A Hillsborough, N.C., author and farmer knows about the economics of eggs from the perch of his small farm.
By Harry Kavros
My wife just returned from the barn. She lets the chickens out at dawn, watching them dash for cracked corn, and supplies them with feed and water.
Now it’s my turn. With the chickens out in the pasture, I can rake the barn’s scattered poop. I typically fill a five-gallon bucket every morning and toss it on an ever-growing pile beyond the fence.
We have a small farm in Hillsborough on which hens (and a handful of roosters, guinea fowl, and turkeys) roam. Egg production is low now during molting season – all their energy goes into producing new feathers.
We don’t raise egg prices when supply plummets. Even during the avian flu epidemic, when tens of millions of birds were culled and egg prices soared, we kept prices steady.
We aren’t in it for the money. Some would say we are bad farmers. We don’t cull elderly hens; instead, we pamper them with cracked corn. We resist raising prices because we know how tough it is for people right now.
But we aren’t in this to lose money, either. And the supplies that go into this business — feed, vet costs, supplies — have been steadily increasing. The price of new chicks has tripled for many varieties.
So, we have had to raise prices and a carton has more than doubled over the last several years. For a while, I felt partly responsible for former President Joe Biden’s defeat, which, in part, was blamed on the price of eggs.
But the price of eggs in general has largely gone up because of bird flu and millions of birds being euthanized to prevent the spread, studies show, and the price of everything else going up.
I don’t know why no one at the top has explained that limiting the price of eggs requires more than an executive order. That’s just not how this really works.
The good news for our birds is that they are free to find bugs, worms, and grit over twenty acres of pastures and woods. The bad news is that because they are pasture fed, our hens are constantly threatened by hawks, foxes, coyotes, racoons, and possums. We have one dog, a Doberman mix, who is employed to spot hawks (he barks and jumps and prevents these predators from landing) and another, a Maremma, who is a flock protector in training. But we continue to lose hens to predators.
Losing hens is a considerable expense. So is maintaining dogs. But neither compares with the ravages of inflation. Over the course of the pandemic and beyond our expenses have exploded.
Raising chickens involves buying feeders and waterers, nesting boxes, feed, and medicine (for worming, bacterial infections, and more). It requires regular veterinary visits. I truck in sand to make the barn more sanitary and mucking easier. Once collected, eggs need to be washed and disinfected. Packaging lowers your profits further still.
You could argue that there’s no way a small farm like ours could make it. But a fellow chicken farmer, who has five times as many hens, also struggles to stay out of the red.
Neither of us is willing to enclose chickens in a barn while they wallow in excrement and bathe in artificial light. Neither culls hens whose laying days are over. And neither raises prices just because market prices rise.
Calculating just the income and expenses, we almost always merely break even. If we included all of the costs including the land, building additional barn stalls, trenching water from the well to the barn, labor, transportation, and liability insurance, we would qualify for debtor’s prison.
Which is why I follow Wendell Berry’s advice: farming is a noble profession, he said, but keep your day job.
Harry Kavros chops wood, raises chickens, and writes books in Hillsborough, N.C., at Hyacinth Farm. He is the author of Observations of an Accidental Farmer. This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.