It's harvest season on the farmers' markets are packed. Hooray! Hey, where did all the eggs go?

Last week, for the first time this year, I ran out of eggs before the farmer's market closed.

One of the sad things about being in the free-range egg business is that the seasonal peak in egg production (April and May) is horrendously mismatched with the seasonal peak in farmer's market customers (August and September).

This is a hard problem without a very good solution. (Telling people that they should buy a whole fryer instead of eggs, because a chicken is nothing but an experienced egg, doesn't work!) It's made even more difficult because demand slackens after September, and it's hard to engineer a two-month egg peak in the wrong season.

So it works out the same as always: get to the market early for the best selection. You snooze, you lose. That's true of everything, not just my eggs.

Let's do the math. There were 76 billion eggs laid by US chickens last year (not counting hatching eggs), laid by 280 million hens (23 dozen eggs per hen). The vast majority of these hens are in factory farms. Suppose we wanted to get rid of factory farms. What would it take?

Well, before factory farms there were ordinary farm flocks. Between about 1900 and 1950, a typical "egg farm" held steady at about 1,500 hens. Some had more, some had less, but a farm family making most of its income from eggs typically had a 1,500-hen operation.

This makes sense when you realize that studies of labor efficiency on old-fashioned egg farms measured productivity at 2.0-2.5 hours per hen per year. A 1,500-hen operation would take between 3,000 and 3,750 hours of labor, which will soak up the time of two wage-earners.

Factory-farm techniques allowed the number of hens per attendant to increase to the current astronomical levels (around 150,000 birds per henhouse, with multiple houses per installation, and only one attendant per henhouse.)

280,000,000/1,500 = is about 187,000 egg farms that would have to be created, providing jobs for 187,000 new farm families. A 1,500-hen flock should lay (at 23 dozen eggs/hen) 34,500 dozen eggs per year.

Now, the median household income last year was about $50,000. Presumably, we can't get rid of factory farms without paying an average wage, so we need to extract $50,000 of wage income per 1,500 bird flock. $50,000/$34,500 = $1.45 per dozen (as opposed to only about $0.0145 per dozen for the factory farm). That pays the farmer. Because the farmer only receives about half the retail price of the eggs, the consumer will have to pay about $2.90 extra for non-factory-farmed eggs.

This cost premium is more than the price of a dozen factory-farmed eggs (around $2.25 the last time I looked). Various other economies of scale that benefit factory farms won't be available to smaller farms, so I figure that, in rough terms, non-factory-farmed eggs will triple the cost -- in round numbers, $7.00 a dozen.

That's for old-time confinement operations, which would have eggs that taste just as bad as factory-farmed eggs. Real free range eggs (not the fake kind that produces the eggs in the stores) cost more to produce. The labor efficiency isn't that much worse, but production plummets in poor weather and there are predator issues. I figure that the costs will work out to around five times as much as factory-farmed eggs -- $10-$12 a dozen.

True free-range farmers are thin enough on the ground that most of them can sell all their eggs locally, which is why you can't get them in the city. Eggs are cheaper in the country, so eggs you buy from me for $5 would cost you $10 in the big city.

Chickens have a natural laying cycle that peaks in the spring and troughs in the fall. The typical flock is at its worst in November, and actually lays better in the depths of winter.

By early spring, long before the weather is nice or the supply of natural food has increased much, the hens start laying like crazy. It's not about temperature and it's not about food: it's about natural cycles. The hens lay their eggs before the food supply is very good because it's the growing chicks who need easy pickings, not the broody hen, who hardly eats anything when she's incubating her eggs, anyway. So the natural egg-laying season has to happen before the time of plenty.

In the fall, the pickings are still pretty easy, but what would baby chicks eat during the upcoming season of scarcity? So the natural tendency is for egg-laying to cease.

This means that Thanksgiving is an unlikely time to feature egg-based dishes, while Easter is a great time. Similarly, farm flocks are thinned in the fall so that only the most valuable animals are kept over the winter, so it's a good time for a turkey dinner. At Easter, it would be madness to slaughter turkeys, because the whole point of keeping your remaining turkeys over the winter was so they'd lay hatching eggs in the spring, and Easter happens before this is truly under way.

I get emails from people every November, wondering why their hens stopped laying, and what they can do about it. This is one of those problems where anything you do will work, because the rate of lay will pick up in a couple of months even if you don't do anything. But giving the hens all the chicken feed they want, housing them in an area that's reasonably dry and more or less out of the wind, and preventing predators, pets, and children from hassling them will help.

The natural tendency for the number of eggs to increase right through the winter is another piece of evidence that, whatever their origins, chickens aren't tropical birds anymore. They're far more winter-hardy than most people give them credit for.

I'm sure you've noticed that real, grass-fed free-range eggs aren't available in city supermarkets, and that they're pretty rare even in the country. Not only that, but the few farmers who produce them rarely expand their operations. At best, they keep the same number of chickens every year.

This has been true for ages. Why?

The answer is that free-range eggs aren't very profitable. Anyone who can make a buck from free-range eggs can make two bucks doing something else. If this weren't true, the farmers would be expanding their flocks as fast as they could.

Why isn't it profitable? Because consumers aren't willing to pay what it would cost. By my calculations, real grass-fed free-range eggs would need to retail for about $10 per dozen in city supermarkets for the farmers to earn a living equal to the U.S. median family income. Of this $10 per dozen, the farmer would receive about half, while wholesalers and retailers would get the other half. (That's how it always works.)

Out of the farmer's half, most goes to expenses -- feed, interest, depreciation, equipment, replacement chickens -- and only $1.69 per dozen goes to paying the farmer's wages.

(I'll post the assumptions and the calculations later, but in this post I want to cut to the chase.)

People can complain about factory farming as much as they like, but until they are willing to pay $10 a dozen for eggs, factory-farmed products are what they're gonna get. You've basically got your choice between factory farms that uses cages and ones that don't, and factory farms that are organically certified and ones that aren't.

If you buy 'em in the city, non-factory-farmed eggs are gonna cost you ten bucks. Activism will have no effect on this whatever. Farmers deserve to get paid, and so do the wholesalers and retailers. Real free-range eggs are expensive to raise. Nothing real will happen until enough people put their money where their mouth is. Ten bucks a dozen.