Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

The egg price is due to the H5N1 epidemics, which also means that this is the least indicated time to get a backyard chicken. The US should have dropped battery caging, like the rest of the world did 15 years ago.

Is H5N1 the cause of current egg prices, or an excuse? From the article:

Egg prices may be impacted for reasons beyond the scarcity of laying hens due to bird flu. Farm Action, a farmer-led advocacy group, has written to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, requesting an investigation into “potential monopolization and anticompetitive coordination” by the egg industry. “While avian flu has been cited as the primary driver of skyrocketing egg prices, its actual impact on production has been minimal,” the group wrote. “Instead, dominant egg producers . . . have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power.

> The egg price is due to the H5N1 epidemic

No, it's not. But that's what the egg companies want you to believe. In truth the number of egg laying hens is only down about 5% total since the beginning of the epidemic.

You don't know the elasticity of the market. I can imagine restaurants, food producers and consumers are very eager to get their weekly box of eggs. So even a 5% drop can cause a price jump that's way more.

I wonder if spreading the chickens out to all the backyards would prevent spread due to lower density, or if you'd get spread via wild animals anyhow and now it's just impossible to contain and more people are at direct risk.

Same epidemic in Japan, egg shortages have been. A thing but the prices have hardly changed ?

California, which dropped battery caging years ago, has been on of the states most hard hit. The real reason is that the US doesn't vaccinate it's chickens, which it mostly doesn't do because if it did, it couldn't export to several countries.

Can you tell more ? Why does vaccination prevents export ?

You do realize that a lot of people don't buy the H5N1 epidemic thing, right?

Certainly easy to perpetuate insane conspiracy theories like this when the anti-science administration is no longer collecting stats on infectious diseases.

Actually we do sort of know from the 2014-15 avian flu. In the 2014-15 avian flu, a 12 percent decrease of egg-laying hens was accompanied by a 220% price increase in 2014-15:

- https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-... - https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2015/06/economic-implicati...

Compare that to the current epidemic in which a 5 percent decrease of egg-laying hens is accompanied by a 600%+ price increase.

> Most U.S. trading partners won't accept exports from countries that allow vaccinations due to concerns that vaccines can mask the presence of the virus.

For what it's worth, America also bans vaccinated poultry imports. There were talks by the USDA to relax the ban when it comes to live animals, but I don't know if it passed.

Only France in Europe vaccinate its chicken yet we still have normal prices. This is not the issue but merely the fact that 70% of chicken in the USA are battery caged plus a protectionist market that does not allow imports.

https://images.app.goo.gl/7B83ooqdAcKRdqoj6

It certainly would but still it would have to be a controlled and regulated environment. I honestly would not want to have chicken near me in this particular moment especially considering who is the secretary of health. The USA really are playing with fire.

Oh FFS the conspiracy of the egg companies it's a new low.

160M chickens were found affected so far. More culled.

https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/data-map-comm...

Most chicken in the USA are raised for meat. There are only 300 millions that are raised for eggs laying so those numbers are staggering.

The size of the EGG LAYING population of chickens is only down 5% since the beginning of the epidemic.

160M chickens with "more culled" is not correct. 115M of those affected have been culled.

Furthermore it doesn't make sense to talk about absolute numbers culled over the course of years when the rate of replenishment of the egg layers is on a shorter time horizon (chicks grow to egg laying maturity in just a few months, which is why we saw a total recovery from the 2015 avian flu in just eight months). That's why it makes more sense to do a year to year comparison of the size of the egg laying population.

If your theory is that the bird flu has decimated the egg laying hen population and therefore egg production is down a staggering amount, answer the following question and decide whether the number is staggering:

How many eggs were produced in Jan 2021? How many eggs were produced in Jan 2025?

10% of all egg laying chickens in the US have been lost due to H5N1. And people will still pay $8 for a dozen eggs instead of eating something else for a few months, so of course there are record profits.