Comment by aj_icracked | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aj_icracked | Hacker News Reader

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It's a good question - From what we've seen most suburban people that raise chickens don't do it to lower costs of eggs - they do it to have better control over the quality of food they eat, to teach their kids that you take care of the chickens, they take care of us. To eliminate food waste (avg family throws out 200+ lbs a year of food that can go to chickens, and because funnily enough most backyard farmers treat the chickens as family and pets vs just little egg-factories.

Avg hen lays about 250-270 eggs a year depending on breed. So 6 chickens (our coop is designed for 6) throws off about 1500 eggs a year. Avg American eats around 291 eggs + egg products per year (which is crazy!).

Most people build their coops or buy one from Tractor Supply or Amazon for $300 and day-old chicks are around $4 each and feed is inexpensive (50lb bag at Tractor Supply is $21). You can make the economics work super well if you want to but as most backyard chickens are treated as pets (I am leaving out large farms and homesteads, etc) a lot of people pamper and spend $ on their hens because it's more than just getting a lower cost egg if that makes sense.

From an absolute financial standpoint it might be hard to justify eggs from backyard chickens, though once you realize that they can eat something like 25% of their feed can be grass or clippings, and that some percentage can be redirected household waste (think: peels, food waste, etc) it becomes much more favorable.

As you mentioned, most treat them like pets which means they get to learn how long-lived chickens can be, and how egg production levels off in the later years.

But even then, if you're buying less than half the feed needed, you can probably break even for quite awhile (especially now).

I grew up on a (very) small farm - I still go to throw apple cores out of the window, as when I was younger the was always /something/ that would be happy for the treat. All dinner scraps were saved (or rather taken straight out), and all the windfall and rotten apples were happily eaten by the sheep, cow, geese and chickens.

I really hate throwing food away now, really pains me!

Yeah, the amount of food waste that can easily be "reprocessed" on even a small farm is tremendous.

Not only do you have reduced waste, you have reduced packaging (no need to put the eggs in cartons if you're just carrying them to the kitchen).

People usually thing you need pigs to eat waste, but most farm animals will take some or all (the biggest risk is accidentally giving an animal something it shouldn't have).

I grew up on a small poultry farm. Most farmers I know are very very good at recycling and reprocessing. There's very little "rubbish" if you are clever about it. If it can't be fed to an animal, and it doesn't rot (compost), it's probably something you can build with, either a machine or a structure. Meanwhile you use animal waste to improve the garden, producing more food, the scraps of which go back to the animals.

The biggest exception was in the case of disease, which we managed with fire. Burning diseased bird coops along with the corpses of dead birds was very cost effective on our small scale.

One of the things that we've been thinking about is when we're at scale (I would say scale is 50,000+ Coops in the field) I would love to build a circular food waste system where we use food expiring / thrown out from grocery stores to feed our Coop member's chickens. Then we'll do partnerships where our members can sell excess backyard-to-table eggs back to the grocery stores.

Most people don't get that eggs usually are 30-60 days old when you buy them at the grocery store and they have to travel up to 1000 miles to get there in cold storage.

Want to know how old your eggs are? On every egg carton there's a 3 digit number from 1 to 365. That is the day of the year the producer of eggs handed them off to the distributor. Producers have up to 30 days to hand it off to distributor and the distributor has an additional 30 days to hand off to retailer. Kinda wild!

The crazy part that I learned when we started keeping chickens is that the eggs last so long unrefrigerated. In the US we have to wash commercial eggs, but we don't wash ours until use. We can keep eggs in our countertop spiral holder for weeks, easily, and they are perfect. Once I learned how old eggs in stores were, I bought more chickens.

Throwing away the core is throwing away both food and the most beneficial part of the apple for your gut. Of the ~100 million bacteria in an apple, the core and seeds contain around 60%, while the pulp only contains around 20%, the skin 10%, the stem 10%. Numbers are from the top of my head, they could be off

Are you saying you eat Apple Cores?

It's actually not that hard if you change how you eat an apple. Don't eat around the core, and there won't be any core left at the end.

Yes, if you eat it bottom up instead of around, there is practically no core. Also much cleaner, and you just throw the stem away plus the benefit of ingesting all the good bacteria

It's a good thing we don't make every decision in our lives from an absolute financial standpoint. We'd all be eating gruel and porrage.

We in fact do make most decisions in our lives based on finances, you're just not aware of most of them.

Try living your life the other way around for a while.

I agree with the sentiment but keep in mind that being able to do that is a luxury, not the baseline. Too many people in the world, very developed countries included, have to take decisions based exclusively on their finances, having no more room for the niceties than you have for a yacht.

Agreed.

I've found, in my own life, that when I'm hyper focused on optimizing things for cost I often get far less "out" of things. I end up not eating my whole dinner because I don't like it. But if I let go a bit, things are actually in aggregate more financially efficient when I'm getting more of what I pay for, if that makes sense.

It only works for people who are built this way though. Not hedonists.

That's a much bigger problem. People at the limit of survival financially - and there's a lot of them - may not have the luxury of any kind of financial education, or the leeway to experiment and take longer term aggregates and strategies. There is only now.

It's expensive to be poor and this is why. It's not just hedonists, a chronically empty stomach changes the way you think and how far and wide you're seeing.

So you are telling me poor folks are poor and struggling?

As if this isn't known?

> So you are telling me poor folks are poor and struggling?

No, I'm telling you that your examples, the "strategy" of getting financial efficiency, and calling it "hedonism" are disconnected from the reality of the people who suffer from this the most. Unlike you those people don't leave dinner on the table because it was too cheap.

> As if this isn't known?

It doesn't sound like you know know. You're telling a blind person how to get around better by just "looking around".

Your perspective above is the modern version of "let them eat cake" [0]. "You don't have enough money? Try to live like you have enough money".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

My advise isn't for those in that situation.

My advise is that many not I'm that situation, maybe you, act and think as if they do need to, but in reality don't.

Others are straight hedonist.

I'm saying don't be either.

It does not make sense,to me, can you elaborate? I know I spend too much time / effort cost optimizing. Interested in reasonable ways to justify not doing so!

Just let go of it.

Logic yourself there.

Calculate a cost of your time, maybe it's your salary, maybe you come about it a bit differently.

Then if you spend 10 mins saving 8 cents on Ramen, and you like the cheaper Ramen less, you have a paradigm within which you can objectively (not emotionally) determine if you are wasting your time (therefore money) on a false optimization, or actually doing good for yourself.

Optimization of optimization does not escape itself, clearly.

We do, but people are maximizing utility and not minimizing costs.

Its more than that, our whole social world is constructed by financial possibility. The very reason that you are able to go see a cool movie or try that new restaurant or take a vacation is because someone or some entity, usually a bank, has calculated the risk of the loan or investment into whichever enterprise you are requesting goods or services from. Which is to say that the element of that risk which is non-quantifiable is still articulated within the boundaries of a certain quantity.

Not really.

Were focused on cutting coupons and not growing food in victory gardens.

We do a performance, a performative version of cost savings that is veiled in corporate marketing tactics and such.

If you were truly focused on minimizing cost you would learn to be self sufficient. Sometimes that's costly, but pays off.

We now frame things in terms of corporate marketing and our whole economic "complex"

It's like you think you are saving money by buying generic soda, then you realize you don't even need soda.

Almost all our food waste goes into a small metal bowl that gets dumped in the coop every night. I used to bury it in the compost pile, but since the hens have picked through it all, theres not much left. They happily eat the scraps and I happily collect their eggs.

I think they also eat ticks, right?

Financially speaking the biggest way to break even is having some way to get value from excess eggs. Selling them or trading for feed is ideal.

We've had good success with Black Soldier Flies[1] too. They compost pretty much anything - you can toss in meat/cheese and similar scraps not just veggies. And you get a very high quality protein to feed the chickens.

[1] https://www.hobbyfarms.com/black-soldier-flies-free-self-har...

Pasture-raised backyard chickens are also great pest control.

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