and it does argue that the small holders of Africa have a lot to teach to us. Many have tried western style agriculture in Africa, and many have failed.
Nowhere did I say that we should just transplant African smallholder farms and their underlying (and often deficient) systems worldwide. That would obviously be stupid. Just as stupid as arguing that there is nothing to learn from people who have mostly succeeded (because most of them are still alive and their populations are growing) feeding themselves from their own land despite having the worst starting position imaginable.
> For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high).
Capital constraints are an extremely common problem for African farmers, not "a small amount of cases". It could easily be remedied with the right support. Or simply by regulating international trade in a way that does not allow excessive subsidies in the E.U., U.S. and elsewhere completely destroy the local market for agricultural products on the continent.
At the same time, fertilizer overuse is extremely well documented in "modern agriculture" across the world. It has extremely bad externalities, from CO2 emissions to over saturating local water reserves, which of course Big Ag usually does not have to pick up the tap for.
If you internalize the costs of fertilizer use, "modern" agriculture quickly becomes uncompetitive. You can see this in many European countries (i.e. Netherlands, Ireland), where the enforcement of nitrate regulations has basically put whole sectors of the agricultural industry out of business.
> But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.
No, but we should learn from it what we can. Especially with climate change rapidly leading to less availability of water and restrictions on using fertilizers.
> Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector.
Again: both the calories and the nutrition to adequately feed the entire population of the world is easily available, including in most cases locally or regionally. If it doesn't reach specific people, it is not an availability problem, but a distribution problem.
Most emergency aid organizations have long since started sourcing both calories and nutrition for disaster relief regionally because they can.
Is Africa's agricultural sector terribly inefficient? Yes, of course. Is there nothing to learn from African smallholders? Hell no!. Will "modern agriculture" have to change radically, including by incorporating lessons and practices from smallholders from around the world if we want agriculture to stop messing up the climate and literally killing the lion's share of natural diversity? You bet!
It's a good question - From what we've seen most suburban people that raise chickens don't do it to lower costs of eggs - they do it to have better control over the quality of food they eat, to teach their kids that you take care of the chickens, they take care of us. To eliminate food waste (avg family throws out 200+ lbs a year of food that can go to chickens, and because funnily enough most backyard farmers treat the chickens as family and pets vs just little egg-factories.
Avg hen lays about 250-270 eggs a year depending on breed. So 6 chickens (our coop is designed for 6) throws off about 1500 eggs a year. Avg American eats around 291 eggs + egg products per year (which is crazy!).
Most people build their coops or buy one from Tractor Supply or Amazon for $300 and day-old chicks are around $4 each and feed is inexpensive (50lb bag at Tractor Supply is $21). You can make the economics work super well if you want to but as most backyard chickens are treated as pets (I am leaving out large farms and homesteads, etc) a lot of people pamper and spend $ on their hens because it's more than just getting a lower cost egg if that makes sense.
From an absolute financial standpoint it might be hard to justify eggs from backyard chickens, though once you realize that they can eat something like 25% of their feed can be grass or clippings, and that some percentage can be redirected household waste (think: peels, food waste, etc) it becomes much more favorable.
As you mentioned, most treat them like pets which means they get to learn how long-lived chickens can be, and how egg production levels off in the later years.
But even then, if you're buying less than half the feed needed, you can probably break even for quite awhile (especially now).
I grew up on a (very) small farm - I still go to throw apple cores out of the window, as when I was younger the was always /something/ that would be happy for the treat. All dinner scraps were saved (or rather taken straight out), and all the windfall and rotten apples were happily eaten by the sheep, cow, geese and chickens.
I really hate throwing food away now, really pains me!
One of the things that we've been thinking about is when we're at scale (I would say scale is 50,000+ Coops in the field) I would love to build a circular food waste system where we use food expiring / thrown out from grocery stores to feed our Coop member's chickens. Then we'll do partnerships where our members can sell excess backyard-to-table eggs back to the grocery stores.
Most people don't get that eggs usually are 30-60 days old when you buy them at the grocery store and they have to travel up to 1000 miles to get there in cold storage.
Want to know how old your eggs are? On every egg carton there's a 3 digit number from 1 to 365. That is the day of the year the producer of eggs handed them off to the distributor. Producers have up to 30 days to hand it off to distributor and the distributor has an additional 30 days to hand off to retailer. Kinda wild!
The crazy part that I learned when we started keeping chickens is that the eggs last so long unrefrigerated. In the US we have to wash commercial eggs, but we don't wash ours until use. We can keep eggs in our countertop spiral holder for weeks, easily, and they are perfect. Once I learned how old eggs in stores were, I bought more chickens.
Throwing away the core is throwing away both food and the most beneficial part of the apple for your gut. Of the ~100 million bacteria in an apple, the core and seeds contain around 60%, while the pulp only contains around 20%, the skin 10%, the stem 10%. Numbers are from the top of my head, they could be off
Yes, if you eat it bottom up instead of around, there is practically no core. Also much cleaner, and you just throw the stem away plus the benefit of ingesting all the good bacteria
Yeah, the amount of food waste that can easily be "reprocessed" on even a small farm is tremendous.
Not only do you have reduced waste, you have reduced packaging (no need to put the eggs in cartons if you're just carrying them to the kitchen).
People usually thing you need pigs to eat waste, but most farm animals will take some or all (the biggest risk is accidentally giving an animal something it shouldn't have).
I grew up on a small poultry farm. Most farmers I know are very very good at recycling and reprocessing. There's very little "rubbish" if you are clever about it. If it can't be fed to an animal, and it doesn't rot (compost), it's probably something you can build with, either a machine or a structure. Meanwhile you use animal waste to improve the garden, producing more food, the scraps of which go back to the animals.
The biggest exception was in the case of disease, which we managed with fire. Burning diseased bird coops along with the corpses of dead birds was very cost effective on our small scale.
I agree with the sentiment but keep in mind that being able to do that is a luxury, not the baseline. Too many people in the world, very developed countries included, have to take decisions based exclusively on their finances, having no more room for the niceties than you have for a yacht.
I've found, in my own life, that when I'm hyper focused on optimizing things for cost I often get far less "out" of things. I end up not eating my whole dinner because I don't like it. But if I let go a bit, things are actually in aggregate more financially efficient when I'm getting more of what I pay for, if that makes sense.
It only works for people who are built this way though. Not hedonists.
That's a much bigger problem. People at the limit of survival financially - and there's a lot of them - may not have the luxury of any kind of financial education, or the leeway to experiment and take longer term aggregates and strategies. There is only now.
It's expensive to be poor and this is why. It's not just hedonists, a chronically empty stomach changes the way you think and how far and wide you're seeing.
> So you are telling me poor folks are poor and struggling?
No, I'm telling you that your examples, the "strategy" of getting financial efficiency, and calling it "hedonism" are disconnected from the reality of the people who suffer from this the most. Unlike you those people don't leave dinner on the table because it was too cheap.
> As if this isn't known?
It doesn't sound like you know know. You're telling a blind person how to get around better by just "looking around".
Your perspective above is the modern version of "let them eat cake" [0]. "You don't have enough money? Try to live like you have enough money".
It does not make sense,to me, can you elaborate? I know I spend too much time / effort cost optimizing. Interested in reasonable ways to justify not doing so!
Calculate a cost of your time, maybe it's your salary, maybe you come about it a bit differently.
Then if you spend 10 mins saving 8 cents on Ramen, and you like the cheaper Ramen less, you have a paradigm within which you can objectively (not emotionally) determine if you are wasting your time (therefore money) on a false optimization, or actually doing good for yourself.
Its more than that, our whole social world is constructed by financial possibility. The very reason that you are able to go see a cool movie or try that new restaurant or take a vacation is because someone or some entity, usually a bank, has calculated the risk of the loan or investment into whichever enterprise you are requesting goods or services from. Which is to say that the element of that risk which is non-quantifiable is still articulated within the boundaries of a certain quantity.
Almost all our food waste goes into a small metal bowl that gets dumped in the coop every night. I used to bury it in the compost pile, but since the hens have picked through it all, theres not much left. They happily eat the scraps and I happily collect their eggs.
We've had good success with Black Soldier Flies[1] too. They compost pretty much anything - you can toss in meat/cheese and similar scraps not just veggies. And you get a very high quality protein to feed the chickens.
Amazing project! I always get excited when I hear new innovative ideas to improve ecosystems/businesses that are taught of as "traditional". There's this My First Million podcast episode with Justin Mares (DTC Food entrepreneur) where they talk about boostrapping alternative food biz ideas and are very bullish on these verticals and they also talk about various types of birds breeds and how cornish cross became the predominantly type of chicken raised.
Regarding this smart poultry startup, where I'm from I often hear from poulty farmers chicken should be able to roam free and have a wide space to lay around eggs and reproduce. I'm curious how this limitation is addressed to backyard herders?
Most of our customers have decent sized backyards - I would say on average from clips people have shared, most yards are about the size of a tennis court or more (which is more than enough for 4-6 hens). Basically we look at it as, if you have a backyard, you have enough space for 4-6 chickens. Also, It's funny you mention My First Million - Sam Parr is a good friend of mine and I've been trying to get him to invest in Coop, lol.
> We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback.
Nobody is going to pay you anywhere near the amount of money you'll need for the energy and equipment to do this.
"Well shit, coyotes got one of the chickens" and then...just go get another chicken for...about $5 each. There's no data you could possibly collect that would interest people enough to buy your company.
The whole point behind chickens is that there are some manageable startup costs but then they're cheap to "run" - if you have a big enough property and free range 'em or use a 'tractor', even your feed costs are cut.
> I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables.
It's not decentralized if everyone has to use your app (I'm guessing your plan is to get a cut...) This stuff already exists. They're called "farmers markets."
It's also called "talking to your neighbors." That's been going on for hundreds of years.
> build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture
Free range birds are able to interact and spread the disease more easily than the caged birds which can be quarantined. At least in my location all the cage free inventory is totally wiped out.
Antibiotics are not widely used. There are many regulations, to use them at all you need a vet to sign off. You also have to pay for them. Then the animal has to be off of them for weeks before you can sell it.
In any case where are talking about a virus which an antibiotic won't touch at all.
Modern large farms have very strict bio controls. Things like: You shower before entering the barn (there is a shower in the barn entrance). Then you wear only approved clothing. Your shoes are disinfected as part of this process. then when you leave you reverse the process. If you enter one barn you are not allowed in a different barn for a week.
> Antibiotics are not widely used. There are many regulations, to use them at all you need a vet to sign off.
This isn't true, some types of antibiotics are routinely used as a preventative measure on chicken farms.
> Both FDA and the World Health Organization (WHO) rank antibiotics relative to their importance in human medicine. The highest ranking is “critically important.” Antibiotics in this category are used sparingly to treat sick birds. Antibiotics in other less-important classes may be used in chicken production to maintain poultry health and welfare, including for disease prevention, control and treatment purposes.
That's a little deceptive. The antibiotics widely used by the industry are used for growth promotion. I don't know how it works, but I don't believe it's because they're keeping the birds healthy--i.e. treating infections. Some sources suggest part of the mechanism is by suppressing otherwise healthy or benign gut microbiota that compete for calories. Antibiotics have been used this way for nearly a century. There have been attempts to phase out subtherapeutic antibiotic use, but the practice is standard operating procedure in the US, and the US is a major chicken exporter. It's banned in the EU, though.
Of course it's at least a little deceptive, it's from an industry association PR page. When I said anti-biotics are used as a preventative measure, that wasn't meant to exclude their use for other non-medical purposes, but that's a more complicated argument.
I posted that, not because it is an unbiased source, but because if even that biased of a source admits it, then it's hard to dispute.
While I'm unsure about chickens, they're also [ab]used for larger meat animals like cows and turkeys because they make the animals grow larger, faster.
The fun thing is - nobody knows exactly why this happens. There's a bunch of hypotheses, but they're exceptionally hand-wavy.
They only interact with other birds within their isolated farm. How would the virus be introduced to that population? Its normally transmitted by wild birds.
>There’s a reason antibiotics are so widely used
Yeah, for bacteria that's in their gut biome. Not pandemic viruses.
That’s not at all the case here (VT). The local sellers are essentially all pasture-raised, free-range, etc., and their eggs are the only ones in stock. I have read some posts from them talking about the various ways they keep segments of the flocks separated, and they are being quite careful about any outside access.
Edit: I guess also the birds are indoors much more anyway, given the winter. It's 11 F here today, so probably they're huddled up inside :)
My half-dozen chickens in my yard in VT are hardy and out and about! I get about four eggs a day, and endless entertainment from the small herd of therapods.
I love to hear it! I didn't realize they were so cold tolerant, but I'm glad they can still enjoy the outdoors even when the winters are as cold as this one.
I'd love to get some chickens one of these days. Four eggs a day would be enough for us to regularly give away dozens while supplying all of our own egg needs.
Cage free does not mean they're out in a field. It means all of the birds are in one crowded space. Eggs that come from birds that genuinely roam the pasture are exceedingly rare.
There’s cage free, then there’s pasture raised and then there’s regenerative farming. All of them don’t include chickens roaming around as freely as you think they do. Cage free especially just means they’re stuffed like sardines in giant barn, but are not in cages. Pasture raised often means they’re still in netted coops that move around on a pasture. I think regenerative farming comes closest to allowing chickens to roam around, but it’s still not freely.
This is my understanding from a former poultry farmer, but of course he had a reason to blame the other types of chicken raising for bird flu issues. I think both can be true, and you're in effect gambling different ways with each strategy.
Really raises the question - should vital infrastructure, like food production, be built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency? Have things swung too far in one direction?
To my mind there's no question that it's swung too far. But it's very easy for me to live in the country and say "oh I get all my fresh produce from the local farm!" when there are cities of millions of people that need feeding too. Scaling while retaining resiliency is not easy.
Which is not scalable for the entire big city. My parents are organic market gardeners, and there is simply no way that model could scale up enough to feed that many people cheaply.
Food budgets would have to go back to the 1940's or earlier - where they were a significant fraction of take home pay. Now they are almost a rounding error comparatively.
I don't necessarily think that would be a bad thing. A lot of the asset price inflation like homes can be tracked to food and consumer goods taking an increasingly lesser portion of the family budget. Re-balancing this seems wise to me.
>Food budgets would have to go back to the 1940's or earlier - where they were a significant fraction of take home pay. Now they are almost a rounding error comparatively.
You are demonstrating your privilege. I am pretty frugal and my INDIVIDUAL food cost is like $100 a week, or 10% of my take home pay, and while I make peanuts compared to most in tech, I make more than the average adult.
USDA stats say the average numbers are closer to $500 a month and 11% of gross salary, and also:
>households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $5,278 on food (representing 32.6 percent of after-tax income).
You put your finger on what I think is the real issue: whether or not access to cheap food is a net benefit or not. I also won't claim to have the perfect answer but do feel we've gone at least a bit too far in one direction.
Yes, and I think it goes beyond "healthy", depending on one's definition.
Part of it is also that "cheap" tends to lead to monocultures and other patterns that are more easily disrupted.
An example being the Cavendish banana, which for most of the western world is the only thing they know of when the word "banana" is mentioned. And now the banana supply of a large part of the world is in danger of going extinct [1]
And there's also ecological health. "Cheap" tends to promote mass production in certain areas and shipping everywhere. "Cheap" tends to promote less sustainable farming practices. That sort of thing.
Almost a round error comparatively doesn’t mean it’s 0.01%.
People used to spend ~30% of their income on mass produced basic staple foods with very little meat they cooked at home. You can live like that on like 1$/day. Median household income is over 80k today so we are talking more than an older of magnitude price reduction.
Get regular meal delivery etc and sure you can spend crazy money but it’s not really spending that money on food itself.
family of 3, never ordered delivery in my life outside of pizza once in a blue moon and eating out no more than twice per month - food bill $1,900-ish / month
The article is literally about eggs being 7$/dozen, which is an egg specific price spike.
Even assuming you’re spending twice as much on eggs it just doesn’t add up to over 20$/day. Flour is 0.50$/lb, lettuce is 3$/lb, butter is 5$/lb, etc. Even a 3,000 calories per day you’re well under that.
I have a similar build, basically all adults and I am the only one who pays for food. My monthly bill is about 30 - 60% your bill. Mostly sits in the 30 - 40% range.
I don't dine out, I don't drink, and I have some lifestyle + allergy restrictions for some things, but I tend to believe those restrictions actually make it more expensive than not.
I am also not in a VHCOL, but still quite high since I'm quite close to a major hub in an expensive suburb.
That number is insane to me. I would have to go high end on every single meal to get to the same number. I don't think I debate quality all that much either. I don't feel I cheap out either generally. Food is a fair bit less than 5% of what I make annually too.
In many cases maximizing profits increases supply through efficiency, especially in the case of things like food. Increased supply is usually considered a safer place than a lower supply if it's vital.
Every step you take that makes food more expensive, some use cases of food are no longer possible (say, free eggs in all elementary schools or something).
How many of these uses are we ok eliminating so the wealthier population has a more consistent/resilient supply?
> built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency
I think framing it as an either/or is a bit of a mental trap. They are sometimes in opposition, sometimes not.
For example, those farms which were not resilient are not maximizing their profits, since they've had more than a year of warning of avian flu. They were operating to minimize work and costs, not maximize profit, and they are losing out on a ton of it right now.
Those operations which built with resilience, or got lucky, are swimming in profits right now.
The issue with that reasoning is that it fails to take into account that risk is a commodity now. It's often more profitable to go for short term profit and offload your risk to an insurer who amortizes that monetary risk in a pool containing a bunch of other industries.
For critical services like food production, that's a problem. "Well, we don't have food, but it's okay because screw production went well" doesn't make sense socially, but our system makes it so monetarily.
I'm not sure in what sense you mean risk is a commodity, and why it's a problem. I'm also unsure what changed to make it so now, as opposed to having ever been so.
Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully. Those who did not take risks into account lost their bet. Eggs are priced higher for some, but are pretty much available everywhere still, and have not dipped below some sort of minimal level of availability. In California, past shortages were far far worse than this one, and even then the egg shortages were in no way catastrophic to the economy or health of humans.
Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine. Instead, our abundance of high calorie food is the biggest risk to the health of Americans.
So I would like to understand your point a bit more if you have the time to elaborate.
I think the assumption they're making is that we want to guarantee a certain reliability of food, and that even if we have perfect insurance that pays out when there isn't enough food, we just have money, and no food.
That's a theoretical problem that could occur, but is extremely unlikely. The worst we'll see is what we have now (eggs are spendy) or a certain type of food disappearing for awhile (tomatoes one year were gone from almost all fast food places).
If we have to substitute one food for another for a year or two that's an inconvenience. But preventing famine by trying to guarantee that the price of eggs doesn't go up is likely far, far down the list. Better that money be spent on improving the supply chains and if necessary bulk storage of long-lasting caloric sources (cheese and flour reserves, perhaps).
Here's an idea. Let's get a large proportion of our calories from inefficient animal sources. Then if there is a widespread crop failure we can eat the breeding stock and then the animal feed.
That's generally what happens in Africa. It doesn't work as well in North America because consumers here are too rich to switch to barley and oats when wheat is expensive.
Yes, ethanol is the American equivalent. If we ever have a food shortage due to widespread extreme weather or similar, the president can nix the ethanol mandate to eliminate the food shortage.
The world does not have caloric food insecurity. We might be insecure in terms of specific nutrients or specific foods, but the modern world is not insecure in terms of human food calories.
> Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully.
I don't know why you're saying this. Imagine I'm investing.
If I "take risk into account" and select stocks anyways, I may lose a bunch of money one year. But I expect to make more on average than bonds.
Looking at a year where bonds excel compared to stocks doesn't mean that I failed to "take risk into account."
Likewise, a conventional producer of eggs that has now had a significant downturn in production may be having a bad year, but this doesn't mean that they're not following a profit maximizing strategy or not taking risk into account.
> Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine.
I think this is making the same kind of mistake: looking at today's outcome and assuming that reflects the risk picture.
We're not observing too much famine right now. But we could certainly have a more of a risk of the most catastrophic possible famines now because of things like monoculture, critical links in production, climate risk, etc. Just looking around and saying "all is great today" or "conventional egg producers are having trouble today" or "stocks are down 15% for the year" does not capture the picture of risk, particularly for rare events.
The best we can do is try to interpret sentinel events like this one and think about what else can happen.
I don’t think of it this way. I think the conventional producers were acting to maximize expected profits at the cost of increased volatility in outcomes. Most years these practices have been more profitable.
Conventional producers have been working to contain things like this for year. They don't all succeed, but this isn't the first time eggs have got expensive because of a bird flu, and they have been paying attention to what works. They don't remodel all barns at once to fix the issues, but they have been remodeling barns over the years to prevent this issue.
> Conventional producers have been working to contain things like this for years.
Sure. My point is, what optimizes for average production and profits doesn't necessarily optimize for worst case production and profits. There is a level of care that doesn't pay off most of the time.
1000 years ago we were much less resilience, and that despite farmers then optimizing for that and not profit. (read acoup.org for long discussions on what farming was really like over different times in history)
We as thoughtful human beings can consider non-extreme points where we find other optimizations that aren’t necessarily around profit or resiliency. We can create a new metric called “human progress mertric” where we consider profit as a strong driver but also put weight on things like resiliency and allow profit to slide a bit so our real goal is better achieved.
Rarely ever, IMO, are worthwhile goals entirely profit optimized or resiliency optimized. Some blend tends to be best, and sometimes you can even have both simultaneously (they’re not always inherently mutually exclusive, although those taking in the winnings may want it to be).
A surprisingly large amount of the United States' crop yield comes from rain falling on non-irrigated fields (85%). Our biggest crop is corn, and corn is very water-sensitive at specific points in its growth.
There is no infrastructure to protect there – only infrastructure to build (irrigation), for better resiliency.
> Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale
Is that what's happened here? It looks to me more like the billionaire/PE class's drive to capture rents through monopolies is a more accurate lens to view the situation through. Especially as it's the trope namer for chickenization
The disease affects wild bird populations heavily and is just as transmissible to disparate flocks as it is larger flocks. Breeders tend to keep their flocks isolated, often for genetic reasons, and because they're their cash cows versus just cattle.
I generally agree with you about centralization and monocultures, just in this case I don't think it's really going to change things.
Likely. I guess if they held onto the eggs for a few days before selling them it would work. If the bird is still alive and the egg is a few days old, sell it.
> This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.
On top of that, large operations tend to be hell on earth from an animal welfare perspective. The air alone is toxic and hard to breathe because there's so much avian poop everywhere that is constantly decomposing.
Wow! That's crazy. Here in the UK, the most expensive eggs in my local supermarket - which are Clarence Court Burdord Brown eggs - are only the equivalent of $5.08 per dozen. Those are the posh, expensive, eggs that only those with a bit of extra cash in their pocket, and a desire to eat more healthily, would buy.
Food additive manufacturers sell farmers aditives to produce yolks with specific hues[1]. There are regional/cultural variations in color preferences, so regional farmers will target different sades.
It's slightly disingenuous to call carotenoids "additives". Although it might technically be true, carotenoids are naturally present in tons of vegetables (hence carrots) and are a good antioxidant with other known health benefits.
So hens don't usually have to be force-fed. Some of that color can come from having a diverse source of proteins--like the bugs and insects that pasture-raised hens get access to--but farmers "in the know" will also add paprika and marigold to the usual soy-and-grain supplemental feed, to try to encourage it to come out a bit more.
A few years back I briefly thought that a rich yolk color was a quality signal, until I found that additives could produce that color cheaply. The color comes from dietary carotenoids [1]. Companies like BASF sell carotenoid feed additives that producers can employ to get a yolk color as rich as desired:
My city has 30k people, although we are part of a larger metro. Store brand eggs are $9.50/dozen. Alternatively Costco is still selling 60 packs for $20, although they have had per customer limits recently and don't alway have stock. Works out to $4 per dozen. But thats a lot of eggs.
yep. been a long time coming. it's unfortunate that when it favors them this is a talking point for the maga folks... but when it hurts them they are nowhere to be found.
If I avoid name brand stuff, my prices generally aren't bad. Like you said, the local eggs have been stable.
Locally sourced chicken also is reasonably priced and often on sale. There was BOGO (mix and match) last week so I got a whole chicken and a 2lb pack of breasts for $12 total. Both beautiful quality. With a bunch of minor cheap produce, herbs, and pasta..that's chicken soup + a chicken one pot meal that'll last us all week. Sometimes those whole chickens are on sale for 99c/lb!
Well, if you know your local farmers and buy from them regularly, it doesn't look great if they jack their prices up unnecessarily. They also know that they're competing against the perception that local food is more expensive. In normal times, factory farms can always undercut their prices, so it would make sense for them to use the current situation as an opportunity to get more people to start buying local (due to the prices!) and hope that they will continue to buy local once the prices invert again (due to the quality).
Doesn't quite answer the question (of why they should sell at the highest price they can).
Unless you are suggesting that raising prices today is better (normative sense, since you used the word "should") than raising prices when you don't have a choice. In which case, can you explain more your reasoning?
I wonder though, in specifically this instance, if the price of their feed is going down because of how many chickens have been culled or just flat out died from disease.
But yea, if other cost rise, they will need to rise prices.
Bird flu has 95% lethality in chickens and takes ~48 hours to kill. It's not like they can get away with ignoring it. Testing happens when you wake up and half your birds are already dead.
That said OP is asserting local costs haven't changed without evidence. Even if that were true (and I don't think it is- local farms are also being hit hard eg duck farming in NY) it probably speaks far more to small operations having a harder time changing their prices. Or the cheap eggs are just places who haven't been hit yet.
I was wondering how I could provide evidence for you other than walking to the grocery and taking a picture, but I found at least one of our local farms that has their prices online: https://www.maplewindfarm.com/collections/retail-store -- I'd expect it would be quite easy for them to change their prices on their own storefront and in their farmstand, where I often buy their eggs.
A dozen large eggs there right now is $7.90, which is right in line with what their costs have been for at least the last year (they are one of the more expensive local brands).
Unfortunately I just went to the grocery last night, so I don't have any reason to swing by today, but next time I do I'll try to remember to snap a pic of the egg section to share.
I've seen a bunch of posts online from the farms about how they're doing biosafety protocols, keeping groups of chickens isolated from each other, etc. I'm sure that increases their costs somewhat, but whatever they're doing seems to be keeping them insulated from the worst of the flock die offs, and regardless, their prices haven't really changed.
In case anyone was curious, the Internet archive on my parent commenter's link shows large dozen egg prices of:
$7.90 March 2024,
$7.50 November 2023,
$6.50 February 2023.
Oh good thinking! So in line with the sibling commenter, they’ve gone up some, but not a crazy amount, with most of that increase happening prior to the outbreak. And still cheaper than Vital Farms prices mentioned by others elsewhere in the thread.
Anecdotes aren't data, but I'll chime in to agree - the locally sourced eggs have gone up in the last few years, but only from like $4.99 to $5.59.
The "generic egg" have gone from $0.25 a dozen during some price war 6-7 years ago to $6.99. That price has caused the local eggs to sell out first where they used to always be available.
Just to be clear, I never claimed to have data. I said "fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here," "here" being where I live. The whole discussion is based on that anecdote. GP noted that I made that assertion without evidence, so I was just trying to provide evidence that I wasn't inventing it out of thin air.
I suspect that the combination of our and other anecdotes in the thread may suggest though that there is some merit to the hypothesis that small, local farms are more resilient to this kind of mass pandemic, although it may vary from region to region, especially with the number and quality of local farms, which is probably much higher where I live than some other rural states and/or in major metropolitan areas.
To add to this, checking Craigslist... local chicken owners here are selling their extra eggs for about $7-8 a dozen here as well (20m drive from a major US city).
Only marginally more expensive than store eggs, but a lot fresher, unwashed (will keep for a long while on the counter), and you can see exactly where (and from whom!) the eggs are coming from.
Biosafety prevents or delays the farm from being infected. It doesn't lessen the impact once it happens. One bird can infect all the others in hours even when they are in separate buildings just from spreading on clothing. If they are infected they will die.
If a small farm gets an infected bird, they can't just raise the prices of their eggs. Those eggs will just disappear from the stores because all the birds are dead. If they are doing rigorous isolation, like hiring totally separate people taking care of completely isolated flocks, that should increase their prices. Farms that are spending more money on isolation and chosing not to increase prices are still at high risk- they just haven't been unlucky yet.
Well I certainly don't know enough about chicken farming to argue with you about it from any position of authority, and I haven't talked personally to any farmers about it yet.
Regardless, we have continued to see the availability of all the usual local eggs with very little fluctuation in price. Perhaps they have all been lucky.
I personally don't really like eggs. I only buy them when I need them for ingredients in something I plan to cook soon, so I haven't been tracking their price over time. But we are making a cake this week and had been hearing about the eggs problem for a while now.
Yesterday, eggs were not sold out at my local grocery store. There was a sign saying they may limit purchases. The crappy bottom of the barrel eggs were selling for 9 dollars a dozen. Pretty much all the eggs that touted organic or farm fresh on their containers were going for 4 to 5 a dozen, which seems reasonable. I assume those are from the local farms.
The local farms here at least are being really cautious about testing and isolation. Many of them sell their eggs to the local grocery stores, so they are bound to the same standards as other eggs.
I don’t see what benefit they would gain by not testing, anyway: if their flock is infected and a significant portion of the birds die, they are going to lose revenue the same way a massive egg producer would. If anything, I’d imagine them to want to be more cautious, since they have fewer eggs in their basket as it were (fewer total chickens).
Depends on where you're at. I mentioned in my last comment that bird flu is killing snow geese nesting near me. It's also infecting crows. The snow geese are not likely to interact with backyard chickens but the crows absolutely will.
> they are now often cheaper...increase the resilience of the system as a whole
cheaper and resilience are not proportional here. in fact, cheaper is proportional to efficient, which large producers are better at (apart from questions of healthiness, etc). i can't argue against resilience though, although that comes at a cost. speaking as a backyard-chicken-raiser of some years.
"Cheaper" varies by the costs of the various inputs. A local chicken farmer which sells to a local market has, aside from the costs of the land, chickens, feed, and labor, the costs of putting the eggs in a truck and driving the truck to the market. Larger distributors have the cost of collecting the eggs, driving them to a warehouse, storing them, potentially repeating that while optimizing inventory and locality, and then driving them to the market. The cost of gas, labor, electricity, and a variety of other factors can dramatically swing the cost calculations. Combined with the noted lack of resiliency in the system - the multiple additional logistical steps, the multiple points of failure in the system, the larger blast radius of those failures - and the "larger is more efficient is cheaper" calculus isn't quite as cut and dry, as we've seen over the last couple years.
Many of your small producers are not counting their full costs. They see they $ from selling eggs, but don't count the cost of the barn, their labor, the land the chickens are on... A real accountant would find all those hidden costs and figure out how you allocate the cost of the light bulbs in the barn to each chicken - only when you have all those numbers can you really see if it works out.
This is so common in small businesses. The biggest example I see is single-family landlords who are notoriously bad at doing the honest math.
This is often why small businesses survive until the owner dies/retires, because the were making much less money than needed to continue. The biggest one is ignoring location costs because they own the building (avoiding rents or mortgage which would immediately put the business way underwater).
Combine the above with small farms often ALSO being the home of the owner, and it gets quite flexible.
If the business lasted until the owner died, then it was making at least the amount of money it needed. Not all businesses need to grow or make tons of money, if they at least serve their owner's lifestyle. If I could make a business that supported me until I died, I'd start it right now.
Sorry I’m not sure I follow your point. I’m saying that given the current situation with bird flu, the local eggs are often less expensive at my grocery store.
I’m not saying that they are less expensive to produce or that they will remain less expensive at the store during normal times. However, paying the extra costs during normal times means those farms stay in business, which means I can still get eggs for the same price right now as I can in normal times.
What I find weird is people’s aversion to buying the organic and local eggs. They had them for half the price as the factory farm eggs yet people weren’t touching them.
I've definitely noticed the pricing for eggs at our neighborhood Trader Joes staying constant while the pricing at our neighborhood Safeway has doubled.
This. I buy my eggs at the farmers market from a local, actually small, farm. I pay $8/doz. In normal times this is very expensive. But you know what? Tomorrow when I go to the farmers market they'll still cost me $8/doz.
I guess I don't see why local farmers _wouldn't_ raise their prices to maintain their premium above store-bought eggs. They certainly have around here.
Because in setups like I'm describing the farmers tend to start building relationships with their customers. Price gouging is generally not the best way to maintain those relationships.
In previous egg shortages over the years the couple of farmers I use would sometimes impose limits like 1 carton per customer or something like that. But not jack up prices.
Smaller farmers usually want to make money to cover their costs, and if they weren't doing that, they're already in a huge pickle.
As you mention, they'll impose limits (or perhaps offer "shiny brown eggs for $1 more") rather than piss off the customers, who 90% of the time have cheaper options already.
Maybe they see it as a way to acquire new customers. They are in the very unusual position of being able to undercut their bigger competitors on price while still making a profit.
Right now, buyers are probably shopping around a ton. You can probably get customers who normally wouldn't be interested. After they try it, some of them may decide they like it and could become long term customers.
Canadian and Mexican egg prices haven’t budged because they vaccinate their chickens [1].
I’m not a fan of factory farming. But this isn’t a story about that. It’s a story about American (a) producers favouring cheap production by avoiding the cost of vaccination and (b) regulators favouring a policy of trade protectionism that keeps our neighbours’ cheap eggs off our grocery-store shelves.
They can be but they’re not. Canadian and Mexican factory farms are not being affected sufficiently to raise prices. The cause of the price rise is not factory farming. It’s vaccination practice and trade policy.
I was curious about this, being neighbors with Canada, and I'm not seeing it mentioned in any articles about their egg prices. Most of these are instead about their supply management system and smaller farms, e.g.:
Buried in that story is one more important point: if you vaccinate many countries will not let you sell that chicken to them anymore. US exports a lot of chicken to such countries and if we vaccinate that market dies. (or we can vaccinate some but not others and then deal with the supply chain complexity)
Came to say the same thing. Fortunate to have a store front on my block in brooklyn that sources primarily from area farms. No interruption in supply or change in prices (though I've always been paying in the $7 range).
Besides all the arguments around diverse food supply and economic SPOFs, it just feels so much better to shop this way.
One of the things that's come up in several trade deals Canada has negotiated is how protectionist we (as a country) are when it comes to dairy.
We have not experienced the massive increases in pricing on eggs. The supply management system effectively works to keep farms roughly below a certain size, and seems to have helped avoid large impacts on certain staple foods.
The usual rhetoric against this is that we should be getting cheaper prices by letting in foreign competition. This ignores that doing so would allow foreign subsidies to wipe out our local supply of critical foodstuffs, then making us dependent.
It's not an ideal system but it seems to have yielded some tangible results when things like bird flu are making their rounds.
I'm 50 and grew up in a medium sized New England mill town. One of the few memories I have of my grandfather is taking a quick trip to the local egg farm to get some eggs. These have all but disappeared from New England.
I hope this bird flu thing is a push for other places to re-establish demand for local eggs and chickens. As someone else pointed out, it’s also a great opportunity to push your local legislators to allow backyard chickens.
I built a little project to help with this over the break, still needs a lot of work - hopefully helpful for folks looking to connect with their local farmer:
Not necessarily. Supporting local is the opposite of supporting scale, it's supporting decentralization. A single local provider might not be able to sustain all local demand, but there need not be only 1 local provider.
Somewhat exactly? Supporting local is largely the opposite of supporting scale.
Unless you have the idea that local farms can make up all of the sales that are done, then you are arguing for a practice that will result in a lower supply of goods. With a lower supply, you expect prices to rise until the demand adjusts down to a lower value, as well. No?
Hence, this is great advice for anyone to try. But if everyone does it, things get more expensive as you lose out on the very advantages that led to the "at scale" solutions in the first place.
Decentralization doesn't necessarily imply lower supply of goods, but it does almost certainly result in higher cost of goods (outside of compared to monopolies). That's the cost of market resilience: higher average cost for lower variance over time. Higher cost of goods may result in lower demand and then lower supply, but the causal order is the opposite direction from assuming decentralization means lower supply.
Fair, I was sloppy there. My assertion is better stated that it will be a different supply curve with higher unit costs. Which should be expected to have a different intercept with demand on where you expect things to even out.
This is how it should be. Consolidating egg production is a bane on society. It might make the profit cheaper but it also greatly increases the opportunity for cross contamination to occur due to the distances they have to travel. I always buy locally sourced.
Ok, but, you can't feed 340M people with "fresh, local eggs". While it's nice you buy six eggs at a time from Joe Farmer off the back of his '72 Ford, but factory farms are an unfortunate necessity to feed everyone that isn't so privileged.
within 7 hours of NYC you have a ton of amazing farms that supply NYC. many farms in the hudson valley but you'd be surprised how many farms all the way to vermont and maine that distribute their fresh produce to the city. you also have a lot of rural space within a day drive of NYC.
recently there was a massive flock of ducks that were culled at a farm in long island. all 19 million people don't eat eggs, but there are enough suburbs with green space surrounding the city that each of those neighborhoods could easily support their own egg production. that could surely help.
i have a big spreadsheet of farms within a day's drive of NYC if you would like me to help you find fresh eggs. i can share the distributors too, that would be a good resource if you want to help supply the 19 million people of NYC with fresh eggs.
> Where can the NYC metro area get fresh, local eggs to feed the 19 million people that live there?
trying to reduce this to something like "there is NO WAY this could ever work" isn't a strong argument.
> help supply the 19 million people of NYC with fresh eggs
This sounds like it could be one of Kramer's schemes on Seinfeld, where he's loaded his rusted-out jalopy with 5k eggs to bring into the city to sell for a profit, but somehow they end up all over the freeway and chaos ensues.
lol that's hilarious. you can keep arguing about the semantics of that while panicking about the factory farmed egg shortage. it won't bother me because i'll be feasting on food grown by farmers i know, all within a day's drive from me. if you are lucky then the regional distributors will pick up the slack thanks to the "not local" farms.
Most people with jobs and families etc. don't have a day per week nor gas money to spare to drive seven hours each way to go egg foraging. It's great you can manage this luxury but it's just not practical and a fairytale life for 99% of people. Not to mention many people in NYC don't own a car.
do you have a substantive argument or more ridicule? because i can go for both.
would you like to see my spreadsheet of regional distributors who move food into NYC from small farms in the northeast? it's possible you've eaten this food. or would you like to see demographic and usda farming data when small farms were the primary food producers during a time when the NYC metro had a similary large population, before CAFOs and the centralized ag we know today? or were those people fed because they went egg foraging?
To an extent, yeah. But farmland utilization has been dropping for decades. We are nowhere near not having enough farmland to feed people even if production efficiency was to drop significantly.
Man, if only it were possible to adjust the number of eggs that we eat in order to account for the increased cost of eggs that are farmed humanely and whose purchase benefits the local economy instead of massive corporate conglomerates. But alas, 340 million souls need their daily eggs.
Yes? I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I think that if you can’t produce something ethically at scale, the right thing to do is to produce less, ethically, and for people to consume less of it. For example, I buy more expensive meat from places that treat their animals well, and as a result I eat less meat than I would otherwise.
My local sellers are $4/doz for the good ones, $5/18 from another seller whose eggs taste 'off' so I quit buying them. I think $4/doz for quality eggs is worth it.
This is also hopefully a catalyst to get people to petition their city for backyard chicken rights. Raising chickens is relatively easy and can be rewarding. Even if you don't want to personally, support the right of those around you to, please.
Generally, mixing livestock and people in the confined conditions of a city is a very bad idea (if you're talking about suburbs, then that's a completely different thing, and I would agree with you about supporting it).
Ah yes, typically suburbs. Cities that adopt it generally have regulations around it, such as needing an inspection and nominally priced permit. The inspection just makes sure it's sanitary and follows certain rules about distance from house and whatnot.
I definitely don't advise raising chickens in an apartment or some such.
Most places that allow them don't have much in the way of inspection, etc, until you start selling the eggs.
Amusingly enough, rural towns are more likely to prohibit backyard chickens than suburbs of major cities these days. This is because if you want chickens in a rural area, the assumption is you'll buy just outside town; the people who moved into town don't want to hear roosters (which are often banned or severely limited even where chickens are allowed).
Noticed that too. The two rural towns near me bans any poultry with under 5 acres, which is essentially the entire town. Luckily I live right outside their limits.
RE: roosters, a lot of cities that permit backyard chickens do not allow roosters as they're considered a bit of a nuisance. As I'm sure you're aware(though I've found many people aren't), roosters are not required for the keeping of chickens nor the production of eggs.
They can be useful for flock protection, if you don't get a dud rooster. But in general, they're more annoying than you expect.
And yeah, you don't need one to "get them to start laying" though if you want to try to actually hatch some eggs you will need one (or buy the eggs ready to go).
Now I've heard that the roosters in Kansas/Nashville, them do lay eggs ...
Most annoying thing about roosters is, if you have one, then you'll have a bunch. (Our hens go hide their clutches eventually.) But if you have a bunch, then you can have coq au vin.
The local eggs here have the same price but they are selling out very quickly. $9.50 a dozen and used to have them all week. They come in on Friday evening and now sell out quickly. People are probably buying more than they used to when available and that is making the scarcity worse.
We're lucky enough to have a pretty substantial network of local suppliers. Our grocery carries eggs from at least six local farms that I can think of off the top of my head.
I've read that some of the farms are having a hard time keeping up with both the increased demand from groceries and also trying to keep eggs available for their regular farmstand customers and such, but it seems like so far there is enough slack in the system that it's working out okay.
What I find endlessly fascinating is how often I see anti-capitalist sentiment, which your comment is, in the context of how often and how much people will defend capitalism and attack socialism. For the record, I don't know if the second part applies to you, specifically. This is a general observation.
Local food production is quintessential socialism: it is quite literally the workers (the farmers) owning the means of production (the farm).
When people hear that, they so often reject it with some variant of "no, that's a business; that's capitalism". Businesses (and markets) existed millenia before capitalism and exist in every economic system.
The defining characteristic of capitalism is exploitation by capital owners. In the eggs case, it's Cal-Maine Foods (or any other large company) owning the land and in all likelihood employing undocumented workers because they can pay them sub-minimum wage. At least that's how the likes of Tyson produces chicken.
It's also worth adding that something like avian flu is used to justify price hikes well beyond what the supply change would otherwise warrant.
This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.