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Comment by mitchell_h | Hacker News Reader

fellow small farmer(live stock only) with a day gig. The only benefit to having a small farm these days is it provides a tax shelter, and an enjoyable(yet difficult) hobby.

Even if you outright own the land, by the time you figure in maintenance and equipment on any cattle farm under 500-1000 head of cattle you simply can't turn a profit in a meaningful way. What you CAN do is use it as a tax shelter where you sorta break even if you squint and hope.

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Why is all the pasture raised, permaculture, organic blah blah stuff all so expensive if it’s not profitable? If I’m paying $12 for a dozen eggs when I can get non-sustainable, conventionally raised eggs from some megacorp for $3 then where is all the money going? Any consumer paying $12 for eggs certainly wouldn’t mind $13, which could then be profit.

$12 dollars for 12 eggs? The goose is dead but the hen is still going strong.

Holy christ. If I could $12/dozen for my eggs I'd start raising chickens again! Where are you buying those?

At Seattle and NYC farmers markets, I regularly pay $12 a dozen. The eggs are often sold out, so others are, too.

Must be nice. The main cost input to eggs is chicken feed. Assume a $15 bag will keep a dozen hens fed for a month, that's about 240 eggs (assuming 2 eggs per hen every 3 days) at a cost of $15 so about $0.06 per egg. Cost will drop significantly if chickens are kept on pasture and the labor inputs for a flock of a few dozen are minimal.

It may not be enough to live on but for a hobby, it's pretty much free money. Although I assume the market charges a stall fee that will eat into profits, but still...

I don't go to the local farmer's market because it's too political, but supermarket eggs here are often under $1.00/dz (presumably sold as a loss leader) and the most expensive "certified pasture raised" eggs are about $6/dz.

It is expensive precisely because it’s not profitable. Imagine if you were a builder, selling artisanal houses built without use of any power tools, only with organic manual labor, using materials prepared with organic manual labor only. You’d be building one deck in the same time it takes normal builders to build an entire house. The only way you could make a living this way would be if you charged multiples of what normal construction costs. But, even then, you’d still complain about your business not being profitable, as you’d have troubles finding people who will pay as much.

Myself, I like good eggs, but I’m not paying $1/egg.

> I like good eggs, but I’m not paying $1/egg

It looks like Whole Foods charges about half that for fancy organic eggs.

However, if you sold them at the Ferry Building in San Francisco and had a good story about why your eggs were special, I think you could get $12 a dozen.

How many of us are going to balk at $1/egg after we just paid $5 for an espresso and are ogling the $50 bottles of olive oil? Especially if we've been conditioned to not eat too many eggs because "cholesterol."

Exactly, scrambled eggs or an omelette at a restaurant easily costs more than $1/egg. Obviously restaurants have all other costs. But in the grand scheme of things, if you’re living in an expensive place like NYC or SF, it doesn’t seem like that much.

How much would the restaurant breakfast cost, if the restaurant was buying $1 eggs and other similarly expensive ingredients?

The point here is that if Starbucks was buying as expensive coffee as are those organic $1 eggs, it would be $10-15 espresso. I’m happy to pay $1 for egg, if it comes with the rest of the breakfast in form of a sit down restaurant service. But paying $12 just for a carton of dozen eggs? No way.

I’m not sure that’s true. One of the cafes near me uses Strauss Milk (pastured cows, methane digesters, the works) and of course fair trade coffee. It adds maybe $1.50 to the price of a latte, for about $5.50. Commercial buyers can buy in bulk, so I imagine it’s a bit cheaper than buying retail from the kind of upscale groceries that sell sustainable foods.

In the US, the tax shelter plan only works if you are profitable 3 out of any given sequence of 5 years. Otherwise, the IRS prohibits deductions from "hobby farms". Be sure you check with an accountant, unless you have been showing a clear profit from your farming activities.

In my experience, a small farmer basically needs to cook their books to appear profitable. Profit is not realistic if you include all of the actual costs.

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