Just get a chicken for your backyard. That was how Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins responded recently when asked on Fox News about the rising price of eggs. Rollins suggested backyard chickens could be a potential “silver lining,” arguing it would be “awesome” if more Americans set up personal coops.
Rollins may be wise to remember that old adage about counting one’s chickens before they hatch. And particularly, the four to six months it takes before they start laying eggs.
Egg prices were a major issue in the closing days of the 2024 presidential election. Now-President Donald Trump blamed then-President Joe Biden and promised to bring costs down. Instead, they’ve only risen. The AP reported last month that “the average price of a dozen Grade A eggs in U.S. cities reached $4.95 in January, eclipsing the previous record of $4.82 set two years earlier and more than double the low of $2.04 that was recorded in August 2023.”
Rollins may be wise to remember that old adage about counting one’s chickens before they hatch.
A big reason for that surge is bird flu, which has led to both shortages, and possibly to some manipulation of egg prices by major producers. There are sensible steps that can be taken to address both of those problems. But the Trump administration’s planned billion-dollar investment to, among other things, help farmers improve biosecurity is largely duplicative of existing safety measures. Plans to surge vaccines to farms, develop news ones and test for infection take time, especially in an era with staffing issues. There are also doubts about how quickly these plans can be rolled out.
Meanwhile, U.S. companies are looking abroad for relief. Turkey has announced it will send 420 million eggs to the U.S. this year, more than six times what it imported in 2024.
I certainly sympathize with anyone looking for answers closer to home. During Covid, my family became chicken keepers. My youngest son had volunteered to do his senior year of high school from home, in quarantine, to protect his older brother who was at risk because of congenital birth defects. We were touched by his selflessness. And so it seemed like a a fair trade when he said he wanted to start raising chickens. I ordered a small coop, arranged for a contactless pick-up from a small Alabama chicken farm, and we were off to the races.
But let me tell you, keeping chickens is not for the faint of heart. There is nothing like getting up at 6 a.m. in the pouring rain to slog through your backyard to the coop. Chickens need fresh food and fresh water. Every day. All day.
We get our chicken feed at the local hardware store. It’s produced by a farmer in Shelby County, Alabama, and my chickens absolutely love it; They go on strike if I try to feed them anything else. It’s also expensive and those 40 pound bags are heavy!
Then there’s the water situation. We have a fabulous low gravity system, where a barrel collects rainwater and sends it into a water bar inside of our covered chicken run. It’s a great system, until it inevitably freezes and cracks in the winter. Which happened a couple of weeks ago. So every morning, I have been carrying water down to the chickens. When the temperatures dip below freezing I take a page from “Little House on the Prairie,” banging the watering dishes against a stone wall to break the ice.
We’ve also upgraded from our starter coop to one that’s straight out of vintage American farm architecture, all white, with a cupola on top and a weathervane. If I have to include that work as part of the cost of dozens of home-raised eggs, well, grocery store prices start to look good. But I was afraid the small, mobile coup would blow away — we live in tornado country. And we added on a big covered run because we’ve discovered the local predators — hawks, owls, and coyotes — have wised up to the happy meals inhabiting our backyard. And even with these precautions we’ve still lost a couple of hens to the hawks. It’s always extremely traumatic.
So, here’s the truth about chickens. We don’t keep them for eggs, not really. They’re pets. They come running when they see us, they eat out of our hands, and even fly up and perch on our shoulders if we aren’t quick enough to offer companionship in the morning. They are decorative in the backyard, fun to watch, and their eggs, which comes in blues and browns in addition to white, are delicious. But we’re not personally saving money here — and I'm not the only one with this kind of cost-benefit balance sheet.
Get chickens if you want to — and obviously many Americans cannot, for a number of reasons. I know my girls would love to hatch some eggs for you. But don’t do it thinking you’ll save money — because you probably won’t. Do it because they’re funny and lovely and they’ll make you smile. There’s nothing like seeing one of the neighborhood kids with a huge fresh blue egg headed home to make breakfast. Chickens have big personalities. They remember people and some of them will even like you and want to sit on your lap for a cuddle. But if you’re looking for cheaper groceries, ask the president to keep his campaign promises.