not enough !!!

2 months ago we scored 5 cartons of duck eggs as the 'best before date' was 2 weeks away....wife called .how about 5 hdjhdjhjdf duck eggs...' sure I said, though she meant 5 dozen(usually 12 per carton up here..).... dang a CASE has 15 dozen in it !!!...

this week she brought home 4 dozen chicken egg 'cracks'...

sigh, farmers make the eggs but the middlemen make the money... NOT FAIR !!!

Jay

At that price, stores are selling eggs at below cost. Near here,  store that seems to be doing that the most is Aldi, and sometimes other stores do the same to compete. They consider it a loss leader to get you in the store where you will buy other stuff that isn't being sold at below cost.

BTW, I keep a few chickens and create a surplus of 7 to 10 doz per week, and sell mine at $2.50 a doz.....$5 for two dozen, which is the standard purchase. I can sell all I get for that price.

Eggs from chickens running around chasing bugs, eating all manner of green stuff and surplus garden vegetables are different than commercial grown eggs. Rich, dark yellow (orange) yolks. One guy told me he gave some to his grandkids and they complained they tasted funny. He told them.......no, that is how real eggs are supposed to taste.

The hardest part about raising chickens is keeping them alive. There are predators galore that like chicken.......and about the only thing chickens seem to be wary of are hawks. They will run and hide from hawks.  When I got my first flock a few years back, my mother advised me it was an ill fated adventure......that they would all die. As a little girl, they kept several hundred birds and sold eggs, and when I was a baby, she tried doing that on a smaller scale herself, and coons got them all. She eventually gave up and suggested I do the same.

So far, that has not been the case for me, but it's not for lack of predators. I am up to my neck in predators. The secret  is to keep them at night in a chicken house that nothing, absolutely nothing, can get into.........and during the day, keep them confined in an area surrounded by a super hot electric fence designed to keep chickens in an varmints out. I've lost track of the number of stray dogs who have found that fence. Last one I didn't see hanging around, but when the fence got him, he let out a yelp which I heard heard........and watched as he left a rooster tail of grass clippings in his wake.......he was 100 feet away and picking up speed when I last saw him......and has never been back.

Our largest flock was 27 birds, and our last flock ended up being just 5 for over a year.  We lost our fair share to vermin- typically oppossums biting the birds' heads off, but our henhouse has an armored shell (galvanized sheet steel in the walls, floor, and ceiling) with thick hardware cloth mesh sides for ventilation, an automatic door that opens and closes.  The pen area is wire mesh that extends below soil level and horizontally out about 2 feet, so digging varmints go down, and hit wire mesh.  The perch inside is surrounded by sheet metal walls, so rats, mice, and other animals with claws can't climb to it... basically, if you don't have feathers, and are less than 5ft tall, you can't get to the perch. I have a watering trough that constantly flows, with an overflow spillway and a heated drain, so there's fresh water 24/7/365, and the feeders are located on the outside of the henhouse so that critters aren't attracted INTO the henhouse or laying boxes.  With all this in place, and the fact that the henhouse and pen are close to the house, we've done really well at keeping 'em alive and laying basically year-round, even with brutal cold and short daylight.

The extreme low prices are probably more due to excess perishable supply, rather than demand.

Interesting fact of poultry farming was told to me by a guy who ran three huge turkey operations a ways north of me:

He makes substantially more money selling the litter, than all the rest, but the meat and feathers are sold too... it was that over the course of raising the birds, he made $4 on litter, for every 1$ he made on meat and feathers.  I'm certain that the industry has changed in the last eight years, but I know with certainty... that they weigh lots of turkey pooh at our locations up there, and when we go to clean out the scale pits, there's no doubt what it is...