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What Is Going on with Chickens and Eggs?
This isn’t egg-sactly earth-shattering, breaking news, but what is up with eggs? I just paid two dollars more for a dozen eggs yesterday than my past purchase. All brands reflected about the same increase. I read about a possible chicken flu coming this past October. They said this is the worst outbreak since 2015, a quote “act of God event.”
“Egg quantity has cratered in lockstep. About 8.8 billion eggs were produced in September, down from about 9.7 billion in December 2021, according to most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
“It’s a supply disruption, ‘act of God’ type stuff,” said Moscogiuri, who called the situation “unprecedented.”
“It’s kind of happenstance that inflation is going on [more broadly] during the same period,” he added.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/why-egg-prices-are-surging-but-chicken-prices-are-falling.html
I don’t recall growing up with all these strange conditions that affect the food world, like mad cow disease or the Romaine lettuce contamination. Add the mysterious fires at various food manufacturing plants recently. Where and when did this chicken flu originate? Is it due to a change in feed or raising conditions? I read that they actually add chicken feces into the feed for extra cheap protein and something similar caused mad cow disease. Is it limited to large, factory farms or is it affecting family farms too? Is it affecting poultry overseas?
The food challenges seem to be getting worse – cost of basic food, ingredient shortages, labor shortages, delivery issues, and they don’t seem to be getting better. Eggs are a cheap, healthy, natural protein and used in many dishes, especially baking at holiday time.
People are struggling with the cost of food, and many things that I used to buy now stay on the shelves. It’s not that I can’t afford it, but I can’t support companies that continue to raise costs at this rate. I’ll find a way to make a product myself, instead of purchasing a ready-made version. Well…not eggs…..
How about you, and what are you seeing locally?
Published in General
We finally but the bullet and got some chickens. They are not laying yet but that first egg is going to cost about 2 grand. I was worried when Lola the dog kept sticking her nose through the fence trying to get a chicken snack but the girls peck her nose pretty hard.
Actually, you did. (Anyone remember cranberry contamination back in the 1960s that killed cranberry sauce one Thanksgiving?) It was just so common that it was not new. (We certainly didn’t have a 24-hour news cycle with a voracious appetite for disaster stories.)
The other thing is that agricultural productivity had been growing since the 1960s. That meant food as a fraction of the family budget had been dropping that whole period. Now, thanks to government “improvements” and environmentalists that growth has stopped or even reversed. That means less food, which in turn leaves less margin, which results in wild fluctuations in food availability and prices.
Chicken and swine flus have been around forever. Swine influenza triggered the Great Influenza of 1918-19 and avian flu the 1957 epidemic. (The latter was accompanied by massive rises in poultry and egg prices due to the effect on flocks.)
Where I live they allow you to raise poultry in your back yard. This in a city of 100K+ people. So if you want to . . .
Only $2.00? That’s great! The cost of a dozen eggs here has remained about $3.00 (or above) for the last several months. I can’t remember when they spiked, but I am unable to recall when they were ever below $2.00 this year. And as one of the main staples in our house, it’s been annoying. We share information about where eggs are cheapest like Soviet dissidents sharing samizdat. (“Pssst. Aldi had them for $2.60 today! Pass it on!”)
I am only vaguely aware of reports of bird flu earlier this year, and stories about the govermment coming in and mass slaughtering chickens to keep it from spreading.
I suppose I could look for more news reports, but I’d have to find a good source that wasn’t just repeating the regime narrative. I have a deep sense that they slaughtered millions of healthy chickens, using bird flu as an excuse to create shortages on purpose. Conspiracy theory? Sure, but how many of those have turned out to be true now? 98%?
I’m in Utah now living my last days in a property owned by my daughter. She and her husband have chickens and Longhorns in addition to the thoroughbred racehorses (we don’t eat those) he breeds. We’re good so far for meat and eggs.
An interesting point regarding how they got into having a ranch and raising these animals. He was a pretty good baseball player, cup-a-coffee in the majors, and when he gave that up he tried work that required some office desk-time which he just could not handle. You may guess the diagnosis. So he went solely for these outside activities. My daughter got her CPA license and started with what was then a Big Eight firm and gradually transitioned into consulting, contracting, and real estate sales, so they both found their niche.
The federal government in recent years has been doing everything possible to eliminate the capability for American individuals to do the things that have led to their success. I’m certain the government policies overall, but particularly energy policy, are affecting the food market.
They were both reared in the city.
Was going to buy some at Sam’s Club Saturday afternoon, but they only had “organic” at a high price even for those. So I passed. (They also were out of unsalted butter, which I’ve never seen.)
My local store has a dozen “on sale” for $2.50. Normally (new normal) $3.70.
Crazy, innit? Wasn’t that long ago they were 99 cents at the Kwik Trip, and sometimes on sale for 49 to 79 cents.
I noticed that they just dropped to $2.99 last week.
Propaganda. Chicken farmers care deeply about their flocks. Chickens will naturally peck at poo, their own and that of other animals, looking for undigested particles or insect eggs or worms. Chicken feed is highly regulated by the FDA. Animal byproducts in chicken feed, such as bone meal or fish meal, have to be food grade, not garbage. Animal feed must be free of pathogens. Why on earth would a company jeopardize its reputation and profits by selling shoddy product? Everyone wants to be Upton Sinclair.
One guess.
There are naturally-occurring avian flu viruses in North America, but they are far less virulent than the ones that have come from that other place famous for viruses and wet markets. Sometimes migrating birds bring back viruses that spread to poultry flocks, but that’s not what’s causing this situation. The current virus is labeled HPAI (highly pathogenic avian influenza).
What do people love to do during the holidays? Bake! Egg demand is naturally high right now. Prices will begin to come down soon. If you are a farmer, why are you going to go all out to produce when demand drops? When eggs are $7/dozen, people don’t buy them. There is a natural ebb and flow to supply and demand. More here.
From the linked article (emphasis added):
Eggs jumped to $3.79 last week at Aldi’s and were $6.00/ dozen for regular large at the Shop-n-Save. Shocking.
Butter is $3.79 at Aldi’s over $6 at all other stores.
half&half just jumped to $2.95 at Aldi’s
vegetables reportedly soar 40% (unexpectedly, I am sure…)
Of course, but egg prices have been high all year. Two years ago they were 99 cents/dozen, even less on sale. In September of this year they were $2.49/dozen. That was well before the end-of-year baking extravaganza. So what else is affecting pries besides the demand?
(Note: I’m in the Old North State, so those are the prices here.)
I eat two eggs almost every morning with bacon and sausage, toast and sometimes grits. I consider this my main meal so I really value the eggs that I don’t have to buy in the market. I like the price and they are fresh.
My generation has a reputation for not being wasteful so we rarely throw away any leftover food products. We divide them appropriately and feed the chickens, the dogs and the cat. We also get a shot at venison since my son-in-law usually brings something home from the hunt. To me, he is a very interesting personality having developed all these hunting and ranching attributes after growing up in the city.
Your chickens look like crows.
An aspect of the agricultural productivity gains that @seawriter mentions in comment #2 is that some of that productivity has come through increasing concentration of certain parts of the production process. This has become particularly conspicuous in meat, with relatively few high volume slaughterhouses processing a large portion of the country’s total meat. The risk of concentrated processing points is that a problem at that concentrated processing point disrupts a lot of product. So while efficient when everything’s working, the “supply chain” becomes vulnerable to disruptions.
At the article I linked is the following:
Your consumption of animal products are an egg-stravagance that the World Economic Forum does not condone. You will switch to eating bugs and the various Soylent™ products.
Here are some links for holiday cooking with bugs:
https://eatsens.com/blogs/news/recipes-for-christmas-treats-made-with-cricket-flour
https://www.womansday.com/food-recipes/food-drinks/recipes/a11089/crunchy-insect-brittle-recipe-122447/
Not interested at all.
I remember an episode of The Rifleman, which was set in the 1880s, where Lucas McCain (Chuck Connors) is visited by a federal inspector who finds that his cattle have an infection and must be killed and buried. Presumably that wasn’t all made up, and such things actually happened back then too.
HPAI is affecting waterfowl and other birds and is not confined to the poultry industry. I just returned from a gathering of falconers in Texas, and the numbers of falconers at this annual event (the North American Falconers’ Association’s annual meet) was down because HPAI is highly contagious, and no one wants to risk their birds’ lives by hunting waterfowl – most of those who attended were hunting ground quarry (rabbits and jackrabbits). People who typically flew their birds on waterfowl stayed home.
And the waterfowl and migratory bird populations carry the pathogen to commercial and farm flocks. There was also an outbreak this past spring. Usually hot weather incapacitates the virus, but apparently not this one or this season.
At least we’re not arguing about which came first any more.
That picture is a month or two old. The closer they get to full size the more they look like chickens. When mature they should look like this:
Don’t forget that feed prices rose as fuel prices and fertilizer prices rose. Egg producers have to pass that on. Or close their doors, which constricts supply, too.
Black Australorps?
The original animal purge occurred in the 1990’s, when Imperial college’s boy wonder, Ferguson, did a computer model showing that the disease the English cattle and sheep had could spread and spread and spread, so the only cure was to kill all of these wonderful 4 legged beasts.
Who donates a lot of money to Imperial College? Bill Gates.
Anyway after the English farmers did in their herds, some of them heirloom pedigreed stock that had been carefully traced back for generations, it came out that the computer model was a carelessly done situation and there had been no need at all to do in all the wonderful beasties.
Did Ferguson lose his job as a result? Of course not, as he was probably at Imperial College through the sponsorship of Bill Gates, who was a valued donor and whose wishes are always respected.
So the Bill Gates’ donations continued. (And think about it – if you are a wealthy businessman, and you know ahead of time that most cattle are doomed, is it not likely that you will have your financial people “short” the market on beef and lamb? So this manipulation of the markets and his gambling on these markets continued to make Gates an even wealthier man. And that new wealth enabled Gates to continue to shove donations here, there and everywhere.)
Anyway when I realized that Gates is hell bent on severing the link between humanity and real foods of all sorts, I knew that there would be an avian flu disease coming our way. As after all, Gates has two goals: ending the human race as we know it, and furthering his ability to “short” whatever markets the Ferguson’s of the world tell us must be ended due to the precision of some computer model or other.
same prices I am seeing
that is unbelievable!
yes we are