The skyrocketing cost of eggs has become a microcosm for economic hurt, as egg prices reportedly increased over 15% in January. Now, some people are turning to an unconventional solution: renting chickens.
As an outbreak of avian flu strikes at the nation’s egg supply chain, at least one major company is providing Americans with the opportunity to rent chickens, allowing them to farm the eggs themselves. But while this may seem like a fun, novel idea for people looking to get cheaper eggs, experts caution that it may not slash prices in a meaningful way.
How can you rent a chicken?
A Google search for ‘chicken rentals’ shows that there are several companies offering the service, including a number of local brands. The most notable is Rent The Chicken, a Pennsylvania company that works with affiliate farmers to rent out hens in the U.S. and Canada. It provides “all of the supplies you need to get started: [a] portable chicken coop, two to four egg-laying hens,” feed and more, according to the company’s website. The “rental cost varies but starts at about $500 for a six-month contract,” said USA Today.
The rentable hens will lay about a dozen eggs per week, Rent The Chicken owner Jenn Tompkins said to USA Today. Amid the growing egg shortage, the company’s phones are “ringing off the hook” and “online inquiries are filling up very quickly as well,” Tompkins said to ABC News.
Will this actually help cut costs?
Not everyone agrees on this point. While renting hens may be a convenient way to get eggs, the “costs of raising chickens can quickly add up,” said CBS News. Consumers “need to consider the initial cost of the coop, chicks and feed, which could cost thousands of dollars” in the long term. On the flip side, buying a dozen eggs at the grocery store per week “would be about $300 per year.”
And the amount of eggs you can buy at the store is the same in every carton — but not so with raising chickens, experts say. Hens are “not just PEZ dispensers and they’re not giving us eggs,” Kathy Shea Mormino, a longtime chicken raiser, said to CBS. The number of “eggs they lay a week is going to depend on how healthy they are, how young they are, what the seasonal influences are.”
Tompkins also notes that the main priority with her company is solving food insecurity, not prices themselves. We “are not coming against the high price of eggs,” she said to USA Today. Rather, the company is “solving a problem of food insecurity; of not having eggs on the shelf. People can have eggs in their backyard.”
If the bird flu is here to stay — or comes and goes in waves — that could mean egg prices will remain high for the long term. During a 2015 outbreak, prices “skyrocketed to, at that time, record highs over $5 per dozen in the wholesale market, and then the disease went away, prices came down, and we didn’t have to deal with this until 2022,” Texas A&M livestock economist David Anderson said to KXAS-TV Dallas Fort-Worth. This “time around, instead of happening and going away for a few years, it happens, and then it happens again, and it happens again.”