The growing case for raising your own chickens

Eggs have become an expensive purchase recently, as you’ve no doubt noticed, with supermarket prices in the UK rising by as much as 85 per cent in the past year. Here in America, the cost of a dozen now averages out at $3.29, an improvement on the $4.25 of two months back, but still well north of the $1.50 many consumers are used to. Globally, more than 140 million chickens have been killed by avian flu and related culling since October 2021 – including 48 million across Europe and the UK.

As a result, we find ourselves in one of those periodic cycles where major media outlets loudly debate the merits of backyard chicken flocks. To borrow an observation from The Godfather: these things gotta happen every five years or so. The ‘chick situation’ offers ‘lessons about the broader economy’, the New York Times tells us (this is true, but it’s also the Times’s endearing way of telling us it has learned something new about the economy that the rest of us have known for decades).