Weren't eggs supposed to be a dime-a-dozen by now? Well those "cackle- berries", as my dad used to call 'em are priced a bit north of that.
But there's a solution, as suggested by Trump's Ag. Secretary, which is to buy some lumber, chicken wire, chicken feed, and of course baby chickens and in a little while you will be up to your armpits in eggs and another chicken by-product that smells awful, draws files and sticks to your boots. I grew up on a farm, we had chickens and they wanted to be cared for 24/7/365. And roosters don't lay eggs, but they do their cock-ah-doodle-do's before the sun comes up, which could rile up a neighborhood pretty fast.
While there may be a shortage of eggs, there certainly isn't a shortage of dumb ideas in Don the Con's chicken coop.
Author: Catherine Rampell (Opinion writer for WaPo)
Headline: No harm, no fowl: Trump recommends a return to subsistence farming. Frustrated with egg prices? Just raise your own chickens!
"During his campaign, Donald Trump promised to deliver great wealth and lower prices. Today, his administration is urging Americans to return to subsistence agriculture.
Egg prices have skyrocketed, recently surpassing $8 for a dozen wholesale large eggs. Stores are rationing cartons to customers and still getting cleared out. These phenomena are primarily driven by the spread of bird flu, which is forcing farmers to cull their flocks. That’s not Trump’s fault, though it doesn’t help that he accidentally fired bird flu experts at the Agriculture Department — setting off a scramble to rehire them — and deliberately suppressed research on the disease’s transmission.
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Pressed about high prices and policy mistakes, the administration has come up with patchwork of pseudo-plans. One is to research chicken vaccination, which many poultry farmers oppose, since some countries restrict imports of vaccinated chicken products (including the United States). The proposal also seems at odds with the administration’s messaging on human vaccination.
Another Trump strategy is to scapegoat (scapechicken?) greedy farmers for allegedly anticompetitive conduct, as if they want to kill off their own flocks. Lefty populist groups have been egging this on, despite no evidence that collusion — rather than a huge hit to supply — is driving price increases.
Perhaps most eg(g)regiously, the Trump administration is encouraging Americans to cope with high prices by raising their own flocks.
“How do we solve for something like this?” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asked on Fox News. “People are sort of looking around and thinking, ‘Wow, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”
In no universe does it make economic sense for every American household — many of whom live in urban areas or even suburbs where it’s illegal to keep live poultry — to start farming their own food. The fact that we humans don’t have to spend all our time growing our own sustenance, and can instead specialize in other fields where we’re more productive, is a tremendous victory for our species.
Our post-agrarian society has allowed Americans to lead richer, healthier, longer, more leisure-filled lives. There’s a reason politicians a century ago promised “a chicken in every pot,” not a “chicken in every yard.”
Encouraging millions of Americans who are completely inexperienced with animal husbandry to become amateur bird farmers in the middle of a bird flu epidemic also seems like a great way to expose more humans to bird flu.
This DIY egg production stratagem also raises questions about how the administration expects Americans to grapple with other grocery items that have grown more expensive.
Trump has been levying (and suspending, and levying again) tariffs on lots of common food items, including produce imported from Mexico and dairy from Canada. For now, most of the North American tariffs have been “paused” for another 30 days. But if they do come back, many foods that Americans love to consume will get more expensive, including avocados (90 percent of which come from Mexico) and fresh tomatoes (two-thirds from Mexico).
Good luck reproducing those supplies in your own backyards in, say, January. Especially since a key fertilizer ingredient, 80 percent of which comes from Canada, is still apparently subject to Trump’s punitive tariffs (though at “only” 10 percent). This tariff will make farming more expensive any time of year.
As will tariffs on Canadian lumber, which might come in handy for building those chicken coops. On Friday, Trump said additional lumber tariffs were (probably?) back on again.
And if you’re in the market for some chicken wire, unfortunately Trump has also — separately — announced new tariffs on steel worldwide, not just on products from Canada and Mexico. Those tariffs are set to go into effect next week. Domestic steel prices have already been rising in anticipation.
Trump surely understands that limiting access to imports raises prices, because his administration has also flirted with the idea of allowing more egg imports — with the explicit goal of driving down the price of eggs. Importing more eggs has proved complicated, though, and so far there’s not much additional poultry in motion. (Sorry.)
“Homesteading influencer” content might be trendy on social media, but surely the way to Make America Great Again does not involve having everyone raise their own livestock, log their own forests and galvanize their own steel wire. But that is, perhaps, the logical conclusion of Trump’s lifelong fixation with autarky, the idea that an economy should not engage in trade and instead be self-sufficient.
If countries should be economically self-supporting, why not states? If states, why not neighborhoods? If neighborhoods, why not every man, woman and child for themselves? Between bird flu and measles and other contagions, adopting the trad-wife/prepper lifestyle might sound pretty attractive right now."