But a dozen brown, large, grade A eggs can be had for less than $5.
If someone has a speedboat on hand, I can hook you up with eggs.
All EU regulation compliant XL eggs.
That is about the price I paid recently for 10 organic medium eggs in Austria.
The price of a speedboat?! Damn!
wait a minute. how much is a live chicken and some chicken food grain? 🤔
You can get a supply of good quality feed for a single chicken that will last months for about 20 bucks, if you shop around. Like, we get a 50lb bag of feed for our 2 1/2 birds. They each go through roughly a scoop a day, and the bag will last for about three months or so, depending on other critters helping themselves, spillage, etc.
I haven’t checked chicken prices in a while, but our pet hen was ten bucks, and she’s one of those fancy color versions that’s supposedly hard to breed for.
You do need shelter for them too, so you have to factor that in. You aren’t getting out for less than about 200 there, and that’s going to be for a small number of birds.
If you’re only getting one bird, and they stay inside with you, a crate that’s decent sized is cheaper, but you’ll want to look into chicken diapers because getting them pad trained is not certain, and they will poop a lot. We got lucky with our pet hen; she took to pad training well.
I haven’t done the math for an exact cost per egg because I don’t really keep track of exactly how much food the hen and only the hen goes through. But even feeding two of our own birds, a volunteer bird that showed up (she’s the 1/2, since she spends enough time elsewhere that she doesn’t eat that much) the squirrels and wild songbirds, we don’t go through a dollar of food a day. More like half of that unless we do something to screw it up.
Now, they also supplement with bugs they find, safe food scraps we give them, and the souls of their human servants, so that is a factor in things. If they were only eating feed, it might shift things upwards a little.
Thing is, we’re spoiled now. Because our hen is fed such a varied diet, and is pampered all to hell and back, her eggs are amazing. Blindfolded, I can pick her eggs every single time. The taste is so rich and deep that it pisses me off that all eggs don’t taste like that.
We don’t eat eggs super frequent, despite hers being the best I’ve ever had, so we sometimes give them away, and I’ve had people offer to buy them at over store prices.
That’s probably more than you want to know since I reckon you were mostly joking, but there’s a reason backyard bird keeping has taken off.
Edit: just in case anyone is seriously thinking about keeping chickens, you really do need more than one. They’re social critters, and don’t do well alone. The adults here can’t work, so we can keep a small number of birds and make it work, but you can’t just dump a single hen in a back yard and them be happy.
If you have 2 1/2 birds don’t you just have 1 bird?
Get free eggs with this one weird trick
$5/dozen is cheap
Really? As a Canadian I was quite surprised to see your eggs so expensive.
I recently bought a dozen eggs for like $7cad which used to be $6cad (free range, the caged stuff was usually like $3.5-$4ish)
But at $5.50 usd that’s $8.00 cad, and I thought $7 was expensive!
As a Canadian I was quite surprised to see your eggs so expensive.
The discussions about egg prices relates to the fact that eggs have been varying degrees of unusually expensive over the past couple years due to outbreaks of bird flu that have killed – or caused the killing of – a lot of chickens.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111
In September 2020, a dozen eggs in the US averaged $1.35. There’s been some inflation since then, but that’s still no more than about $1.64 in 2024 dollars.
But since then, there have been some very large increases, and a lot of price volatility.
I don’t think it’s all about the bird flu, some mark ups are definitely greed. Today I was at a target, eggs priced 9 dollars for a dozen low quality eggs. Ralph’s (West Coast Kroger’s) priced them at 9 also. However, a day ago I was also at a Sprouts and a Trader Joe’s, and the going rates were 4 dollars (although TJ was sold out). Hell, Sprout’s much tastier Pasture raised eggs were like, 8 bucks, although those birds are likely the least likely to get infected.
The thing that killed me is at Target in saw a very ill informed woman buying two 18 packs of crap white eggs for what I can only imagine cost her a second mortgage. Please shop responsibly, y’all.
It’s always greed, but corporations need an excuse, so you don’t get angry at them. Covid was the perfect example for that, when they see the opportunity, they will jack up the prices.
I’m in the NE USA (close to the midwest) and they’re all $6-$12/dozen in my area
I wish I could get them this cheap…
lol a dozen large are $8.99 in the Bay Area
That’s pretty reasonable, but definitely going to go up considerably soon if H5N1 projections are anyone close to correct… Oof.
