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Eggs cost $9.70 in San Diego, but a few dollars across the border in Mexico. The price difference is so compelling that people have taken to smuggling eggs and even live chickens across the border. Egg prices in Southern California are so high that there are signs that drug cartels and gangs are starting to smuggle eggs along with their usual cargoes of drugs.
Eggs cost around $6 in Chicago, but around $4 US across the border in Canada. In the past half year, 3,768 ‘poultry and bird’ products were intercepted at the Canadian border. Reportedly more eggs than fentanyl are being seized by customs coming down to America.
Why are eggs cheaper in Canada and Mexico than in America?
One reason is that Mexico and Canada have culled chickens on a smaller scale than we have. Mexico began vaccinating its chickens in the 90s and doesn’t cull chickens unless the outbreak is severe, while the Biden administration wiped out huge numbers of chickens with little pretext.
“The Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said back in January.
The actual number is now over 150 million when including ducks, turkeys and other birds.
The mass cullings haven’t stopped the spread of bird flu. Ever since the Biden administration launched that policy in 2022, the virus is now present in every state and the cullings actually helped infect human workers who handled the disposal of millions of dead chickens.
Bird flu is primarily spread by migrating wildfowl, but environmentalists refuse to allow the mass killing of wild birds, and prefer the idea of wiping out farms instead. Mass culling, while devastating to farms, still looks more profitable because farmers receive compensation for culled birds, but not ones that die of natural causes, making culling seem like a safer bet.
The government has paid out over $1 billion to compensate for culled birds. And the vast majority of the birds in question may not have needed to be culled in the first place.
While bird flu is devastating smaller farmers, a tight circle of major egg producers has taken home over $250 million in culling payments, while consolidating the market and raising egg prices. The Justice Department is now investigating some of these companies for price-fixing. Some of these companies previously faced similar accusations. But the real issues with the effect of market consolidation on prices goes beyond just price fixing.
Factory farms operate on a scale that makes mass culling of chickens more necessary. That’s another reason why Canada and Mexico, whose egg production comes from smaller scale farms, have fared better during the bird flu. There’s a big difference between a farm with thousands of hens and a mass industry, one of whose biggest players had to cull over 500,000 chickens in one single outbreak, out of its total of 32 million hens.
And equally significantly, broiler exports are more significant than domestic egg sales, and that requires that chickens not be vaccinated. The opposition to vaccinating chickens has nothing to do with the preference of some American consumers for avoiding vaccines, and everything to do with an export market that treats vaccinated chickens as evidence of bird flu infestation.
However since America is already infested with bird flu, this puts the chicken ahead of the egg.
American agriculture no longer exists to benefit either American farmers or consumers. Much of it is owned by foreign companies or investors who use it as a worldwide resource. The cost of eggs to Americans becomes a minor matter hardly worth bothering with in a global market.
The mass culling of chickens helps reassure export markets that our chickens are safe for foreign countries and that matters far more than whether Americans can afford to buy eggs.
And so the cullings are likely to continue, not for the sake of Americans, but the export market.
Environmentalist and organic opponents of factory farms however are just as culpable. The same year as the outbreak of bird flu began, California passed the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative requiring “cage free eggs”. Egg prices in the state began to rise and are still some of the highest in the country. Cage free eggs did not ‘make life better’ for barnyard animals. The same companies already selling eggs put on a show of being ‘cage-free’ while raising prices.
That’s why egg prices are $4 higher on average in California than in Texas.
Meanwhile few in the U.S. are willing to look for answers beyond the mass culling of chickens.
Canada’s commitment to culling at all costs reached a turning point at an ostrich farm earlier this year. When bird flu was detected at the Kootenay ostrich farm in British Columbia, the owner resisted the order to cull the ostriches, protesters gathered and the birds rallied. Oly 10% died while the rest recovered. A court order has spared those ostriches from being exterminated.
The ostrich farm was isolated and ostriches don’t fly. But farm fowls also don’t. The spreaders of infection are migratory birds like Canada geese which were already local pests, but are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that took hold shortly after a previous major flu outbreak over a century ago. In his last days in office, Trump watered down the ancient treaty, but those changes were quickly reverted by the fanatically environmentalist Biden administration. And yet the only kind of culling that can stop bird flu would be culling wild birds.
Cities and states have culled geese and other migratory pests before on the grounds that they’re a massive nuisance, and culling geese and other fowl that fly around concentrations of farms is far more likely to work than killing millions more non-migratory domestic fowl.
Our response to the bird flu, like the response to the COVID pandemic, is based on the irrational pursuit of a ‘safetyism’ that is impossible to achieve in the real world and which has severe economic and social side effects. If bird flu becomes a major outbreak among humans, it won’t be because we didn’t kill enough chickens, but because of events in China or elsewhere.
Panicking over the bird flu hasn’t worked. The sensible thing to do would be to pursue herd immunity among domestic fowl, the way it already exists among wildfowl, stop mass cullings on the scale of the Biden administration, and accept that it is now endemic in the United States. And focus more on culling migratory fowl that spread the disease over domestic chickens.
American agriculture is both too regulated and too centralized, aimed at export markets instead of domestic ones, and subject to the vicissitudes of government bureaucrats and foreigners.
Last week, I visited a major supermarket and had to choose between the last two remaining cartons of eggs, both had one egg already broken inside, and both were priced at $10 or more.
High egg prices are a choice and we’ve made all the wrong ones.
As Daniel G concludes, herd immunity was the logical way to go for the government, the chicken farmers, and even the environmentalists, Why? Because the unspoken rule is that if it helps people, do the opposite. The reason Democrats of the deep Left have no policy is because stating the rule about making human life less comfortable would be worse politically than the current chaos of not being able to formulate useful policy.. And why is making life more uncomfortable for the majority of the world the only choice for a certain warped vision of the future? Because the goal of all policies is to make family formation and the raising of families difficult or unthinkable or arcane. Population will never decrease unless all policies support childlessness. Europe is ahead of the United States in terms of low number of children per woman per lifetime and yet they do nothing. That is because the unwritten rule cannot be publically discussed. Almost everyone is a useless eater!
We used to raise Bantum chickens the smaller ones
There is something lovely about chickens. I imagine caring for them was very rewarding.
Egg prices have dropped by $3 bucks for more or less all the packages here in San Jose but I still won’t buy any until I can get a dozen for $5 bucks or less and 18 for $7.50 or less. I used to eat the things every morning, too.
I notice the Alzheimer Joe administration went all Chicken Little about bird flu just a year into its reign of sabotage but didn’t kill shitloads of egg hens until Trump won the election last November. Maybe my memory is going Bidumb on me but I don’t think it is.
I also noticed chicken meat prices are unaffected by bird flu. Big surprise seeing how beholden Beijing Biden was (and still is) to China and how chummy meat farmers and the USDA had been with the yellow peril until Trump came to town. China has just a bit of an interest in America’s livestock. Even when a dozen eggs here sold at $10 up to $20 bucks and cartons of 60 were $53 bucks, BIG boneless, skinless chicken thighs were only $250 an lb and $250 an lb for drumsticks.
Brooke Rollins as President Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture after she replaced that corrupt, D-Bag piece of shit, Thomas Vilsack, who was the Secretary under both Brokeback Hussein Obama and Alzheimer Joe, seems to be doing a good job. She’s letting population immunity take care of bird flu instead of culling over a hundred million egg hens. I heard a report that a bunch of top USDA scumbags got fired and I hope it’s true.
You must really love eggs to pay $10 bucks and more for a dozen, Danny. I almost caught them at $7 bucks a dozen yesterday but the shelves were cleaned out by the time I got there. This is killing me. I hope your wife is making lots of homemade schmaltz and rendering lots of regular chicken fat. I have to buy lard or Manteca and cheat for chicken fat by refrigerating chicken stock because I live alone.
I think everybody but egg farmers, hens and D-Bags will be glad when this egg crisis is over.
And you’re right that “free range” farms don’t make life better for livestock. Almost all “free range” chickens never go outside. Most of the ones who get that label are offered the opportunity to go outside – sometimes for only an hour a day – but most want to stay inside with their buddies where it’s safe from hawks and other predators they have the instinct to avoid. I don’t blame them and I don’t care where they peck around. Free range or no range chickens taste the same to me.
Luckily the cost of eggs is not a decision I have to make – You can say I am blessed because I do!
However, I was looking at sparsely stocked eggs with a hot young lady – I mean she was barely over 40!
And as a small talk attempt I said to this doll: “These egg prices are obscene”. Well that was enough to turn her on – then I noticed the wedding ring so I had to cool that one off.
I do not eat as many eggs as I used to because the price is obscene.
I don’t believe the bird flu scam anymore than the scam-demic or pLandemic and you can’t use ivermectin to cure yourself and ivermectin became scarce and doctors were afraid to prescribe it even in hospitals, and pharmacists went ballistic if someone came up with a prescription they had to fill for ivermectin.
Fires destroying poultry farms all over the USA and now the lie of a bird flu epidemic.
Not just to inflate prices but to make the vox populi spin into frenzies and blame who the mail sleaze media lies about to blame like President Trump.
Scandalous. Tax the farmers and redistribute their land.
After this we cycle back to prohibition/ with masking to make it really appealing. Only path the nation can take.
If I need eggs I’ll buy ’em, and I won’t bitch about the price like the pu$$y Democrats do 24/7……….about everything.
Every time there is a nation wide and world wide economic catastrophe you can bet your good money it’s been created by government interventions, controls, and mandates.
“Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society – and the solution is Laissez Faire Capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.” –Ayn Rand
Ah yes, the “take it or leave it” method of commerce. Nothing bad could come from that……….derp.
In so many ways you simply hate interventionist government, big or little. Unless you are in charge.
And what a disaster that would be, you little hypocrite.
I don’t know why they don’t just put stickers on the floor in the hen house instructing the hens on where to stand to avoid the bird flu.
Mr Greenfield, why are you against higher prices? You do after all support Trump’s idiotic tariffs that will raise the price of most everything!
You are a great writer and a solid conservative for the most part. It is very disappointing that you drank this protectionism Kool-aid!
And yet inflation ended, prices keep decreasing, employment is increasing and we have the added benefit that foreign countries aren’t robbing America blind anymore.
You neocons and other Dirtbagocrats may like bending over and saying “thank you Sir may I have another” but the majority of us don’t.
Using rational logic w/them, about gassing chix is about as intelligent 👌 as arguing w/the nazis over why it was irrational to gas the jews.
If we based egg production on the idea that chickens are living creatures who feel pain and fear, who are social, and who need a life and who we should be caring for tenderly, might that make a difference?
This article seems an opportunity to post a poem that I feel ought to be much better known than it is. I hope you will see a connection to my previous point about how we treat animals. It’s not by me, by the way – I wish I had written it.
The Clever Children
by Philip Gross
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
Their father
teased them on their way to bed.
They lay awake for hours, those clever
children. Then one little egghead said,
“Inside the shell the embryonic hen
has got all her cells in her, even the cell
of her egg, within which… So on, in, on
in time to the smallest conceivable.” Well,
now they couldn’t sleep. They had to see
the ultimate egg, the egg of the future. On the way
how many breakages, unwanted omelettes, casually
discarded chickens? At last, there it lay.
so tiny, so precious, so shimmeringly slight
it made them feel tremendous, like a pride
of giants. Now to sleep, but… “Wait!”
said one (yes), “”What’s inside?”
So they split it. What hatched out?
“Quick,” they hollered, “put it back again.”
But those clever children couldn’t, not
with all the king’s horses, all the king’s men.