This is supposed to be the age of technology. You know — the days of artificial intelligence, the eve of the robot takeover. You've seen all the sci-fi movies.
Instead, it's turning into the year of the chicken.
The demons of the matrix might steal our jobs and souls, but evidently nobody's taking away our omelets and Grand Slam breakfasts.
So with egg prices more than doubling in the past year or two because of avian flu's toll on the supply chain, Americans are scrambling to buy their own hens and wait for them to start delivering fresh, free eggs.
Well, not really free. If you're going to be a backyard poultry farmer, you have to figure in some costs — shelter, fencing, feed, water dishes, heat lamps and, of course, whatever price you put on your own labor to keep your little ranch running.
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Nonetheless, the price is apparently right for a lot of folks around the Yakima Valley, according to people like Bryan King, district manager of Washington's Wilco stores.
"People are rushing out to buy chicks right now because of the egg prices," he told the YH-R's Questen Inghram recently. According to King and other local retailers, eager customers are lining up in stores to await new loads of chicks and supplies can sell out in hours. ...
Ironically, some of those same customers probably stood in similar lines to buy the latest iPhones a Christmas or two ago. These are surreal times.
Now, as poultry operations around the country kill off millions of chickens to prevent the spread of bird flu, the once-humble bird is spreading its wings as its value soars.
In this strange era, chickens are ascending to the top of the consumer food chain. Suddenly, they're right there with the latest laptops, tablets and smart watches as technology and agrarianism begin to interface.
Who could've seen this coming?
Regardless of all that, whatever this trend is, We doubt it will continue long. Anyone who's lived in the country for any length of time knows farm animals are a lot of work. Scraping poop out of a coop gets old fast.
And fowl farming isn't exactly a risk-free undertaking. The highly contagious bird flu isn't sparing backyard flocks, nor are skunks, raccoons, neighborhood dogs and other opportunistic predators.
Realistically, shelling out astronomical prices for eggs beats hearing clucking all over town.
For now, though, it looks like the chickens come first. Then the eggs.
