Egg prices in the United States have never been higher. They likely will drop back to a more typical level, but no one can say exactly when.
Various experts who spoke with The Epoch Times said the average price a consumer paid for a dozen eggs rose to more than $7 per dozen in early February. U.S. residents in some regions are paying more than $8 per dozen, a record high.
Experts said this high price for the staple good was the result of a prolonged outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), which has resulted in the decimation of the United States’ chicken flocks over the past two years, as well as other inflationary factors.
Agricultural economists who spoke with The Epoch Times said there is not a shortage of eggs, meaning there are enough eggs to satisfy national demand. Nevertheless, consumers are likely to pay surcharges at restaurants, see substitutions and price increases for goods that use eggs, face buying limits at their grocers, and maybe even see empty store shelves.
Avian Influenza
Carol Cardona, one of the nation’s foremost experts on avian influenza, told The Epoch Times the HPAI scenario is “catastrophic” for the nation’s egg industry.So-called H5N1 HPAI was first identified in Guangdong, China, in the 1990s, and has since spread worldwide through migratory birds. Cardona, a professor in the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Minnesota, said the disease is deadly for birds. The standard control strategy is stamping out, or culling, the entire flock in an effort to control the spread.
Cardona, also the Pomeroy Endowed Chair in Avian Health, said the control strategy worked in containing a previous outbreak that hit turkey and egg-laying flocks in the winter of 2014 to 2015, but is failing now because of the rapid mutation of H5 avian influenza.
The current outbreak of avian influenza began in 2022 and has continued to the present day. Cardona said every region of the United States is susceptible.
Since the outbreak began, Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana—the nation’s top three egg-producing states—have lost more than 55 million birds.
The disease is now being spread by a variety of mammals—Cardona said at least 50 species can carry it—as well as birds, creating a much more difficult biosecurity challenge for egg farmers. Right now, avian influenza has spread to dairy cattle and is even infecting humans who work closely with those animals.
Cardona said the virus will likely become endemic in North American wild bird populations. The disease response will likely need to change, and new measures, including vaccination, may well be deployed.
Supply and Demand
Jada Thompson, associate professor of agricultural economics and agribusiness at the University of Arkansas, and David Anderson, professor and extension specialist focused on livestock and food product marketing at Texas A&M University, told The Epoch Times that egg supplies are down and demand is up.The forthcoming Easter holiday, the largest egg-buying event in the United States, is compounding the existing problems.
Thompson said that paradoxically, panic-buying demand has been created by what she called a “higher than ever” price and the perceived shortage. Consumers are rushing to stores to buy eggs and ensure that they have them on hand in case conditions continue to deteriorate.
Thompson said that by the beginning of February, the size of the egg-laying flock had dropped by about 7 percent compared with the number of birds in the field at the end of 2021.
And the disease is not just taking away productive birds, Anderson said. HPAI is killing young birds, called pullets, before they can reach a productive age, which is about 5 to 6 months old.
The virus is also affecting the so-called breeder birds that lay eggs that hatch into the layer birds. The decimation of this part of the egg supply chain is severely reducing the egg industry’s ability to return to a more normal level of egg production.
Typically, the United States has about 300 million active so-called layer hens in the field. A productive hen lays one egg per day for a certain number of years, depending on the breed.
Thompson said the breeder flock is still recovering from losses that occurred in 2022 and 2023.
Egg farmers are trying to extend the useful life of their surviving layers by pushing them to keep laying after they reach the end of their typical productive lifespan, Thompson and Anderson said.
In a press conference outside the White House on Feb. 14, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said the price of food is “one of the key issues facing all Americans” and the administration is “looking at every possible scenario to ensure that [it is] doing everything [it] can in a safe, secure manner, but also to ensure that Americans have the food that they need.”
Looking Ahead
Thompson and Anderson agreed that the price of eggs will come down in the future. When exactly that will happen is entirely unknown. Prices will likely go up again, thanks to Easter demand, before they return to normal.“Nobody’s going to be able to give you an accurate prediction,” Thompson said. “It’s going to depend on how many more birds go out of the system.”
Anderson said the high price currently commanded by eggs will most likely curve demand to a point where the price begins to drop, incentivizing egg producers to boost production.
“High prices are the signal to produce more eggs,” Anderson said. “It’s just the time it takes to catch up.”
Both pointed to previous outbreaks as an example. When the supply has been limited, the price has gone up, but when the disease situation has improved, the price has dropped significantly. Anderson and Thompson said eggs sold for as little as $0.89 per dozen in 2022 or $0.59 per dozen in 2014 because the egg producers began to market more eggs than there was a demand for.
In the longer term, Anderson and Thompson said the price of eggs may remain higher than in previous years because of the general inflationary pressure exerted on the cost of feed for the animals, farm and processing labor, and fuel and energy for storage and transport.
Anderson noted that the cost of the egg industry’s cage-free transition is also being passed to consumers. Because of animal welfare commitments made by large buyers and laws in some states, many major egg producers made a costly switch from conventional layer cages to cage-free housing.
Thompson said eggs are an inelastic good—meaning people and businesses will want and need to buy them no matter the price—so eventually, the current elevated price of eggs will be passed to consumers eating at restaurants or purchasing products that use eggs.
Anderson said large businesses will be able to handle the higher prices better than small businesses serving eggs, such as local diners or breakfast restaurants. The substitution of other competing proteins, when possible, is likely to occur as well. Thompson said reformulation of egg-heavy recipes is unlikely to come to pass given the well-established general volatility of egg prices.
Cardona said controlling the disease itself will continue to get more difficult as egg farmers and breeders struggle to keep the disease out of their poultry barns. Eventually, she said, vaccination will be on the table.
Nevertheless, that will be difficult given the extant trade laws that would penalize the United States’ much larger industry of broiler chickens—chickens raised for meat—on the international market. The United States is one of the world’s leading exporters of chicken meat, and vaccination of layer hens, in the current trade scenario, would give many countries reason to bar U.S. chickens entirely.
Cardona said things can always change, especially with President Donald Trump’s focus on overhauling international trade. But for now, vaccination is viewed as an acknowledgment that a disease is not controlled. There are also fears, she said, that vaccinated birds can unintentionally spread the disease to healthy birds.
If the U.S. egg industry decides against vaccination, the entire national operation may need to expand significantly in anticipation of constant depopulation due to continual HPAI outbreaks. That will undoubtedly cost producers and consumers more.
“How much grain can we produce?” Cardona said. “There has to be a carrying capacity of how many birds we can actually raise economically.”
