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!
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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".
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).