Kfacres, I just reread my previous post, and it sounded punchier in tone than I meant it to. I wasn't trying to be pushy, but I did want to make the point that the USPS is revenue neutral, so it's not a direct culprit in regard to the national debt. When people stop using the USPS, it has to shrink... that's what's happening in the changes currently proposed. (For the record - I'm in the private sector, and I try not to deal with paper mail unless I have to, so I'm certainly no champion of USPS.)
Back on the subject of chickens - if mail gets expensive, perhaps that would result in changes to the hatchery industry. That's a basic rule of the free market: when the costs of doing business change, business has to adapt. The ones that don't adapt are the ones that don't make it.
What would that mean? Perhaps more regional hatcheries would pop up. They might find that they can now compete against the big national hatcheries, once the price of shipping is calculated into the final pricetag. Instead of paying to ship them cross-country, they might be able to trim some costs by serving more local markets. (Obviously, none of this conjecture would apply to industrial chicken farming, where the hatcheries already are located near the big grow-out barns, in order to cut down on trucking costs).
Or maybe that won't happen, and the only change will be more expensive chicks, across the board, for everyone.
If shipping gets really, really expensive, backyard farmers might all of a sudden get a renewed interest in meat birds that sustainably breed true from one generation to the next, so they wouldn't have to import each generation of hybrids.
