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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
Yes
They are nice birds – my husband and I had a few of them over the years before we moved to our current home.
Actually, you would go “long” if you knew future supply would be tight.
Shell shock.
🤦🤦🤦
Am I the only one to see the pun in egg supplies “crate-r-ing?”
Not to mention the rest of the shelves – like why have chips doubled while the bag shrinks? It’s anything but the eggs were a shocker this week.
Animals, like humans get diseases and die. That’s pretty basic, but there is something new here as well and I think it is related to what is also destroying the country. Reality is complex, diseases always appear, mutate and spread until we figure them out or adjust to them. Figuring them out and adjusting, fighting them defending ourselves from sick chickens or kids, has to begin immediately and at the bottom. By the time the top pays attention and figures them out, we’ve already seen huge damage and are way behind. There is one simple reason the US was more successful than any country before it. We were bottom up, on purpose and designed a system that kept it that way for most of our history. Disease is just another reason top down can’t work in the most complex developed country in history. The top is run by humans and is too much for them, even if they were uniquely focused on something other than their own interests, but they’re just humans and that’s the way we are.