Scrambled

Appeared in Methow Valley News 2.20.2025

There sure has been eggs-ceptional hullabaloo about the price of eggs lately. Eggheads on all major media outlets have been using the rising cost of a carton of eggs as a touchstone for — well, just about everything. Last week, Forbes eggs-amined egg sales and reported that the average price of a dozen (non-organic) eggs in the U.S. was just under $5, which seems like kind of a steal to me.

Now don’t get me wrong — I’m as happy as the next consumer to walk out of the grocery store with a manageable receipt. But let me egg-splain. At roughly 42 cents per egg, a dozen eggs at $5 seems pretty reasonable. That’s breakfast for less than $1 — an eggs-cellent bargain, in my mind.

We’ve been raising laying hens in the Methow Valley for almost 20 years. I use “raising” loosely, because we’re not very disciplined about our methodology. We let our chickens run free most afternoons and it’s not unusual for me to get a text telling me that my chickens are in the road again. We routinely find piles of eggs under bitterbrush bushes, behind the woodpile, or under the porch, most of which have to be discarded because they’ve lain in summer heat for too long, far past their eggs-piration date.

We lose a chicken or two every year to the food chain: bobcats and coyotes. Neighborhood dogs have eaten more hens than the wild critters. And the ravens are so darn cheeky that they just swagger up the gangplank that leads into the coop, grab eggs in their beaks, and fly away with them: eggs, literally poached.

Chickens are eggs-pensive, especially if you’re feeding them organic grain. You have to put a light on them during the darker months or else they won’t lay. When it’s crazy cold — as it has been since about Christmas — that lightbulb needs to rachet up to a heat lamp. You also need to heat their water most of the winter. To keep the flock robust, some years you need to buy chicks, not all of which will be hens. And that’s without even having to factor in bird flu.

I’m guessing the amount we shell out on feed, electricity, and routine equipment replacements — not to mention buying chicks some years — far eggs-ceeds the cost of just buying eggs at the store and enjoying a blissful life free of the demands of being a chicken farmer.

When you calculate the indirect costs, the return on investment gets even further scrambled. As I’m chiseling away at the layer of hay and chicken poop shellacked to the coop floor in the dead of winter and hauling it out to the garden compost in a sled, those 42-cent eggs are looking pretty good to me. When a neighbors’ truck slides off the road on an icy night and decimates an entire section of our chicken fence that will need to be repaired in the spring, 42 cents seems reasonable. When spring chicks have to be kept in a heated box in the living room until they’re big enough to fend for themselves in the outdoor coop, well, again, $5/dozen does not seem eggs-cessive.

Roosters start crowing eggs-travagantly early — about 3:30 a.m. in the summer — annoying everyone within a half-mile radius. And when you want to leave town for a while, you have to throw yourself at your neighbors’ mercy to take care of your chickens while you’re gone. Depending on the laying cycle, your neighbor might only get an egg or two out of the whole thankless venture.

So we can complain all we want about the price of eggs, but any egg farmer knows that chicken husbandry is no yolking matter.