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Aaron and I have been meaning to figure out how much money we actually spend on producing a dozen eggs. We’ve been charging $3 per dozen because *shrug* that’ll probably cover our costs, right? Since you can probably guess where I’m going with this, I’ll get to the punchline: we spend more than $3 per dozen. If you’re interested in seeing what investment goes into producing eggs, check this out:

We spend $0.63 per paper carton.
We pay $0.25 per sticker that we adhere to the cartons.
We spend approximately $1.90 on chicken feed for each dozen eggs our girls produce.

If you’re keeping track of the math so far, you can see that already we’re spending $2.78 on each dozen. But wait! There’s more!

We spent $166 to purchase our flock of 25 hens in the first place. Because our girls should live several years, I’m not even going to try to calculate their cost per dozen eggs.
We invested in materials to build the chicken tractor, chickshaw, waterers, water heaters, and appropriate fencing. (I seriously don’t even want to know what we spent on this stuff.)
Egg cleanser costs $9.16 per 16 fluid ounces. (This is admittedly not a huge cost because it lasts for a pretty long time. I’m just trying to give you a thorough idea of what goes into a dozen eggs.)
We bought a livestock guardian dog to protect our flock. His presence has proven worthwhile because predators have been leaving our ladies alone, but he eats a lot of food and requires vet visits.
Then you have to factor in the labor, which is on average 4 hours per week.

The bottom line? If this side hustle of ours is going to be sustainable, we need to increase our egg prices. We value the work we do here, raising happy, rotationally-grazed, antibiotic-free hens, and we hope our customers do too.