Depends on supply and demand. When I did a farmers market last year, I sold mine for $3.00 a dozen. 5 bucks seems a lot for organic eggs, especially if it's from a large producer, but the cost of feed has gone up by a LOT this year (along with everything ELSE, but I won't rant). I am not doing the market this year, one of the reasons is because I didn't make one cent last year. I just give mine to family and friends, or eat them myself. Much better than store bought. BUT, if you want to feel better ("lll help you rationalize it), it's cheaper for you to pay 4.00 or even 5.25 a dozen for eggs rather than what I do: Buy some chicks in the spring (I got 25 chicks via mail order-I don't trust the people or auctions here, too many diseases), the order total for the chicks plus postage was about 80 bucks. Then you have to feed them for about 5 months before they start laying. They go through about a 50 lb bag of feed a week, so that's about 8 dollars for a bag of adult XLA, or $10 for starter (XLA's more now days, about 10 dollars). Just to make it easy, pretend that the costs to raise them to laying age is 8 bucks a week for feed. So, that's about $24 X 5 months which is 125 bucks for feed to get them to laying age. Now, add chick grit (if you buy it, they need it when they are babies), which was about 10 bucks for a bag, plus $250 for building a chicken coop, $30 bucks for feeders, waterers and other incidentals, then you need some oyster for their eggs, which is about $15 bucks a bag. So, all this comes to a grand total of...hmmm... about $510 just to get the pullets to laying age. Now, I'm going by my own expenses as I'm not an egg business or farm. BUT, it does show how expensive it is to raise chickens and eggs. I let mine range out in the yard which helps with feed costs of course. But, raising chickens isn't an easy job, especially in the winter when the water freezes and you have to go out and keep them fed and watered at least 2 times a day. Hope it makes you feel better about paying a lot for eggs, ha ha!

Commercially bagged organic fertilizers cost about $30 for a 40-pound bag. They contain a mix of ground corn, wheat, soybeans, cottonseed, alfalfa, fish meal, seaweed, and feather meal. All of these ingredients can be found individually at your local feed store in brown, 50-pound bags. The cost ranges from $4 to $20 depending on the market price of the contents. I find the cost of the plain brown bags to be 1/6 the local cost of commercially bagged and labeled organic fertilizer. Another difference between organic fertilizer and chemical fertilizer like Lesco's is the time it takes to show results. Chemical fertilizers usually show results in a day or two. Organic fertilizers show results in 3 weeks (21 days and not any faster). The results they show are a very deep green color. I adjust for the timing by applying 3 weeks earlier than I think I need it. After many years I came up with the idea of fertilizing on the federal holidays. They are easy to remember and that works very well for me in San Antonio. Some people use organic fertilizer because they are concerned about the health and well being of their children and pets that play in the yard. Most chemical fertilizers and all herbicides have warning labels to explain how long you should stay off the lawn after applying the product. Organic fertilizers are made from food and don't need warnings. In fact my fertilizer sessions sometimes broke out into corn meal fights with my daughters. When it gets into your eyes, you blink it out. No pain or stinging. Some people don't use alfalfa or other products because they think it will attract skunks or (fill in your favorite local critter). It does not seem to. As to the cost, you have to calculate the cost per 1,000 square feet. Almost all fertilizers are applied by that measure. If your bag of Lesco costs $12 and covers 6,000 square feet, you divide $12 by 6 and get $2.00 per 1,000 square feet. My cost example for corn meal was posted above. The cost difference is usually not an issue when you look at it that way. Sometimes chemical fertilizers are very inexpensive, but unless you have a football field to cover (like Andy has), you can usually justify using cheap organic grains in your lawn hobby. One more thing to say. Many people find that once they stop using all chemical fertilizers, fungicide, herbicide, and insecticide, they find their yards are full of wildlife. In particular they see the return of toads (slug and snail predators as well as cockroaches and anything else), lizards (insect eaters), geckos (insect eaters), and birds (insect and caterpillar eaters). If you don't spray the wasps living under the eaves of your house, they are voracious caterpillar predators. The point is that you no longer need insecticide in the garden because all the animal predators have returned to do it for you. If you are comparing the cost of the two methods, you have to include all the costs of all the chemicals you use versus the cost of only using organic fertilizer. Is one better than the other? Consider the ideas above to decide for yourself. I use organics because I am cheap and lazy but I want the lawn to look nice. Turns out it is one of the nicer lawns in the neighborhood.

Here are some good studies -- at least from the descriptions there seem to be some well designed ones -- that show some higher nutrient levels in organic foods, and the specific nutrients are named. Some of the studies also demonstrate the higher levels of harmful pesticides in conventional foods, such as the study that measured the levels in the urine of children from two groups, one eating conventional and one eating organic. And the value of organic methods for soil microbiology and carbon sequestration and the like is also mentioned in some studies. I would like to note that the "source" for information in the posts by TMG1 on this thread is primarily a propaganda pamphlet paid for and produced by big AG (it's a circuitous route, which was described to him last year when he was last here touting these fictional "facts" but he didn't believe that his source was inherently flawed, and so he's come back armed with misinformation again.) If anyone really wants to know the route and how the pamphlet came to be sold on Amazon, I can lay it all out again. Here is a link that might be useful: nutritional values, pesticide levels, value to soil in organic foods

Oils well that ends not so well?? End of Oil Could Fuel 'End of Civilization as We Know It' By Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Senior Writer posted: 14 December 2004 03:28 pm ET SAN FRANCISCO -- Opponents in a long-running debate over when the world will run out of oil squared off Tuesday in a crowded room of scientists, reaching only one conclusion: The supply of fossil fuels is fixed and the world economy will eventually have to wean itself from oil. The most dire and perhaps speculative forecast calls for global oil production to peak next year -- specifically on Thanksgiving. Others say the end can't be accurately predicted, but that it is likely decades rather then centuries away, and that the consequences will be grave: huge inflation, global resource wars -- China vs. the United States was emphasized as a possibility -- and the end of civilization as we know it. Other experts at the face-off, held here during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, said there is nothing to worry about in the short term. U.S. peaked already The argument stretches back to a 1956 prediction by M. King Hubbert that oil production in the lower 48 U.S. states would peak in the early 1970s. He was right. The United States now imports nearly 60 percent of the oil it uses. Kenneth Deffeyes, a Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, has taken Hubbert's logic a step further and predicts the world's oil production will top out late in 2005. "It's Thanksgiving plus or minus three weeks," said Deffeyes, who grew up in the oil fields and was a researcher at Shell Oil for several years. Deffeyes second book on the topic, "Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak" (Hill and Wang) is due out in March. His crystal ball is full of complex formulas and, most scientists agree, numbers that are impossible to accurately pin down, such as the amount of oil in known fields and how much more will be found. "This is not science," said Michael Lynch, a political scientist and energy consultant. "This is forecasting." Lynch agrees there are problems with relying so heavily on oil, and he sees more price volatility ahead. But he argues that many smaller deposits will be found and they will add up to "a lot of oil" over time. He also faults the running-dry-soon predictions as being based not on geology, but on politics and economics: Oil production in various countries has flattened or fell at certain times for reasons having nothing to do with how much they could produce, Lynch says. Further, Lynch contends, it is not possible to predict the discovery of new oil fields or the true size of existing in-ground reserves. He likens current oil forecasts to stock market prediction. Charts fit history well, he says, "but they're not predictive." Alternatives? Likewise, analyst Bill Fisher of the University of Texas at Austin sees plenty of oil over the next few decades. Fisher sees no reason to panic. He expects the world to gradually transition to an economy based on natural gas during the first half of this century, then to a hydrogen economy before 2100. He pointed out that estimates of oil reserves tend to grow over time, no matter who does the guessing. The debate got more complex at this point. Caltech physicist David Goodstein sees little hope for hydrogen, which he said requires fossil fuels in order to extract. And natural gas, like oil and coal and shale (another proposed alternative) are all finite, Goodstein argues. "The oil will run out," he said. "The only question is when." Goodstein puts little stock in nuclear fusion, which for decades has been proposed as the cousin of fission with unlimited potential. "Fusion and shale oil are the energy sources of the future, and they always will be," he quipped. Solar energy shows promise, he said, but "we haven't figured out how to use it." So Goodstein takes a pragmatic approach. It doesn't matter so much when we run out, he argues, but what we do about it. Global trap Goodstein, author of the book "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil" (W.W. Norton & Company) sees a looming world crisis that could fuel war and bring society to its knees. "We have created a trap for ourselves," Goodstein said. The United States has so far avoided serious consequences from the trap by relying on imports. The country uses about 7 billion of the 30 billion barrels of oil produced annually around the globe. And it makes us rich. Oil consumption equals standard of living, experts agree. Meanwhile, other countries are beginning to clamor for oil at unprecedented rates, and therein lies the recipe for potential disaster. China uses a comparatively modest 1.5 billion barrels a year (perhaps 2.4 billion this year) according to some estimates. India consumes less. Both countries' economies are becoming increasingly dependent on oil, however. China's consumption is expected to grow 7.5 percent per year, and Indias 5.5 percent, according to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. By 2060, oil production will have to triple just to meet global population growth and maintain current standards of living, said Stanford University geophysicist Amos Nur. Yet China's own production has been flat since the 1980s and it now imports 40 percent of what it needs. 'When do we panic?' "What matters in the short term is, when do we panic?" Nur said. "In my opinion, the point of panic has already taken place." It's a behind-the-scenes sort of panic. The two largest economies on Earth -- China and the United States -- have already incorporated the finite nature of oil into their national security policies, Nur argues, citing policy statements from both governments reflecting the need to secure stability in oil-producing countries and a free flow of the resource. The war in Iraq, a country second only to politically unstable Saudi Arabia in oil reserves, is another clue, he said. "There is a huge conflict that might be emerging," Nur said. Some of the fine points of the various presentations were argued, even resulting in one shouting match over how much oil is in Saudi Arabia. But none of the roughly 500 scientists in the room voiced disagreement with Nur's view of the potential for war. If the world is sliding toward global conflict over oil, the skids may be pretty well greased, politically speaking. Governments do not have the political will to prepare for the end of oil, says Goodstein, the Caltech physicist. "Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime this century, when the fuel runs out," Goodstein said, adding that "I certainly hope my prediction is wrong."