I'd always been told that backyard eggs are a very environmentally friendly source of food, but I just did some calculating and the feed brand we buy requires feeding around 125g a day (consists mainly of grains, I used wheat for my maths since that's the first ingredient), which is around 400 calories a day. A chicken laying 200 eggs a year would give around 40 calories in egg a day. You're literally reducing your caloric output tenfold by filtering food through a chicken's body?? Insane!
Environmentally friendly is sort of a relative term. If youβre comparing backyard eggs to store bought beef, then it is comparatively environmentally friendly. If youβre comparing raising your own chickens to growing your own tomatoes, then it probably isnβt.
How sustainable backyard eggs are depends on a lot of factors, what feed you're using, where you're getting it, whether they're foraging etc. but in general terms, it will be more sustainable and more calorie efficient to eat a crop directly, than to feed it to an animal and then consume what that animal produces using those calories. No animal produces in food more calories than they take in. This just makes intuitive sense even without the statistics.
There is an exception to that if we're talking about crops that aren't edible for humans, but even then, there is the water and land cost, and the opportunity cost of not growing crops for human consumption on that same arable land. Most animal products quite literally detract from the global food supply, but that isn't always the case with backyard hens.
A hen who is left to forage and/or fed on grain that you grow yourself will have a lower footprint than a hen who is fed on store bought grain, but I don't imagine it would be as sustainable or efficient as eating crops directly even in that scenario. I'd need to see more data to be confident about that though, that is just my educated guess, as I can't find much comparative analysis on it.
