The Trump administration’s secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, suggested Americans keep chickens in their back yards in response to surging egg prices on Sunday during a Fox News appearance.
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She said: “I think the silver lining for all this is how do we in our back yards, we’ve got chickens too in our back yard, how do we solve something like this and people are sort of looking around and thinking ‘wow maybe I could get a chicken in my back yard and it’s awesome.’”
I’m confused. I thought Trump was going to bring down egg prices on Day One. Why do we need our own chickens to get cheap eggs? Can I tell my apartment manager Trump wants me to keep my own chickens?
Sure, the people least able to afford eggs will magically be able to afford the upfront costs of buying the gear to raise chickens so they can recoup that money and start saving several months or a year down the line. All while holding down multiple jobs so they have all that free time to devote to keeping animals alive.
We can all just ask dadd’ums for some startup capital like Donnie and Elmo, right?
If there still is a bird flu epidemic in USA, it is a really bad idea. A hell of a lot small time chicken holders won’t be checked as easy as bigger chicken farms. Are controls in place at all after DOGE?
Nobody knew it would be so complicated. Like peace in Ukraine. Nobody knew it was going to be difficult. Can’t blame Trump, really, he promised all the right things.
My next door neighbors actually do raise chickens in their back yard. I’ve never asked them how much it costs, but just from what I can see, there’s the cost of building and maintaining the coop, the cost of buying the chickens, the cost of feed, and the electricity to heat the coop (it gets cold here during the night). I doubt it’s all that cheap, and those are just the expenses that I can easily deduce.
The upfront costs are non-negligible but the daily expenses can be pretty low. And you get eggs from it.
But there’s still the problem of that upfront investment plus having the time and energy to not only care for the chickens (you do need to spend at least some time every day doing that) but also learning how to do so.
Not insurmountable but the people who could benefit the most are also the ones who are least able to afford the cost or time involved or have the real estate to do so. A Catch-47 if you will.
Here in Arizona some people already have chickens in their yards. It can be a fun hobby. Considering the cost of the coops, the feed, the infrastructure (swamp coolers, water supply, sunshade), I’m not sure the cost of an egg from your own yard is going to be cheeper than going to the store, though.
And don’t be like our one neighbor and have all the chickens die in the summer heat. I’m still mad about that!
I know…it’s like our economy is predicated upon the notion that it is more efficient all around if we aren’t not all required to be self-sufficient. That it’s better if things like egg production could be handled by a small number of people, freeing most of us to focus on other things.
And that somebody who carelessly knocks down the underpinnings of that system can easily make us all collectively poorer.
Yeah, even without heating the coop by the time you get done with the expenses nobody raising their own chickens is going to get eggs cheaper than buying store eggs. You do it for the quality of the eggs and/or you like chickens.
DesertRoomie has wanted chickens for a while and we finally pulled the trigger. Even with a cheap-ass coop from Temu we’ve spent about $200 getting ready and another $95 for a half-dozen Buff Orpingtons from Murrey McMurrey. Unfortunately the flu-epidemic seems to have hit their contract breeders like the commercial egg people and the earliest we’ll get our batch is June. Since the BOs aren’t egg-laying machines like Leghorns are it’ll be another six months before they start laying.
If I was a smart-ass reporter I’d be asking Secretary Rollins how many chickens she has.
I already pay a $35 dollar pet deposit for my dog. I can’t imagine what I’d have to pay to keep some chickens in my … I don’t know, bathroom? They’d be cool in there right?
This reminds me of Mao’s initiative to get the people to smelt their own steel. The result was that the vast majority of these “folk furnaces” produced unusable steel and the productivity lost in the meantime crippled the country.
In this case I’m guessing that a lot of people may purchase chickens which will promptly die because chickens do that if you don’t know how to care for them. So a lot of money will be spent and the return will be a lot of dead chickens (and not in an edible way).
It reminds me of something Ben Franklin suggested to the Continental Army since muskets were in short supply - that soldiers could be armed with bows instead. Perhaps thinking of English longbows. Clearly, nothing came of that.
Goes to show even smart people make dumb suggestions sometimes. Dunning-Kruger can hit all of us.
I’m still mad about that!