Egg prices have risen again as the bird flu outbreak coincides with a surge in demand for the holiday baking season.
But prices are still far from the last peak they reached almost two years ago. The American Egg Board, a trade group, says egg shortages in grocery stores have so far been isolated and temporary.
“These errors are corrected quickly, sometimes within a day,” said Emily Metz, Egg Board President and CEO.
The average price of a dozen eggs in U.S. cities was $3.37 in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This represents a slight decrease from September, and a significant decrease from January 2023, when the average price rose to $4.82. But they are up 63 percent from October 2023, when a dozen eggs cost an average of $2.07.
Sometimes, supermarkets may be responsible for higher prices. During testimony in August in an FTC case seeking to block Kroger’s merger with Albertsons, Kroger’s senior pricing manager admitted that the company had raised the cost of milk and eggs beyond inflation levels.
But there are other factors behind the high prices. The egg industry sees its highest demand in November and December, for example, Metz said.
“You can’t have your holiday baking, your pumpkin pie, your filling, without eggs,” she said.
Bird flu is another big reason for the price hike. The current bird flu outbreak, which began in February 2022, has led to the slaughter of more than 111 million birds, most of them laying hens. Any time the virus is found, every bird on the farm is euthanized to limit the spread of the disease.
More than six million birds have been slaughtered this month alone due to bird flu. They were a relatively small portion of the total U.S. egg-laying flock of 377 million hens. However, flock numbers have declined by about three percent over the past year, contributing to a four percent decline in egg production, according to the USDA.
The latest wave of bird flu is disrupting cage-free egg supplies because California has been among the hardest-hit states. California, Nevada, Washington and Oregon require eggs sold in their states to be cage-free.
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“We have to move eggs from other areas of the country that produce cage-free eggs to cover this low supply in those states, because those states only allow cage-free eggs to be sold,” Metz said.
Cage-free requirements are scheduled to take effect in Arizona, Colorado and Michigan next year and in Rhode Island and Utah in 2030.
The demand for such special eggs may also contribute to the spread of bird flu, which is spread through the droppings of wild birds as they migrate across farms. Allowing chickens to roam more freely puts them at greater risk, said Chad Hart, a professor and agricultural economist at Iowa State University.
“It’s really difficult to control this interaction between domesticated birds and wild birds,” Hart said. “Some of these vectors have opened because we are asking the egg industry to produce in ways we have never asked them before.”
Climate change and extreme weather are also throwing some wild birds off course, Metz said.
She said: “We have birds that have been displaced by hurricanes and forest fires, and these birds are now spreading in areas where they may not roam or at times of the year where they may not roam.” “These are all new variables that our farmers are having to deal with.”
The egg industry is trying to rebuild the flock, but that can also limit supplies, as farmers have to save some eggs for new chickens to hatch, Hart said.
However, there is still some good news for American poultry farms. The price of chicken feed – which accounts for 70 percent of farm costs – has fallen significantly after doubling between 2020 and 2022, Hart said.
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
