Egg shortage and Organic feed

I don’t want this to sound like I am happy about this egg shortage. I am not.

We have rabbits and chickens. We have them because we want to provide ourselves with a quality food source and we want to provide our animals with the best possible life, for an animal, to be an animal.

We have high predator pressure where I am. It includes many roaming dogs/many, many hawks, coyotes, etc. I could kill the dogs and the coyotes but not the hawks. We keep our animals in a coop/run combo that gives each bird about 35 sqft to work with and keeps them safe from predation. We started some garden spots where we grow food for our stock, and we hope to continue to reduce our offsite feed requirements. If we could free range, Methinks we could really reduce the input cost, but we cannot currently. If I lose a hen to a predator, that would mean a loss of a lot of eggs and a happy hen.

We do buy Organic or Non-GMO feed, when we buy it. I have to say it can be tough to do sometimes. A 40# bag of organic chicken feed at the big red store is the same price as 80# of the conventional. At the end of the day, I don’t want to eat that junk, and I don’t want our stock to eat that junk and then me eat them or their eggs/offspring, thereby eating that junk.

I went to the big blue store today. I saw that the big blue store eggs are $4.63 a dozen for the cheapest junk dozen. For the first time, my production costs for a dozen quality eggs, from well loved and treated birds, are less than the cheapest store eggs I can buy.

I want to record this in the annals of internet history so that when I get discouraged in the future about anything I wrote above, I can come and read this post.

Feel free to comment.

Congratulations on happy hens, showing a "profit" or at least breaking even and avoiding all the weird stuff that gets included in animal feeds.
Ours loved the seeds from tree lucerne (Tagasaste)  kitchen peelings, and I even spotted them having a scrap over a baby snake. They happily scratched around their pen (they hid whenever a hawk came over) and not too much trouble from foxes, a slack mesh fence and underground mesh to prevent digging, so when we had a problem it was my fault for leaving the pen door open.