Why are grocery store Eggs so expensive?
This question has made it to the headlines of many a news story lately and the reporters explanation is always: Avian Flu has ravaged the poultry industry over the past few years causing a decline in our national poultry numbers causing a nationwide egg shortage. And yes that is the reason or rather the beginning of the reason…well not really the beginning, first lets look briefly at why the avian flu has caused so much damage to our egg supply in the first place. Then we will see what large corporations have been doing to turn an unfortunate situation into one that reaps unheard of profits at the expense of the general public.
According to new reports 20 million poultry have died in the last quarter in the United States! That is a staggering number of animals! Let clarify a few things here:
1. Avian flu is a highly pathogenic virus that as far as we know is spread by wild birds (this is why its all over the planet and so hard to control because birds migrate all the time).
2. Since the virus is so highly contagious the USDA has put into law that any flock with a positive case must be EXTERMINATED immediately. So the reality is that the actual bird flu has not killed this many birds, it is the USDA’s policy that has killed this many birds. (whether or not this is a good policy is another topic for another time)
3. 90% or so of all eggs today are produced in industrial aviary egg complexes. A single complex can consist of 15 buildings and contain up to 350,000 chickens per building! So that is up to 5,250,000 chickens at one location!! Think the biggest multi story prison complex that you have ever imagined…yes I said 5 million birds!
4. 5 egg companies in the US own 99 MILLION laying hens. The Largest of those companies Cal Maine owning a staggering 33.5 million of those birds.
Ok I think you now have enough information to start piecing this puzzle together on your own but lets just lay it all out there. 1 Complex (you cannot call these a farm) houses up to 5 million birds. That means 1 chicken sneezes and the USDA swoops in and Exterminates 5 million birds overnight! Oh by the way to kill this many birds all you have to do is turn the ventilation system off and they are all dead within 3 hours…the USDA frowns upon this method so they recommend a much more “humane” method of spraying them with a thick foam that suffocates the birds more quickly. Ok so 5 million down, now all we need are 3 more chickens to sneeze in 3 more complexes and boom in just a few months our national poultry population has plummeted down 20 Million birds! I really don’t think we could find a better example anywhere of how our incredibly efficient modern industrial agriculture system is unbelievably vulnerable and fragile, not to mention the absolute horrors that the animals inside and the workers at these facilities experience! Could you imagine if your job was foaming 5 million chickens to death before you go home to have dinner with your family? One last note on the topic of how these birds actually contract and spread this virus so rapidly. Think about the common flu or covid for example in humans. Now imagine you are living in a high rise that has no walls with a measly 350,000 other people (that’s way more than the population of Chattanooga by the way). What do you think would happen if one of those people got the flu or covid? How have we come to the conclusion that it would be any different with animals? Ok I’m going to stop there…my feathers are getting too ruffled.
Now we all know exactly how we lost so many birds which has caused the national egg shortage which has triggered egg prices to skyrocket…because supply and demand, right? Wait what??? Why is it so easy to shrug off price increases of 200% as supply and demand? Why is nobody even mentioning the fact that maybe these monopoly egg producers should be held accountable for their own grievous mistakes? These companies have completely and totally screwd up up and instead of tucking their tails and admitting this to their shareholders and saying we better figure out a better model to avoid this in the future, instead they go to the board meeting with a grin on their faces and say: let me tell you, we have an opportunity to make more profit than ever in the history of our company because SUPPLY AND DEMAND BABY!!! Lets open some champagne because we are about to burn this house down with record profits!! ***please note I was not at that board meeting but I’m guessing it went something pretty similar to this.***. Don’t take my word for it…according to the NASDAQ report Cal Maines quarterly statement reflects a 42% increase in shareholder value at a whopping $219 million dollar profit with a total quarterly revenue increase of 82% reaching $954 million the very same quarter that we lost 20 million hens to bird flu. How About That??
This is the news story that I would like to hear: Egg prices surge due to malpractice and horrid conditions in Egg production facilities causing infectious disease to spread rampantly. Industry Leaders such as Cal Maine are being held responsible and are facing multi billion dollar settlements that will be reinvested in more responsible and regenerative farming applications that provide solutions to the problems that agriculture faces today.
Yes I know we cant just end this way of producing eggs immediately because people will starve or become malnourished if they don’t have access to bacon egg and cheese Mcmuffins 24/7, 365. So lets look into longer term solutions that we can begin to implement immediately. Here’s an idea: we decentralize the industrialized monopolized food system and support models of agriculture that are cooperative and diverse. What if instead of one facility with 5 million birds we have one thousand family farms with 5,000 hens each, these birds of course will live outdoors because that is how they naturally stay happy and healthy and that’s what’s good for the environment and in the mean time we just produced thousands of enjoyable agricultural jobs in the process and spread the profits more evenly between operations rather than one large company. If one chicken sneezes on one of these farms and the USDA somehow catches wind of it then 5,000 chickens are exterminated instead of 5 million chickens. Who’s with me on this concept? Do you think its possible? I think its totally possible myself but not without a massive paradigm shift in the way that we as a people think about food production and not without these mega food producing corporations being held accountable. See you at the farmers market!
-Kelsey