Eggs US – Price – Chart

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.

And the reason why it spreads so well is still concentrated industrial farming.

No, that's simply not true. It's being spread by wild birds, not concentrated farming.

I know people love to blame "big anything", but it's just not true here.

Here's a source:

https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/virus-transmission/avian-in-bir...

"Domesticated birds (chickens, turkeys, ducks, etc.) may become infected with avian influenza A viruses through direct contact with infected waterfowl or other infected poultry, or through contact with surfaces that have been contaminated with the viruses."

"Domesticated chickens may become infected by wild waterfowl or by other infected poultry", and other infected poultry includes domesticated chickens. Nowhere in that web page does it say that domesticated chickens cannot spread it to other domesticated chickens. Once a domesticated chicken becomes infected (however it became infected) in a massive concentrated area, it will spread that infection to other domesticated chickens. You're conflating "spreading across chicken farms by flight" with "spreading within chicken farms by already infected chickens" and saying the first is true so therefore the second can be.

So you're suggesting there's some other viable model of egg production that would deliver eggs at 2021 prices? People want cheap eggs. Saying, "well if we just adopted a decentralized, more resource intensive model we wouldn't have problems with bird flu" doesn't address that concern.

I'm not conflating it. Spread with Avian flu means to other places. A single chicken in a farm means ALL chickens will get it. That's such a trivial thing, it's not even worth noting.

What matters is how does it spread.

I think what's confusing you is that there are diseases where a single infected animal does NOT mean all animals will get it, and in those cases the more concentrated the farm the higher percent of other animals will get it.

That exists. But it's not the case here. Here it's 100%, doesn't matter if it's a concentrated farm, or a pastoral farm with chickens walking in the house.

I think it was Food, Inc, a documentary from a number of years ago. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms talks about factory farming and Salatin often argues that industrial farming is not necessarily more cost-effective and that his method is both profitable and environmentally sustainable.

People want lots of things to be cheap but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. Here in the mid-Atlantic we’ve seen the same thing others mention: the local, non-factory farms prices haven’t changed in years but the supermarket stuff went from being cheaper to more expensive.

The theory that optimizing for the lowest price might other negative effects isn’t exactly novel: we’ve seen that in many other areas, and if you’ve ever been anywhere near a factory farm it’s enough to put you off of eating eggs.