Bird flu killed millions of chickens last year, worst outbreak in US history. For some virological or environmental reason, meat chickens (price has been stable) are not as affected as egg-laying hens. Egg prices were up around 50% in '22, largest increase in the goods included in the Consumer Price Index. eta: just looked it up: 52.8 million chickens in the US here's a summary article with fancy graphs and quotes and stuff: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/29/why-egg-prices-have-been-rising.html
Bird Flu + the ever-growing cost of feed and water and whatever else it takes to raise a gazillion egg-laying hens. Not to mention the costs of supply-chain logistics of delivering eggs to various markets.
For years the USA has printed too much money, choosing to inflate their way out of debt instead of cutting spending or raising taxes. The chickens, and now their eggs, have come home to roost. What's sad is that inflation hits the poorest members of the community the hardest.
Texas needs to ratify the right to have backyard chickens. Right now local laws and HOA bylaws supersede state laws. As long as you only have hens, you could always get a quiet breed, but you need to watch out for hawks, too.
A production red will reliably give you an egg per day, though they'll take a break in the winter unless you give them some artificial light. Maybe $5 to get a chick or $20 for one that's already laying, though the biggest cost is building the coop to house them. Will give you ~2-3 years of production before you make them into soup. But controlling for predators and scavengers is a problem. I'm rebuilding my run right now because the old one was so compromised that rats kept getting in and stealing the eggs. We also had a couple of chicks pulled out from under the wall once. That was from a group of 10 1-day-old chicks we got. They survived for a little while but then 2 died of hypothermia after a sudden rain, 2 dragged out from under the wall, one eaten because we forgot to close the run door one night, and then we returned 2 because they turned out to be roosters. So of the 10, we still have 3. And those are silkies, which suck at egg production anyway.
This is neither here nor there but for some reason, at about the halfway point of reading this, it started coming through to me in the in Dwight Schrute talking head monologue style.
Long story short: you will not break even raising eggs. Even if you sell several dozen a week. You will have so many eggs you can't sell them in the warm weather, and you will get minimal-to-no eggs in the cold weather. Don't even try it as anything other than a hobby. And it will be more work than you think.
If you want to do them for fun, then do them for fun. If you want to make money? You're not going to make money raising chickens, for eggs/meat/whatever
it’s because of the war. we’ve been importing most of our chicken and eggs from ukraine since 1997 and this war has been devastating to the chickenomics.
What's even more crazy is that people have been watching Jurassic Park for years and the movie literally says how to make dinosaurs which also happen to lay eggs. I'd be against this if Chris Pratt wasn't real but he can train the dinosaurs and we can use them for eggs and to fight the war against Russia to help Ukraine.
