You are what you eat – or – is $4.00 for a dozen eggs too expensive?

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr… The hammer mill hums along as I shovel the whole corn into its always hungry loading chute. Small farming often entails repetitive tasks that once mastered don’t require much mental effort to accomplish successfully. Making chicken food is one of these tasks. Making the chicken food entails lifting 1 ton grain totes with a hoist, dumping the grain in the totes into rodent proof steel drums, running the whole grains from the drums thru the hammer mill where it falls into more steel drums and then combining the now ground grains along with other foodstuffs & minerals into another steel drum and thoroughly mixing the feed. This chore typically takes an hour or two every 10 days or so to make about 600 pounds of chicken feed. Today I am thinking about eggs while I mix the feed.

Yesterday, while thumbing thru the Sunday newspaper looking for the comics, I came across a sale flyer for one of our local grocery stores. As a small farmer I don’t get into the grocery store much so I was surprised to see a dozen eggs on special for 99 cents (limit 2 dozen eggs per customer). Sure, these will be runny pale yellow eggs with poor quality white shells and they probably have been in cold storage for more than 6 months BUT…. Let’s see…. 99 cents divided by 12 hmmm around 8.25 cents per egg I think. Let’s assume that this is a lost leader to get more people into the store so the store is selling them at cost. How the heck do you produce an egg for 8.25 cents????? Ok, let’s ignore the fact that the super hybrid de-beaked chickens are in battery cages 6 or 8 to a cage, kept in light 24 hours a day breathing in high concentrations of ammonia caused by the high concentration of manure, fed antibiotics to survive and pushed to produce greater that 1 egg per 24 hours. These chickens will also be destroyed spent & unfit for eating at around 16 months of age when there production starts to go down. Sure, these factory methodologies have been designed to reduce costs but this level of automation still can’t explain eggs this cheap.

Wooooooowwwwww…..…clink,clink,clink…. Contactor switched off, the hammer mill slowly spins to rest so back to the chicken feed. Let’s see winter ration… 4 parts non GMO corn, 1 part wheat, 1 part non GMO whole soybean meal, 1 part oilseed cake & 1 part alfalfa meal and a liberal scoop of the farmers secret natural mineral recipe. The wheat, oilseed cake & alfalfa are all locally grown. The corn & soy both come from parts farther east (Washington & Idaho) as neither can be efficiently grown in our climate. Keeping the feed local really gets tough when it comes to minerals. All of the minerals we use come from natural mineral deposits in Montana, Wyoming, Utah & Pennsylvania or are harvested from the North Sea. While I don’t like the “food miles” associated with the mineral supplements they are by weight a very small portion of the feed and the natural minerals really make the health of the chicken & the quality of the egg.

My hand starts to ache and sweat runs down my forehead as I use the giant wooden spoon to mix a layer of feed. Mental note - I really have to find a cheap old cement mixer to help with the mixing. I have to remind myself that all of this work making feed really pays off when it comes to costs. At the local feed store a bag of commercial Purina feed, loaded with GMO soy and corn costs about $12 for a 50 lb. bag. A bag of commercial organic feed costs about $22 for a 50 lb bag. My home brewed feed made with non GMO ingredients & the best natural minerals money can buy comes out at around $10 for 50 lbs. and I don’t have a million plastic feed bags to dispose of. In winter when the pasture is dormant each chicken eats a little under a ¼ lb. of feed per day or around 5 cents worth of feed. We go through about 300 lbs of chicken feed every 10 days. Since we believe in heritage breeds, letting the chickens sleep in the dark and letting the chickens roam about expressing there “chicken ness” we get about 40% egg laying efficiency in the winter instead of the commercial 102% to 105% year round. Based on this I like to use the figure of 12 cents of feed for every egg our hens produce or roughly ½ the value of a medium sized egg. The other half of the value of the egg is in the preloaded costs associated with the cost to buy the chick, raise the chick thru pullet, repair and maintain equipment, egg cleaning, sorting & delivery costs, etc. Labor value to the farmer for all of this work? As with many small farming tasks $0.

Ok, so aside from getting to enjoy watching the chickens run around and getting dusty exercise like making chicken food why would we possibly want to be in the chicken business if it does not pay money? The key to this is in thinking like a producer not as a consumer. As consumers we tend think of money as an end product not as a means of exchange for real products. As a producer it is vital that I think around money to the end products. Aside from laying eggs chickens do two things really well…eat bugs and poop. By trailing the laying hens in their mobile chicken coops behind the cows & sheep during the grazing months the chickens get to dig thru the cow pies looking for fly grubs (protein supplementation) and at the same time distribute excellent non petroleum produced natural nitrogen fertilizer on the pastures. While I can’t really quantify in dollars the health value of fly control to our herds & flocks I do know that the value and the quality of the nitrogen laid down as chicken poop is way more cost effective than buying organic fertilizer at Wilbur Ellis and firing up the tractor for a couple of days to spread it around. Not only is the chicken fertilizer of a higher quality but the chickens spread it for me!

People often ask why we don’t feed “certified organic” feed to our chickens. While we choose foodstuffs to mix that are non GMO and have few if any petroleum based inputs we could not feed “certified organic” without going broke. Currently I pay $500 a ton for non GMO whole soybean meal. The current price for “certified organic” soybean meal is $1,200 per ton. While our egg production can operate at $0 it cannot sustain very long at a net monetary loss. So…. This brings us back to the 8.1/4 cent commercial eggs. How do they do it? Even with tricks like buying GMO grains in huge quantities, feeding a percentage of urea soaked paper pulp for protein or re-feeding processed manure to recapture the available nitrogen the truth is they can’t. Eggs at 8.1/4 cents each is in economic terms referred to as dumping. Didn’t the Chinese just get into trouble for this? Right now industrial egg and dairy producers have a huge surplus of product because our current global economic slowdown has had a significant impact on the industrial producers export market as a result they are wholesale dumping at below cost in the US marketplace.

The other day, muddy, soaking wet & frozen after morning chores I ducked into a local quickie café to grab a cup of coffee on a parts run into town. I particularly like this place not for the bland coffee but for the concrete floor. It is really embarrassing to leave farm guck on the tile & industrial carpet at the big national coffee chain next door. An older retired gentleman wearing a BMW baseball cap and Las Vegas sweatshirt stretched tight over his belly was sitting at the counter waiting for his breakfast. As I was the only one in the place looking like a drowned rat dripping mud and manure onto the floor, the old guy asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a farmer. Without hesitation the old guy started railing on the high cost of food. Eggs came up and he rallied on about how we were all fools for letting the stores rob us of $2.50 for a dozen eggs. I just quietly smiled as I watched him eat his tasteless pale yellow runny shit and paper fed battery cage produced eggs. “You get what you pay for I guess” I said with hot coffee in hand heading for the door and out for round 2.