Egg prices are rising once again due to a persistent outbreak of bird flu coincides with the high demand of the holiday baking season.
But prices are still far from the recent peak they reached almost two years ago. And the American Egg Board, a trade group, says egg shortages at grocery stores have so far been isolated and temporary.
“These are quickly fixed, sometimes within a day,” said Emily Metz, president and CEO of the Egg Board.
The average price of a dozen eggs in U.S. cities was $3.37 in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a slight drop from September and a significant drop from January 2023, when the average price jumped to $4.82. But that’s a 63% increase from October 2023, when a dozen eggs cost an average of $2.07.
Sometimes supermarkets can be responsible for price gouging. While testifying in August in the Federal Trade Commission’s case to block Kroger’s merger with Albertsons, Kroger’s senior pricing director acknowledged that the company had raised the cost of milk and eggs beyond inflation levels.
But there are other factors behind the price rise. Metz said the egg industry sees its highest demand in November and December, for example.
“You can’t cook your holiday baking, your pumpkin pie, your stuffing without eggs,” she said.
Bird flu is another important reason for the price hike. The current avian flu epidemic which began in February 2022 has led to the culling of more than 111 million birds, mainly laying hens. Whenever the virus is detected, all birds on a farm are killed to limit the spread of the disease.
More than six million birds have been culled this month due to bird flu. They made up a relatively small portion of the total 377 million laying hens in the United States. Still, the herd declined about 3 percent from last year, contributing to a 4 percent decline in egg production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The latest wave of bird flu is weakening supplies of free-range eggs as California is among the hardest-hit states. California, Nevada, Washington and Oregon all require eggs sold in their states to be from cages.
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“We need to move eggs from other areas of the country that produce cage-free eggs to cover the low supply in those states, because those states only allow the sale of cage-free eggs,” Metz said.
Cage-free requirements are expected to take effect in Arizona, Colorado and Michigan next year, and in Rhode Island and Utah in 2030.
Demand for these special eggs could also contribute to bird flu, which is spread through the droppings of wild birds as they migrate past farms. Allowing chickens to move 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 domestic birds and wild birds,” Hart said. “Some of these vectors have been opened up because we’re asking the egg industry to produce in a way that we weren’t asking them to produce before.”
Metz said climate change and extreme weather are also causing some wild birds to veer off course.
“We have birds that have been displaced by hurricanes, by wildfires, and these birds are now circulating in areas where they would not otherwise circulate or at times of the year where they would not otherwise circulate,” he said. she declared. “And these are all new variables that our farmers have to deal with. »
Hart said the egg industry is trying to replenish the flock, but that can also limit supplies because farmers have to hold back some eggs to give birth to new hens.
However, there is good news regarding poultry farms in the United States. The price of chicken feed – which accounts for 70% of a farmer’s costs – has fallen significantly after doubling between 2020 and 2022, Hart said.