Gimme the Dirt… On *&@#$% Eggs

What the heck is it with the price of eggs? That’s a question you’ve likely been hearing everywhere, and if you haven’t, you might live under a rock. I keep chickens, a practice that isn’t necessarily intended to make me a fortune – more on that in a minute – but does provide enormous satisfaction. Trust me – there is almost nothing more soothing than copping a squat in my lovely chicken coop or chicken yard to watch my hens and three roosters scratch around for kitchen scraps. Years ago, I had a far larger flock of a different variety of hens and no roosters. They were prolific laying hens, with gigantic brown eggs and many double yolks. I sold the eggs in bulk to a local farm stand for use in their homemade baked goods. When I say “bulk,” I mean “at a discount” and “too many to count.” Now I keep a heritage variety – American Bresse – a dual-purpose breed from which we get a generous number of eggs, and the fanciest poultry meat to be found anywhere. They are snooty little birds, very “French” in their attitude toward me, their humble servant. But they tolerate my company when I’m needing a little cheer, and I love the sunlight shining through the coop onto their bright white feathers and the highlights of their neon-red combs. Their eggs are the best we’ve ever tasted, and that’s saying something because we’ve eaten our fair share through the years of my chicken-keeping habit. Now, we are holding ourselves back because, well…eggs.

As we’ve watched the price of eggs climb in the stores, we’ve seen our feed bills growing, too. And while it’s true that the cost of everything has gone up with inflation, what has happened with eggs has been shocking. Suddenly, our flock of fancy birds has real value, for a number of reasons. The biggest problem, from a price perspective, is actually something that has existed for many years: what everyone is calling “bird flu.” This winter, a variant of the virus has been wreaking havoc on the wild bird population just as they begin their annual migration northward. As they migrate, they stop to rest, often in areas where there are concentrated chicken operations, many of which are egg producers. These facilities consist of large numbers of enormous barns. Each barn has a ventilation system that circulates fresh air from the outside while expelling the sour air from inside. The combination of this air circulation system and the arrival of wild birds in the area means the risk of contracting bird flu in the chicken flock is serious. On a farm that sometimes has millions of birds, the thought of contagion must be terrifying for that farmer. You see, if one chicken in only one of those barns is found to have this virus, the entire farm of chickens is quarantined: even if that one chicken has no symptoms, and even if not a single other bird has it. What happens next requires a warning: our government has a stomach-turning solution. The chickens in every barn are culled. That’s the polite word for “killed,” and how it’s done is sickening. This is not humane euthanasia. The chickens are sometimes sprayed with a high-density foam that suffocates them. Or the ventilation system is simply turned off, and the chickens die of asphyxiation. Or the barns are pumped full of carbon monoxide, another way for them to suffocate. It’s an extreme solution, conducted in a horrific way.

When even one farm of hundreds of thousands of birds is culled, that’s millions of eggs per week that don’t make it into the food supply chain. This isn’t only eggs for your breakfast scramble: the shortage impacts businesses that buy in bulk, like large-scale bakeries, hotel chains, companies that manufacture prepared foods (L’Eggo My Eggo) and fast-food joints. Without going into the specifics of how many eggs are consumed by our population, suffice it to say that the impact of the numbers of culled laying hens on the national egg supply has been dire. And this has happened during a time when small farms like ours didn’t have any eggs to spare because of the laying cycle. You see, in the natural world, hens lay eggs in conjunction with the amount of sunlight they are exposed to. Commercial facilities use artificial light in the wintertime to maximize production, because they want to maximize their profit. On our small farm, we grant our hens a winter vacation. We don’t put a light in our coop, and our flock is quietly roosting when the sun sets at 4:30 pm on the darkest days of winter. Starting in October, we have diminishing numbers of eggs until December, when egg production nearly stops altogether. And then, in February, we start to get eggs again, when the days lengthen as we hurtle toward springtime. During those dark winter months, we get a few eggs here and there, just enough for our own consumption and maybe a few extra dozen to sell, but we are feeding and keeping our chickens at a loss. We still need to provide them with feed, housing and extra care in the cold, all with little to show for it. This might not seem like the most expedient financial plan, but we aren’t a commercial facility. We want our hens to live longer, produce longer, and lead healthy, natural lives. What it means for the US, however, is this: just when the national flock is being culled in alarming numbers, the small farms like ours that would usually be able to fill that production gap don’t have eggs either. In fact, our hens are just starting to come back into full production now.

Pricing is always tricky on this small farm. We have “healthy” discussions (more like “robust” or” colorful”) about how to price the products we sell, both of us wanting to give a balanced price for the highest-quality food. We want our food to be accessible to as many people as possible while still being fair to our bottom line. With the small flock we keep, and the costs of our inputs, that fair middling point is difficult to find. A friend messaged me the other day to tell me that eggs in Brooklyn were selling for $18 a dozen. In cities, pricing has far different considerations than in rural locales. Trucking plays a role, and the limited shelf space does, too. In a shop where eggs must share a refrigerated shelf with other perishables, and with limited available shelf space, stock numbers are also limited. That drives the price upward. But did you know eggs don’t need to be refrigerated? In European countries, as well as the UK, eggs are safely stored on the counter for upwards of a month; they are even sold in stores on unrefrigerated shelves. In the US, there are strict laws regarding commercial egg sales from the moment an egg hits the nest. Commercial eggs are collected as they are laid on conveyor belts attached to nest boxes or cages. They reach a bath of chlorine bleach where they are mechanically cleaned, then air-dried, boxed, and refrigerated. It sounds fast, but by the time commercial eggs reach a consumer’s hands, they are often already a month old. And those porous eggs have been bathed in bleach. I’m no scientist, but logically speaking it’s hard to believe some of that doesn’t reach the inside of the shell. So, part of the price of eggs includes this process of washing and refrigeration. The costs are huge at commercial facilities, and they are not absorbable on that kind of scale. These expenses are passed off to the consumer.

Chickens are omnivores when they live on a small farm. On our farm, they eat whatever we put in front of them and whatever they can find when scratching in the dirt. This means the occasional treat of Wagyu suet isn’t unheard of – this is a Wagyu farm, after all. In addition to that special snack, and kitchen scraps, and worms and bugs from their outdoor foraging, they also get free choice pelletized grain that makes up their primary diet. This is the perfect balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fat to keep them healthy, fit, and laying eggs. I also mix in some crushed oyster shells for calcium to make their eggshells thick and strong. If I’m planning to hatch out some chicks, however, I hold back the oyster shells because that can make the shells too hard for an emerging chick to crack open. This is one of the reasons I love raising and keeping chickens so much. They require detailed, delicate care, all while being the most carefree and tough little dinosaurs on earth.

Something I haven’t brought up is man hours. Or, in my case, woman hours. It’s something people forget when they calculate what their food costs. Dairy, meat, eggs, vegetables – all of these things require human labor to produce them. Animals need to be fed and cared for every single day, electric bills require payment, water and soil need monitoring, and so many other details need sorting. But managing all of it, and performing the necessary physical labor, are people – farmers – and if the old business maxim holds, time is money. Our time has extra value because on this farm there are only two of us doing the work. We deserve to be paid for it, don’t we? Let me tell you the truth of it: even if we were to charge the Brooklyn price for our eggs, that still wouldn’t cover the labor we put into those birds on this small scale. I guess this makes our chickens what you would call a labor of love. In olden times, “egg money” was a term used for pocket change housewives would collect and keep in a jar over the stove for emergencies. When I started selling eggs, I decided that I would use a little jar labelled “egg money” for customers to use to pay us and make change if they needed. It’s a self-service affair that moved to our front porch with the eggs and jar in a cooler because the farm store was encased in ice. Now it’s spring again. The grass around the farm store steps is greening up, and the chickens are laying their eggs in all their glory. Springtime brings more work and more daylight hours by which to do it. My little egg money jar is filled and emptied many times per week now, and I hear from customers how much they appreciate the eggs my hens provide. They share photos of the egg salad or fried eggs they’ve made, and their words and photos make us smile. But we keep a wary eye on the skies, watching as the wild birds return from their winter respite in warmer climes. We hope the safety measures we’ve put in place will keep our chickens safe. We don’t think about it too much, though. We just keep our heads down, and in the words of some wise someone out there, we keep calm and farm on.

Photos courtesy of Rebecca Collins Brooks 

Rebecca Collins Brooks is a farmer, writer and farmstead cheesemaker at Hilltop Farm in Accord, NY.  She is the creator and founder of The Meeting of the Milkmaids, a gathering of women working in the cheese and dairy industry. In addition to a small herd of dairy cows, she and her husband Barton raise Wagyu beef, selling meat to customers directly off the farm. Her best friends are two terriers, Winston and Molly; and Sylvie, a truly brilliant barn cat. You can visit the farm by appointment to see where truly good food is grown.

Connect with Rebecca via Instagram @catskillwagyu, on Facebook CatskillWagyu

Check out > INSIDE+OUT’s Spotlight on Catskill Wagyu at Hilltop Farm