US egg prices increased 22% in 2025 and 202% in 12 months

Actually the inconvenient truth is that it's not.

Free range birds are able to interact and spread the disease more easily than the caged birds which can be quarantined. At least in my location all the cage free inventory is totally wiped out.

Totally agree with this. After selling my last company (iCracked W12) I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables. I've always wanted to build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture and we decided to start with chickens. I have been raising chickens for 15 years and automating my coops with Arduino's, automatic doors, cameras for computer vision, etc.

We spent 2 years building and designing a AI / smart coop and it's been a fascinating company to be able to build. We've trained our computer vision model on around 25 million videos and have gotten extremely good at doing specific predator detection, egg alerts, remote health monitoring, specific chickens in a coop and behaviors etc. We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback. If you're interested in seeing what we're doing we're at www.TheSmartCoop.com

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?

Profit of course! And only short term profit! Don’t want any of you eggheads trying to constrain profit to the goal of not killing all our customers!

Bird flu has 95% lethality in chickens and takes ~48 hours to kill. It's not like they can get away with ignoring it. Testing happens when you wake up and half your birds are already dead.

That said OP is asserting local costs haven't changed without evidence. Even if that were true (and I don't think it is- local farms are also being hit hard eg duck farming in NY) it probably speaks far more to small operations having a harder time changing their prices. Or the cheap eggs are just places who haven't been hit yet.

Depends on where you're at. I mentioned in my last comment that bird flu is killing snow geese nesting near me. It's also infecting crows. The snow geese are not likely to interact with backyard chickens but the crows absolutely will.

The local farms here at least are being really cautious about testing and isolation. Many of them sell their eggs to the local grocery stores, so they are bound to the same standards as other eggs.

I don’t see what benefit they would gain by not testing, anyway: if their flock is infected and a significant portion of the birds die, they are going to lose revenue the same way a massive egg producer would. If anything, I’d imagine them to want to be more cautious, since they have fewer eggs in their basket as it were (fewer total chickens).

I've been paying almost $11 for them.

I guess I don't see why local farmers _wouldn't_ raise their prices to maintain their premium above store-bought eggs. They certainly have around here.

Meanwhile in Ireland, I can get a tray of 30 free range for 8 eur at a vending machine on the dog walk. Or 15 for 4.50.

Lidl is maybe marginally cheaper, prices there have gone up maybe 20% in a year.

its 3-4$ at trader joes - still 8ish in WholeFoods in Michigan

The free range eggs at Aldi in PA are ~$5.30/doz vs ~$6.50/doz for the normal eggs. Might be cheaper than normal.

"Cheaper" varies by the costs of the various inputs. A local chicken farmer which sells to a local market has, aside from the costs of the land, chickens, feed, and labor, the costs of putting the eggs in a truck and driving the truck to the market. Larger distributors have the cost of collecting the eggs, driving them to a warehouse, storing them, potentially repeating that while optimizing inventory and locality, and then driving them to the market. The cost of gas, labor, electricity, and a variety of other factors can dramatically swing the cost calculations. Combined with the noted lack of resiliency in the system - the multiple additional logistical steps, the multiple points of failure in the system, the larger blast radius of those failures - and the "larger is more efficient is cheaper" calculus isn't quite as cut and dry, as we've seen over the last couple years.

Sorry I’m not sure I follow your point. I’m saying that given the current situation with bird flu, the local eggs are often less expensive at my grocery store.

I’m not saying that they are less expensive to produce or that they will remain less expensive at the store during normal times. However, paying the extra costs during normal times means those farms stay in business, which means I can still get eggs for the same price right now as I can in normal times.

They are still here in Vermont!

I hope this bird flu thing is a push for other places to re-establish demand for local eggs and chickens. As someone else pointed out, it’s also a great opportunity to push your local legislators to allow backyard chickens.

It's apparently an API, although it's both difficult to find, and apparently only available through an email request to Albertsons. The website is here:

https://www.albertsonscompanies.com/amc/

The email request is at the bottom. mediacollective at albertsons

Trump's last administration drew on a NOAA hurricane map with a sharpie to try to convince people he was not wrong about a hurricane path. Changing data is his style.

AFAIK, free-range and cage free are not heavily regulated terms like organic, which is a registered and trademark enforced term. At best they just mean the hens have a bit more room to move around. Neither of them actually mean there is no cage.

It's why we see "pasture raised" as the more premium marketing term. It still doesn't mean much without looking into the specific farm.

Do you mean cage-free hen regulation? This statewide regulation has been in effect since 2022.

Im oretty sure thats TJs fault, they regularly run out of eggs for years now if you go at the wrong time

I'm in NorthCal, they usually have some supply in the first few hours of opening

Y'all are getting hosed. The Whole Foods ones around here (upstate NY) are $4.19/dozen as of today.

It increases the cost of egg production which shifts the supply curve left raising the market clearing price. If it were cheaper then all egg producers would be doing it.

Could be that normally this wouldn't have caused much shortage or price increase, but that in conjunction with avian flu it escalated.

Well, that'd depend on the law's definition of a cage but it's a hell of a lot easier to protect chickens that are fully enclosed vs those that are free range.

It's another requirement to comply with. More work for the producer == higher cost for the consumer.

I think the most brutal thing is when the male chicks are immediately sent into a shredder damn. Out of sight out of mind

That's where I can be a proponent of lab-grown meat without consciousness

Monopolies have no incentive to lower prices.

I have lost 2 flocks of chickens to a combination of raccoons, foxes, and skunks. Interestingly enough none of those could kill my turkeys - they are big enough to fight them off I guess. They don't lay as many eggs though.

It is a lot of work, but after my last group was killed off 2 months I have not impressed by store eggs, so I'm planning on re-enforcing my coop so I can get another group of them soon.

yes. i have a flock and the feed alone puts a doz at $3.

the labor is somewhat enjoyable and the chickens are incredible child-leftover disposal machines. but when you factor infrastructure and labor youll probably never recoup your “investment” in eggs.

for anyone dealing with land predators, get electric poultry net. it’s magic.

That $800 first egg...

10 years back, we were getting eggs at something like 25c/egg in feed costs. But we had a bunch of birds that only laid every 2 or 3 days, so they were no where near as efficient as a first year dedicated layer. OTOH, they all had names, we had most of the egg colors, and the bantam eggs were so cute. And the one hen that basically only laid double yolkers.

Health does not have a price.

Owners of coops know how different are those organic eggs. Totally diffrent color of yolks, also they have totally different smell when they are cooked.

Having dealt with my share of pig shit, chicken sheet and cow shit, I can assure you that chicken shit is the worst.

Didn't grow up with chickens, but have had them for 8 years now. Easiest pet I've ever owned, and they provide eggs. Haven't seen a weed in the yard in years. They'll decimate a garden bed, though.

My neighbor kept chickens in their backyard which caused issues in my yard with parasites and other pests. So it isn't even a PITA that you can contain to yourself.

I've only ever tried one brand. It's the only brand my local grocery store carries. It's a yellow carton with black writing, if that helps. I'm too lazy to go walk into the kitchen at the moment though.

It's not a strictly defined term, in the UK people generally mean lacto-ovo-vegetarian by it (they will eat eggs and milk) but many combinations are possible and what's most common varies geographically - in India for example it would generate taken to mean lacto-vegetarian (milk, no eggs).

Wikipedia has a nice table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Varieties

Yes.

Vegetarians don’t eat meat (including fish, although some religious sects have a marketing deal with fishermen to count fish as a vegetable for some reason), do eat animal products.

Vegans don’t eat meat and also don’t eat animal products.

The usage of the term "vegetarian" in the US is not consistent enough to come up with a precise definition, probably due to the mixture of so many cultures bringing their variation and translations. So it's always good to clarify on particular food items in my experience. Some will consider eggs part of a vegetarian diet, others will be practically offended at the ridiculousness of the idea.

Eggs are definitely a grey area for vegetarians, to the point where vegetarians will describe ovo-lacto-vegetarians where they are ok with eggs (and animal milk) whereas others aren't.

Technically since they're not meat and aren't born, but they're not vegan or ethical. The treatment of hens is inhumane.

Some vegetarians make exceptions for eggs, but I wouldn't call it "vegetarian" personally. You do you though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism

Just fyi the whole "vegan foods are full of toxins and chemicals" is mostly nonsense pushed by the dairy and beef industries. They've spent a lot of money paying fitness, alt-right, and trad-wife influencers to push nonsense about vegan foods.

The one I love is the "there will be mass famine" if everyone goes vegan narrative that meat-heavy eaters like to talk about.

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.

That's because chickens raised for meat don't live long enough to be affected.

A second reason is because chickens get sick by contact with wild bids, due to free range laws for egg laying chickens.

Meat chickens don't go outside, they are kept in large barns, although without the pens and egg collection of their egg laying sisters. So they are not affected.