The Egg Shortage Is Being Caused By A New Chicken Mafia, NOT By Bird Flu

I recently grew suspicious about the chicken egg shortage. Supposedly it’s being caused by mass cullings of hens infected with bird flu, but chickens aren’t electrical substation transformers. They need regular replacement even at the best of times, which means there’s already a chicken-replacement pipeline that can replace a billion birds every decade or so, not even counting the chickens raised for meat. Price spikes were inevitable, yes, but egg prices are staying high, which means the replacement pipeline is itself being throttled. And then, this headline:

More egg product seizures than fentanyl seizures at the border so far this year

h ttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/egg-products-fentanyl-border-2025/

By Li Cohen, 19 March 2025

According to the CBP data, there have been 413 drug seizure events involving fentanyl in fiscal year 2025, with December, January and February all having fewer fentanyl seizures than in those months the year before.

Meanwhile, there have been 5,572 egg product interceptions so far this fiscal year, the data show. There were nearly 16,000 such interceptions in all of fiscal year 2024.

CBP has said most of the egg product interceptions that have occurred were because people were unaware that they couldn't bring those products across the border. "Travelers are prohibited from bringing fresh eggs, raw chicken, or live birds into the United States from Mexico," the agency notes.

Bird flu is spread by migratory birds, so we’re told, which means border security cannot possibly contain it. Particularly since the problem started on the inside. That means Trump is keeping egg prices artificially inflated by prohibiting foreign eggs, while his tame Kennedy talks about not vaccinating the chickens. Kennedy is correct about that, of course, but now I smelled a headfake. Causing domestic shortages + banning foreign-sourced replacements = monopolistic economic behavior.

Check out what I found:

Hatching a Conspiracy: A BIG Investigation into Egg Prices

h ttps://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investigation

By Basel Musharbash, 7 March 2025

This issue is part one of a three-part series on the egg industry. It is written by antitrust lawyer Basel Musharbash, based in part on a report he researched for Farm Action…

The stated reason for the high price of eggs is something that happens periodically: an avian flu epidemic. Since 2022, outbreaks of bird flu on poultry farms have led to the culling of over 115 million egg-laying hens. This epidemic, according to the prevailing narrative, has driven egg prices up to record highs all on its own. As one industry executive put it, it’s all just “supply disruption, ‘act of God’ type stuff.” The popular response to this story has been what you’d expect: Scientists are discussing flu vaccines for chickens, politicians are blaming each other about bird culls, and many are concerned about how the massive scale of today’s egg farms enables—and exacerbates—avian flu epidemics. And none of that is necessarily wrong.

But something doesn’t add up about this “avian flu is the sole and natural cause of high egg prices” story. Despite the “act of God” going on — and the skyrocketing prices accompanying it — egg production is actually . . . not down by all that much. 115 million hens is a lot of birds to cull, but it’s important to put the loss of those hens in context: They weren’t lost all at once. They were lost over three years. And there have always been around 300 million other hens alive and kicking to lay eggs for America—not to mention a continuous pipeline of 120-130 million female chicks (called “pullets”) in the process of being raised into adult hens to replace the ones dying or aging out.

…So, reports of an unprecedented egg “shortage” are exaggerated. Nonetheless, egg prices — and egg company profits — have gone through the roof. Cal-Maine Foods — the largest egg producer and the only one that publishes its financial data as a publicly traded company — has been making more money than ever. It’s annual gross profits in the past three years have floated between 3 and 6 times what it used to earn before the avian flu epidemic started — breaking $1 billion for the first time in the company’s history. All of this extra profit is coming from higher selling prices, which have been earning Cal-Maine unprecedented 70-145 percent margins over farm production costs per dozen. Taking Cal-Maine as the “bellwether” for the industry’s largest firms — as people in the egg business do — we can be pretty confident that the other large egg producers are also raking in profits off the relatively small dip in egg production.

High persistent profits are an anomaly for the industry. Historically, egg producers have responded to avian flu epidemics—and the temporary rise in egg prices that often accompanies them—by quickly rebuilding and expanding their flocks of egg-laying hens. “Fowl plagues”—as these epidemics used to be called—have been with us since at least the 19th century. Most recently, large-scale avian flu epidemics hit egg farms in 2015 and 1983-1984. The egg industry responded to both of these destructive events by sprinting to rebuild and expand the egg-laying hen flock — something which checked price increases and ultimately made sure prices went back to pre-epidemic levels within a reasonable time.

As Cal-Maine Foods explained in its 2007 Annual Report: “In the past, during periods of high profitability, shell egg producers have tended to increase the number of layers in production with a resulting increase in the supply of shell eggs, which generally has caused a drop in shell egg prices until supply and demand return to balance.”

As for egg producers themselves, you may be surprised to learn that they have added between 5 and 20 million fewer pullets to their farms in every one of the last three years than they did in 2021. As the USDA observed with some astonishment at the end of 2022, “producers—despite the record-high wholesale price [of eggs]—are taking a cautious approach to expanding production[.]” The following month, it pared down its table-egg production forecast for the entirety of 2023 on account of “the industry’s [persisting] cautious approach to expanding production.”

As the coming installments in this series will detail, the fundamental problem in the egg supply chain today is the simple fact that every industry involved in turning an egg into a chicken and turning a chicken into an egg—from the breeders and hatcheries that create the hens to the producers who use the hens to make eggs—has been hijacked by one or two financier-backed corporations, with the incentives flipped from competing entities seeking to produce more eggs to an oligopoly trying to restrain the production of eggs.

The article is a must-read if you want to understand the egg-price situation. I think they’re right, and food monopolies are forming to control access to animal protein. Why would our ruler-usurers simply eliminate meat when they can instead drive the price sky-high via public-private collusion?

It wouldn’t be the first time a Rockefeller played robber baron.