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United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins recently suggested that Americans struggling to afford rising egg prices should buy chickens themselves — an impractical solution, people experienced with managing chicken coops have said.
In an appearance on Fox News on Sunday to discuss rising consumer costs, Rollins laughed, saying that the egg pricing crisis had a “silver lining.”
“I think the silver lining in all of this is, how do we solve for something like this? And people are sort of looking around, thinking, ‘Maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome,” Rollins said.
Egg prices, which have been rising since 2022, are continuing to go up, primarily due to the culling of millions of chickens to prevent the spread of the avian flu. During the 2024 presidential campaign, many conservatives used the “price of eggs” analogy to promote President Donald Trump, highlighting his promise to focus on lowering consumer costs, including prices for groceries.
Trump said multiple times on the campaign trail that, if elected, prices would “come down fast.” But after the election, he moved the goalpost entirely, admitting that it would be “hard to bring [prices] down.”
Just last month, Trump falsely claimed that prices were actually lower now than they were before he took office. In reality, when Trump started his second term in January, egg prices across the U.S. were around $6.55 per dozen, on average. Today, they’re around $8.16 per dozen — a price increase of more than 24 percent.
Last week, Rollins unveiled other actions the administration was planning to take to address the pricing crisis, including spending $1.5 billion to increase biosecurity measures, research possible vaccines, and subsidize farmers impacted by the avian flu. But those actions don’t address consumer prices directly, a point that Rollins herself admitted when she said the plan wouldn’t “erase the problem overnight.”
Instead, according to Rollins’s predictions, egg prices should stabilize sometime within the next “three to six months” — hardly the “come down fast” promise that Trump made in 2024.
Rollins’s suggestion that Americans should raise their own chickens in the meantime has been met with widespread backlash.
“As a former and likely future backyard chicken-haver: Chickens at backyard scale will not be cheaper than store eggs! They need shelter and food and daily attention & it’s great but not cheap,” said Daniel Laurison, a sociologist professor at Swarthmore College.
Journalist Robyn Pennacchia, writing for Wonkette, also panned the idea.
“According to the r/BackYardChickens subreddit, the cost of getting to one’s first egg, on average, is about $750,” Pennacchia wrote, further noting that one user explained on the thread that, “If you actually care for your chickens, shelter them and treat them well, you’re not going to save money on eggs versus buying them.”
Indeed, one analysis of costs found that eggs would have to cost $10 per dozen for the next three years before any backyard coop, with eight hens laying eggs total, would pay for itself.
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