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Chickens in cages at an industrial egg farm. (Edwin Remsburg/VW Pics/Getty
Images)


THE FRIGHTENING COST OF CHEAP EGGS


WHY PAYING MORE FOR EGGS COULD SAVE US FROM ANOTHER PANDEMIC


BOYCE UPHOLT

FEBRUARY 6, 2023

A few weeks ago, the egg shelves at my local Whole Foods in New Orleans were
nearly empty. A note, citing an egg shortage, limited customers to no more than
two cartons apiece.

Oh no, I thought. It’s back.

Last summer, on a reporting trip for this magazine, I visited a rural Nebraska
county where several chicken farms had been hit by avian influenza. Local
farmers were forced to slaughter nearly a million birds—just one small sliver of
a national massacre. Some 58 million birds were culled throughout 2022.

The disease is carried by migrating waterfowl and was waning during my visit,
since the birds had already passed north in the spring. But the outbreak’s
impact was already clear in supermarket aisles, where the average cost of a
carton increased from $2.05 in March to $3.12 in August. And as the birds winged
south again last fall, the flu returned. Once more, millions of birds were
euthanized. In December, prices hit a record high: $4.25 per dozen, more than
double what consumers were paying a year earlier.

The number of avian flu infections has waned as ducks and geese moved further
south, and by mid-January wholesale prices had dropped by a dollar, which
augured coming price drops for shoppers too. Farmers are slowly restocking their
flocks. Nonetheless, the media has been in an egg frenzy, with stories detailing
everything from cross-border egg smuggling to a boom in backyard chickens. One
farmer in Idaho has apparently found a profitable niche by freeze-drying and
pulverizing his eggs; the powder, which costs about $20 per dozen eggs, lasts
more than two decades. The news cycle hit its nadir last week, when Fox News’s
chief conspiracist, Tucker Carlson, suggested that the Biden administration and
mainstream media were covering up the real causes of the egg shortage: chicken
farms burning down and commercial feed that causes impotence.

Mostly, though, the coverage has pondered one question: Why are eggs so pricey?
The answer is relatively straightforward. Yet the egg panic should be raising
bigger questions: Might this virus jump to humans, and can anything be done to
stop it? These answers are more complicated and may depend on whether we’re
willing to give up cheap eggs.

A note in the egg section of a Whole Foods in San Mateo, California, last month
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

•••

Modern egg farms are less agricultural than sci-fi dystopian. The birds are
stuffed into cages that offer less than a single page of printer paper’s worth
of space; the cages are stacked, row after row, with some facilities housing
more than a million birds. The feed is carefully formulated, the light
deliberately manipulated so that the hens are tricked into churning out as many
eggs as possible.

For an influenza virus, such barns are paradise. Since the chickens have been
engineered to maximize egg production, they’re genetically identical—a buffet of
bodies where disease spreads rapidly. The only option for industrial farmers
after a bird tests positive, then, is to slaughter every single one in the
facility. But the problem goes beyond the size of these cullings. “These birds
are immunologically naïve and act as an enormous amplifier of the virus,”
virologist Michelle Wille told me last summer. “This obviously means that we
have enormous reservoirs for avian influenza ... and increases risk for viral
transmission. It is with this enormous amplification that we see zoonotic
spillover events.”

Mammals generally cannot contract bird flu. Every once in a while, though,
evolution allows for a trans-kingdom leap. The pandemic of 1918—the worst in
modern history, with a mortality rate 30 times higher than Covid’s—happened
after a bird flu virus jumped from Midwestern chicken farms into human
populations. Another scary wave of bird flu hit Hong Kong in 1997, when 18
people were infected and six died, a staggering mortality rate. As I noted in my
investigation for The New Republic last year, this outbreak was likely prompted
by the recent arrival of intensive chicken production in China.

In the years since, the disease has slowly spread across the globe, hitchhiking
in the bodies of wild birds, which often show no symptoms. Leaps into domestic
poultry were rare; the last U.S. outbreak occurred in 2014. But once the virus
hit our farms, it grew more contagious, according to officials from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture. This strengthened virus spread from farm to farm
until, after a then-record 50 million birds were euthanized, the epidemic was
contained.

The current strain of influenza—which has now reached five continents—first hit
the United States last February. It’s morphed again, it seems, and now is
transmitted much more easily from wild birds into domestic poultry. Rather than
farm-to-farm spread, the majority of 2022 cases seem to have been separate
infections from migrating birds.

It seems quite possible, then, that every migratory season our industrial
chicken farms will become oversize petri dishes for a potential superflu. What
makes that particularly scary is that the current strain is already too super.
Far more mammals were infected last year than in 2015, and while federal
authorities suggest that the current virus poses low risk for humans, several
people have tested positive, including one in the U.S. Last month, there was a
dire new milestone: On a Spanish mink farm, the virus proved capable of
spreading from mammal to mammal—a “warning bell,” according to one veterinary
researcher. If the virus learns to spread from human to human, we have another
pandemic on our hands.

•••

The position of the Agriculture Department, as relayed to me by a spokesperson,
is that the “current outbreak has impacted all types of farms, regardless of
size or production style.” The department’s data tells a different story,
though: More than half the deaths occurred at just 20 egg farms, each home to
more than a million laying hens.

It’s not that small farms are immune to this disease. Dozens of tiny flocks have
been hit: backyard collections, mostly, raised by hobbyists who perhaps aren’t
always as cautious as professional farmers, so the birds—or the hobbyists
themselves—wind up walking through infected piles of goose poo. You might think
of a typical “small commercial farm” as having somewhere between 15,000 and
25,000 hens. Several companies, like Vital Farms and Pete and Gerry’s, buy
pasture-raised eggs from such farms to distribute to national retailers. The
USDA data shows that only three farms on this scale have contracted the virus.

Last summer, during my initial reporting on bird flu, I spoke to several farmers
who raise chickens at this scale. One suggested he existed in a kind of
Goldilocks zone: He’s more cautious than backyard growers, but, unlike the big
farms, he does not have low-wage employees coming and going from his facility.
“We have less exposure to wild bird populations, and we have less exposure to
human traffic,” he said. Tom Flocco, the CEO of Pete and Gerry’s, noted that
since the farmers he works with don’t use antibiotics, they already have strict
biosecurity in place. “They walk through their barns and pastures every day,
monitoring the health and well-being of their flocks,” he said. “They aren’t
simply employees at an egg factory; their farms are their livelihood, and they
are deeply invested in the health of their hens.” A food system with many
smaller flocks is also inherently more resilient: Even if Pete and Gerry’s
suffered an outbreak at one farm, the losses would be a tiny fraction of their
overall supply. (So far, none of the company’s farms have been infected, Flocco
said.)

Flocco noted that the retail prices for premium eggs are up 20 percent year over
year, mostly because the cost of feed doubled due to the war in Ukraine.
Conventional eggs, he said, are up 130 percent. That’s helped upend the
economics of the egg industry: Cal-Maine, the country’s largest egg producer,
has been selling its “specialty eggs”—a broad category that includes organic,
pasture-raised, and cage-free eggs, among other labels—to retailers for 50 cents
less per dozen than its conventional product.

•••

But to focus only on grocery-store prices is to miss the full costs of eggs. The
2014–2015 crisis cost the federal government $879 million, including indemnities
paid to chicken companies. According to one estimate, the ripple effects across
the U.S. economy reached $3.3 billion.

This year, with a higher death toll, the government will likely spend more. The
big chicken companies, meanwhile, are doing just fine. Cal-Maine recently
announced record-setting quarterly profits, which has prompted accusations of
price gouging. It does seem fishy that a relatively small drop in egg supply can
drive such huge jumps in price, but the real cause is more likely to be the
unique economics of eggs. This is a staple product with few good substitutes,
which means demand is inelastic; even a small drop in supply forces a big jump
in price before buyer behavior will change. Collusion or not, the outcome is the
same: The spread of bird flu means you spend more in the checkout aisle and more
on tax-funded cleanup, while the big companies reap more profit. What incentive
do they have to quash this disease?

It’s not clear how quashable the virus is anyway. Mike Stepion, a USDA
spokesperson, told me that the best form of protection is keeping wild birds
separate from poultry. Wille, the virologist, agreed—noting that, for obvious
reasons, this is hard to do with pasture-raised birds. The “pasture-raised”
label does allow farmers to move their birds into barns for their safety, and
Flocco said Pete and Gerry’s has asked farmers to do so whenever there is a
nearby outbreak. That will inevitably happen more in the coming years.

If less dense flocks can help prevent spillover, it strikes me as a practice
worth pursuing. Since my trip to Nebraska, I’ve been buying eggs I know come
from smaller flocks. They typically cost me around $7 per dozen—a steal, by my
math, if it means preventing a pandemic on the scale of Covid-19, which cost the
U.S. an estimated $16 trillion.

Rapid change is possible, as recent history shows. In 2015, just 6 percent of
egg-laying hens in the U.S. lived cage-free; within five years, thanks to a wave
of legal bans, nearly a third of the national laying flock was raised outside a
cage. To stop a pandemic, we’ll have to go further, but it shouldn’t mean
everyone pays $7 per carton. Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of the
nonprofit Farm Forward, pointed out that the current prices are due to markup.
With conventional eggs providing a cheap alternative, grocery stores can
artificially raise the prices of ethically raised eggs—often charging more than
twice what they pay to the egg companies, he said, according to the figures he’s
seen.

“Yes, giving animals access to pasture or raising breeds of chickens with more
robust immune systems costs more, but it doesn’t cost 3x more [than conventional
practices],” deCoriolis wrote to me. “Reducing pandemic risk in the poultry
industry will increase the price of products, but we don’t really know by how
much because so few companies raise animals in these conditions, and those that
do … haven’t reached meaningful economies of scale.”

We may not be able know the true price of such eggs, then, until we make such
conditions mandatory. But it’s a safe bet that they’ll be far cheaper than one
more global catastrophe.

Boyce Upholt@boyceupholt

BOYCE UPHOLT WON THE 2019 AWARD FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING FROM THE JAMES BEARD
FOUNDATION. HE’S WORKING ON A BOOK ABOUT THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER.


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