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Eggs US – Price – Chart

(tradingeconomics.com)
643 points throwaway5752 | 3 comments | 05 Feb 25 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.64s | source
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mplanchard ◴[05 Feb 25 16:43 UTC] No.42951168[source]▶
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.

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afavour ◴[05 Feb 25 16:54 UTC] No.42951379[source]▶
This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.
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SketchySeaBeast ◴[05 Feb 25 16:58 UTC] No.42951470[source]▶
Really raises the question - should vital infrastructure, like food production, be built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency? Have things swung too far in one direction?
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epistasis ◴[05 Feb 25 17:22 UTC] No.42951902[source]▶
> built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency

I think framing it as an either/or is a bit of a mental trap. They are sometimes in opposition, sometimes not.

For example, those farms which were not resilient are not maximizing their profits, since they've had more than a year of warning of avian flu. They were operating to minimize work and costs, not maximize profit, and they are losing out on a ton of it right now.

Those operations which built with resilience, or got lucky, are swimming in profits right now.

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1. mlyle ◴[05 Feb 25 17:32 UTC] No.42952069[source]▶
I don’t think of it this way. I think the conventional producers were acting to maximize expected profits at the cost of increased volatility in outcomes. Most years these practices have been more profitable.
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2. bluGill ◴[05 Feb 25 18:06 UTC] No.42952626[source]▶
Conventional producers have been working to contain things like this for year. They don't all succeed, but this isn't the first time eggs have got expensive because of a bird flu, and they have been paying attention to what works. They don't remodel all barns at once to fix the issues, but they have been remodeling barns over the years to prevent this issue.
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3. mlyle ◴[05 Feb 25 18:21 UTC] No.42952855[source]▶
> Conventional producers have been working to contain things like this for years.

Sure. My point is, what optimizes for average production and profits doesn't necessarily optimize for worst case production and profits. There is a level of care that doesn't pay off most of the time.