Copyright Forbes
We live in weird unpredictable times when Americans are struggling financially. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than at the grocery store. Food prices are insane and it seems that every trip to the grocery store brings more surprises. If your internal price estimator was set pre-COVID and pre-tariffs and you go shopping now generally you will be in shock. Consider the cost of protein. In 2019 for example, you could buy chicken for about $1.50/lb now it is $2.08/lb. The price of eggs was an even bigger source of concern this year. The price spiked to a record $6.23 for a dozen eggs in March – now it is back down to about $3.59 per dozen on average across the country. This, however, is still super high compared to what everyone is used to paying at the grocery store (see graph). If you like buying organic or free range eggs you know the prices are still in the eye watering ranges. The high egg costs are primarily from avian flu outbreaks and the resultant culling creating massive gaps in supply. There are also regulations, feed price increases driven by inflation and climate destabilization issues impacting the yields on feed crops all which tend to push the costs of eggs up. Tariffs, which are only a secondary cause of increases, as those costs will be hidden for some time (e.g., increased cost of imported equipment that in the future will raise feed prices) and increased cost of fuel from Canada, fertilizer, etc. The costs, but maybe more perhaps the volatility and seemingly randomness of tariff pronouncements, have many people thinking more about bringing the supply chain closer to home. In the most extreme cases to their homes. Does it make any economic sense to make your own protein? The consensus among homestead redditors is that in general it is still cheaper to buy eggs at the store than raise them at home - but those that raise chickens in their backyards have supply when the stores do not and their costs are much less volatile. When the price of eggs is super high it does work out financially depending on how you value your time. You would not want to for example give up your high paying analyst job to spread chicken feed in the backyard all day, but if you can do that after work for fun with your ‘pet chickens’, the time costs do not factor into the equation and you can produce eggs and chicken meat for less than can buy it for at the grocery store (even more so if you are interested in organic free range and obviously super fresh eggs). MORE FOR YOU Sure, anyone can raise a few chickens (if they are allowed depending on where they live), but could consumers actually produce all of their own protein? In a study done for the pandemic, it found the answer is yes, but it depends a lot on where you live. At the time analysts were interested in the topic because of the meat supply shortages of the pandemic. Dealing with Protein Shortages at Home To safeguard against meat supply shortages of any kind, the study analyzed the potential to provide the average American household’s entire protein consumption using either soybean production or distributed meat production at the individual household level. This is a radical clock-turning back proposal as most food is produced for Americans in large factory farms compared to when America was founded and most Americans were farmers. Now less than 1.3% of Americans actually work on farms. For distributed meat production the study considered three ideas: (1) pasture-fed rabbits, (2) pellet and hay-fed rabbits, or (3) pellet-fed chickens. The results were somewhat surprising. Only using the average backyard resources, soybean cultivation can provide 80–160% of household protein and 0–50% of a household’s protein needs can be provided by pasture-fed rabbits using only the yard grass as feed. If external supplementation of feed is available as it is in all but the most extreme catastrophes, raising 52 chickens while also harvesting the concomitant eggs or alternately 107 grain-fed rabbits can meet 100% of an average household’s protein requirements. So yes, the average American family could cover their protein needs using only the average backyard. These results show that resilience to future food price spikes and physical challenges of any type associated with growing meat demands can be incrementally addressed through backyard distributed protein production. This is pretty good news and is perhaps a bit of calm reassurance when you go to the grocery store and find that even a box of cereal costs $7. Backyard Protein Better for the Environment The other bit of good news, is that backyard production of chicken meat, eggs, and rabbit meat reduces the environmental costs of protein due to greenhouse gas emissions savings in production, transportation, and refrigeration of meat products and even more so with soybeans. Generally, all the forms of distributed production of protein whether plant or animal was found to be economically competitive with centralized production of meat if the labor costs were ignored.
