“H5N1 has not been spiking the Mexican chicken industry because Mexico vaccinates its birds. This has a certain up-front cost, but it also means they don’t need to do flock-wide cullings any time a bird tests positive” [1].
I don’t think we need to vaccinate all our chickens. But we clearly need to vaccinate a resilient core to stabilise egg prices.
(The author also said “Americans in border states were driving to Mexico to buy eggs and bringing them back home,” nothing that “this is illegal, so please don’t do it.” Egg prices, like housing prices, are a policy choice. Not an act of god. In the case of eggs, we favour protecting domestic production over consumer prices.)
Perfect time to build chicken coop. Also eggs price is increasing globally witch is not good.
I've noticed a fun split among people I know—those who grew up on a farm will move heaven and earth never to deal with chickens again, while people who grew up in cities or suburbs are really into the idea.
Didn't grow up with chickens, but have had them for 8 years now. Easiest pet I've ever owned, and they provide eggs. Haven't seen a weed in the yard in years. They'll decimate a garden bed, though.
question: why hasn't this had a side effect of raising food prices in general? a significant percentage of foodstuffs involve eggs.
It certainly has. Raw chicken has noticeably gone up in price as well, and poultry is completely unavailable at some retailers.
But a lot of restaurants in my area have been price gouging under the guise of “inflation, it’s out of our control” and have much more room to absorb price increases, to a point.
I built a chicken coop, mostly as a hobby, and the eggs were a bonus. the 1,000 in materials for the structure and 25 bucks a month in food and bedding make that amortization table go out a couple of decades before you see ROI. I joke that they are the most expensive organic eggs you can buy. ;)
That $800 first egg... 10 years back, we were getting eggs at something like 25c/egg in feed costs. But we had a bunch of birds that only laid every 2 or 3 days, so they were no where near as efficient as a first year dedicated layer. OTOH, they all had names, we had most of the egg colors, and the bantam eggs were so cute. And the one hen that basically only laid double yolkers.
Double yolkers are my favorite, always a pleasant surprise!
Anyone serious about middle-class spending has been laser-focused on healthcare. It’s a luxury to ponder egg prices.
Everyone has to buy food. Eggs are (generally) an inexpensive animal product, and people in the US generally buy animal products.
It’s a much stronger argument to say that anyone who sits down to do their household finances, blithely passes over their health insurance and worries about eggs must be buying thousands per month. In terms of GDP, health spending is 3x all agriculture.
What's going on with eggs in the US? The whole world had high inflation after Covid, so that's not US-specific, but eggs tripling in price? That is extreme. I don't think my (Dutch, free-range organic) eggs went up more than 25%.
Bird flu, made worse by concentrated farming of chickens. Those operations are basically disease factories and some bird flus come from them.
That's actually not true.
Bird flu comes from wild birds, not factory farming. Chickens get it when wild birds land near them due to free range laws.
The solution (possibly temporary) is to confine the chickens in sealed buildings so they can't contact the wild birds.
Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper. This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.
Yes. Vital Farm eggs. Been $8 a dozen for a long time. No change in price. What we're seeing are the consequences of factory farming and not treating animals like the living beings they are.
> It would be very uncharitable to extrapolate that to "the people joking about eggs don't care about working-class people". I put it to you that the conservative opposition and bigots are very uncharitable at the outset, in interpretation of messaging from the other side. In this case they didn't have to do any work, it was literally said for them. Don't forget that working people and moderates are the ones you need…
> If people didn't change their votes, election outcomes would always be the same. This is only true if the composition of the electorate never changes, which of course it does: people become, and stop being, eligible voters all timhe time, and those that remain eligible change constituencies. Even if each individual’s voting behavior was constant, election results would change all the time.
Of course it changes. Just not that quickly. We went from Biden to Trump: do you want to explain that with electoral composition?
How does cage free make this worse? The supply shortages are coming from avian flu in every report I have heard.
Well, that'd depend on the law's definition of a cage but it's a hell of a lot easier to protect chickens that are fully enclosed vs those that are free range.
This is a very wrong interpretation of a cage. Cages are matrices of 3 cubic foot volumes with a few pieces of wire separating them. All but the top row are toilets.
Edit: the toilet thing is what I've seen for transport in open-trucks. For most of their lives they're just crammed horizontally.
Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper. This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.
> they are now often cheaper...increase the resilience of the system as a whole cheaper and resilience are not proportional here. in fact, cheaper is proportional to efficient, which large producers are better at (apart from questions of healthiness, etc). i can't argue against resilience though, although that comes at a cost. speaking as a backyard-chicken-raiser of some years.
"Cheaper" varies by the costs of the various inputs. A local chicken farmer which sells to a local market has, aside from the costs of the land, chickens, feed, and labor, the costs of putting the eggs in a truck and driving the truck to the market. Larger distributors have the cost of collecting the eggs, driving them to a warehouse, storing them, potentially repeating that while optimizing inventory and locality, and then driving them to the market. The cost of gas, labor, electricity, and a variety of other factors can dramatically swing the cost calculations. Combined with the noted lack of resiliency in the system - the multiple additional logistical steps, the multiple points of failure in the system, the larger blast radius of those failures - and the "larger is more efficient is cheaper" calculus isn't quite as cut and dry, as we've seen over the last couple years.