Edition #4: The $2,000 Egg

Earlier this year, I bought chickens. It was something I always wanted to do. I felt like keeping chickens was sort of a right of passage towards living a more sustainable life. What could be more sustainable than feeding your kitchen scraps to your chickens in the backyard and getting some lovely eggs in return? It turns out chickens are the gateway animal. And once you start going down the rabbit hole of producing your own food and homesteading you will soon feel a sudden urge to buy more animals. For me, I have always dreamed of collecting my own eggs with the goal of producing wonderfully tasting local eggs. Most people take eggs for granted. But the pandemic changed that. Suddenly prices skyrocketed and eggs became a talking piece about inflation (eggflation?). During the pandemic, the egg supply was deeply disrupted. Egg prices skyrocketed up to over $7/dozen. Here in Puerto Rico, at times there simply were no eggs in the supermarket. That certainly got the consumer's attention and I probably wasn’t the only one who considered buying a few chicks as a potential cost-savings solution. I may or may not have used the high price of eggs as a justification for doing something I always wanted to do…keep backyard chickens.

I’ve always been drawn to the homesteading section of the library. I always enjoyed having a garden and got a thrill from eating something I grew. I definitely put chickens on a pedestal, dreaming about the day I could wake up and go collect my own eggs. My foray into keeping chickens quickly became an obsession. I succumbed to “Chicken math” which is described as the following: You first think about how many chickens you “need” and then somehow you end up buying three times the amount of chickens you really need. Hence, “chicken math.” Maybe you are like me and you start doing the research into different chicken breeds and then you learn “Wow! Honey, did you know that there are chickens that lay blue eggs?”, then all of the sudden you now own chickens that lay blue eggs. They are a thing, Ameraucana is a chicken breed that lays blue eggs. And yes you can even breed them with a dark brown egg layer and you get a “green egg layer.” So green eggs and ham can actually happen.

These little dinosaurs captured my heart, and I fell big time. While I won’t disclose the actual amount of chickens I now own, I treated this as an experiment into managing a small chicken flock, measuring its viability as an additional farming enterprise for small-scale farmers. My partner, a trained carpenter, designed a chicken house made of wood and a 20 foot chicken run. We spent a few weekends building this out and learning as we go. Due to the high cost of wood here, the final cost was over $2,000 to get the chicken operation up and running.

The experimental chicken coop and run

A lot of patience is needed for the interested homesteader or amateur chicken farmer. Hens take between four and six months to start laying eggs. So after many months of daily work providing food and changing water for the chickens, I finally received that precious first egg. It was thrilling and also....pretty tiny. I didn’t know this at the time, but the first eggs a hen lays are always very small and they gradually get bigger as the hen matures. That tiny egg was the most expensive egg I had ever had, but it sure did taste pretty good.

The $2,000 egg

After many batches of chickens later, I am now producing nearly two dozen eggs per day with a very diverse flock. I tried out a number of different breeds of chicken to measure the suitability for this tropical climate and heat as well as how good of a producer each breed is. I have now honed in on a few solid producing breeds that will now be bred for other small scale farmers in Monte Azul’s farmer training program to use as a starter flock. 

Diverse members of my flock featuring Buff Orpingtons, Silver Laced Wyandottes and Black Australorps

Puerto Rico currently only has eight commercial egg producers for an island of 3.1 million people. In 1982, there were close to 300 producers and before Hurricane Maria in 2017 there were 21. This mind boggling shrinkage in the number of egg producers is concerning to say the least about the state of food security in Puerto Rico. Given that the current commercial producers only satisfy an estimated 20% of the local market according to the Puerto Rican Department of Agriculture, there is a significant need for more egg producers. I was excited to learn that 23 farmers in Monte Azul’s Agricultural Entrepreneurship 101 course this year identified egg laying hens as their top choice for farm diversification. 

In response to the needs of the agricultural community, the consumers, and the interest of farmers in our program, we are currently developing a small microlending program to help incubate more egg producers. We hope to launch this during 2024 and start with a cohort of 10 new egg producers. My hope is that these 10 producers will fall in love with chickens as I have, and that “chicken math” will spread like wildlife among rural communities addressing food insecurity and creating a viable secondary enterprise for farmers. 

Keeping chickens has been a joy. While caring for animals is a daily responsibility, they also provide entertainment. My favorite part of the day is collecting the eggs and seeing all the quirky shapes and fun colors of each egg. There is a trend among chicken enthusiasts to produce a rainbow dozen, from a light bluish white to a dark brown and every shade in between due to the different breeds that are out there. One year into the chicken journey, and I finally achieved the rainbow dozen. May chicken math go forth and multiply.

My rainbow dozen

Andrew M. Hermann

Founder & Executive Director