Sunny side up?: Mridula Ramesh on the economics of a breakfast missed

“I waited and waited, but they didn’t lay more than two”, he said. That through our breakfast plans for a toss, because between three of us, we eat eight eggs.

“They” were the ten hens the farmer kept, along with two roosters, in a 4,000-sq-ft grassy patch adjoining his house, a short walk from where my family and I were staying, while on holiday in Kodaikanal this week. A few days ago, the chickens had been generous: ten eggs, one from each hen. But today, they’d gone on strike. Each hen laid an egg a day for roughly 15 days each month, he said.

The eggs themselves were tiny, far smaller than the supermarket ones, and warm—fresh from hen to hand to stove. The thick shells had the colour of biscuit dunked in milk, and when cracked, they cooked fast, into golden omelettes with a rich mouth-feel that regular eggs couldn’t match. Each country chicken egg fetched ₹20. So, if the hens held up their end of the deal, the farmer could earn ₹3,000 a month from egg sales. Not nothing. Not a lot either.

He doesn’t feed them much. They peck at bugs, snack on fallen grain and leftovers, and have a preference for ration rice—whatever’s cheap, whatever’s around. At night, they shuffle into a wooden box. And when they turn two, he sells each for about ₹1,000. Quite literally end-of-life value.

Now, the land they strut on — those 4,000 sq ft — is worth far more if sold. In the local market, it would fetch lakhs. I imagine he knows that. Even when placed in a fixed deposit, the annual interest alone would yield far more than the hens do, without the fuss. But if he sold the land, where would the cow go? And the new house, probably in a colony with boxy walls and no view, wouldn’t offer what this one does: a familiar, grassy yard with the mountains at his back.

He’s lost two hens recently to stray dogs, whose population had exploded in recent years, in one of the unintended consequences of urban sprawl and mismanaged food waste.

Yet still, he doesn’t sell. He doesn’t scale. A spreadsheet would call this irrational. But life, unlike economics, doesn’t always balance neatly in cells.

The hens live well: no cages, no fluorescent lights, no conveyor belts. They have grass underfoot, bugs to chase, and space to quarrel or cuddle. Their lives are longer. In the ledger of life, they may have brokered the better deal. In terms of climate, this land-use cannot scale. But the chicken litter becomes compost, and the feed comes largely from local insects and food waste, meaning there is no transport, packaging or cold chain to consider. And so, the carbon and water footprint fall substantially.

And the farmer? He’s trading yield for quiet. Maybe, like his hens, he too has pecked out his own modest patch of dignity. It’s not enough to live on, but a nice topper to his main income, “anytime money”, as B Soundararajan, chairman of Suguna Foods (one of the largest poultry manufacturers in India), puts it.

As trade-offs go, it’s not bad. Even if it means, now and then, someone doesn’t get their omelette.

(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watershed. She can be reached on tradeoffs@climaction.net)