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.
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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.
- 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.
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.
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?