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Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper. Th

Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper. This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.

perfmode 2y ago
I’ve always bought the most expensive pasture raised free range cage free eggs at Whole Foods. If I recall they used to be around $10 per dozen. Been a while. Anyone know Is this still the case?
- garyfirestorm 2y ago
  its 3-4$ at trader joes - still 8ish in WholeFoods in Michigan
  - RyanOD 2y ago
    I've definitely noticed the pricing for eggs at our neighborhood Trader Joes staying constant while the pricing at our neighborhood Safeway has doubled.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      Trader Joes is like Costco and is known for driving hard bargains; they likely have a long-term contract. You overpay a bit but guarantee stability.
  - jcdavis 2y ago
    Still $3.50 at TJs in SF last week still, which is by far the cheapest around (that I'm aware of). Pretty surprised they are still that low given prices elsewhere.
    - _joel 2y ago
      Loss leader, perhaps, to get people through the door and buy other stuff at a better markup. That and/or they've got long-term fixed price contracts.
- agloe_dreams 2y ago
  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.
- wiredfool 2y ago
  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.
  - schnable 2y ago
    free range isnt the same as pasture raised.
    - likeabatterycar 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - perfmode 2y ago
    Free-range hens have some outdoor access, but pasture-raised hens roam outdoors freely with significantly more space to forage.
afavour 2y ago
This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  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?
  - financetechbro 2y ago
    Feels like we’ve swung exceedingly far. Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale make us very vulnerable to systematic disruption
    - Karellen 2y ago
      > Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale Is that what's happened here? It looks to me more like the billionaire/PE class's drive to capture rents through monopolies is a more accurate lens to view the situation through. Especially as it's the trope namer for chickenization https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/ https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickenization&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickenization&ia=web
      - graemep 2y ago
        I think both are true. It also goes far beyond farming - it applies to many supply chains.
  - afavour 2y ago
    To my mind there's no question that it's swung too far. But it's very easy for me to live in the country and say "oh I get all my fresh produce from the local farm!" when there are cities of millions of people that need feeding too. Scaling while retaining resiliency is not easy.
vlan0 2y ago
Yes. Vital Farm eggs. Been $8 a dozen for a long time. No change in price. What we're seeing are the consequences of factory farming and not treating animals like the living beings they are.
- tcdent 2y ago
  I've been paying almost $11 for them.
  - vlan0 2y ago
    Big city "tax"? Whole Foods and the local co-op out in WNY are both $8 a dozen.
    - lacksconfidence 2y ago
      My city has 30k people, although we are part of a larger metro. Store brand eggs are $9.50/dozen. Alternatively Costco is still selling 60 packs for $20, although they have had per customer limits recently and don't alway have stock. Works out to $4 per dozen. But thats a lot of eggs.
    - HelloMcFly 2y ago
      I'm in a major metro area and Vital Farms eggs are still $7.99 from Kroger.
  - Digit-Al 2y ago
    Wow! That's crazy. Here in the UK, the most expensive eggs in my local supermarket - which are Clarence Court Burdord Brown eggs - are only the equivalent of $5.08 per dozen. Those are the posh, expensive, eggs that only those with a bit of extra cash in their pocket, and a desire to eat more healthily, would buy.
    - likeabatterycar 2y ago
      I love how British eggs have deep, amber yolks. Are they force-feeding the hens Earl Grey?
uticus 2y ago
> they are now often cheaper...increase the resilience of the system as a whole cheaper and resilience are not proportional here. in fact, cheaper is proportional to efficient, which large producers are better at (apart from questions of healthiness, etc). i can't argue against resilience though, although that comes at a cost. speaking as a backyard-chicken-raiser of some years.
- roughly 2y ago
  "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.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Many of your small producers are not counting their full costs. They see they $ from selling eggs, but don't count the cost of the barn, their labor, the land the chickens are on... A real accountant would find all those hidden costs and figure out how you allocate the cost of the light bulbs in the barn to each chicken - only when you have all those numbers can you really see if it works out.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      This is so common in small businesses. The biggest example I see is single-family landlords who are notoriously bad at doing the honest math. This is often why small businesses survive until the owner dies/retires, because the were making much less money than needed to continue. The biggest one is ignoring location costs because they own the building (avoiding rents or mortgage which would immediately put the business way underwater). Combine the above with small farms often ALSO being the home of the owner, and it gets quite flexible.
fatnoah 2y ago
I'm 50 and grew up in a medium sized New England mill town. One of the few memories I have of my grandfather is taking a quick trip to the local egg farm to get some eggs. These have all but disappeared from New England.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  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.
jghn 2y ago
This. I buy my eggs at the farmers market from a local, actually small, farm. I pay $8/doz. In normal times this is very expensive. But you know what? Tomorrow when I go to the farmers market they'll still cost me $8/doz.
- bityard 2y ago
  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.
  - jghn 2y ago
    Because in setups like I'm describing the farmers tend to start building relationships with their customers. Price gouging is generally not the best way to maintain those relationships. In previous egg shortages over the years the couple of farmers I use would sometimes impose limits like 1 carton per customer or something like that. But not jack up prices.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      Smaller farmers usually want to make money to cover their costs, and if they weren't doing that, they're already in a huge pickle. As you mention, they'll impose limits (or perhaps offer "shiny brown eggs for $1 more") rather than piss off the customers, who 90% of the time have cheaper options already.
      - ryandrake 2y ago
        Are rising costs the reason for store-bought eggs' rising prices?
        HDThoreaun 2y ago
        Yes but its because all their chickens keep dying because of the factory farm conditions that local farms might not have
jl6 2y ago
Are small local farms able to keep producing as normal because the birds aren’t getting bird flu or because they’re not testing/killing them?
- mplanchard 2y ago
  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).
- hwillis 2y ago
  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.
  - mplanchard 2y ago
    I was wondering how I could provide evidence for you other than walking to the grocery and taking a picture, but I found at least one of our local farms that has their prices online: https://www.maplewindfarm.com/collections/retail-store https://www.maplewindfarm.com/collections/retail-store -- I'd expect it would be quite easy for them to change their prices on their own storefront and in their farmstand, where I often buy their eggs. A dozen large eggs there right now is $7.90, which is right in line with what their costs have been for at least the last year (they are one of the more expensive local brands). Unfortunately I just went to the grocery last night, so I don't have any reason to swing by today, but next time I do I'll try to remember to snap a pic of the egg section to share. I've seen a bunch of posts online from the farms about how they're doing biosafety protocols, keeping groups of chickens isolated from each other, etc. I'm sure that increases their costs somewhat, but whatever they're doing seems to be keeping them insulated from the worst of the flock die offs, and regardless, their prices haven't really changed.
silisili 2y ago
My local sellers are $4/doz for the good ones, $5/18 from another seller whose eggs taste 'off' so I quit buying them. I think $4/doz for quality eggs is worth it. This is also hopefully a catalyst to get people to petition their city for backyard chicken rights. Raising chickens is relatively easy and can be rewarding. Even if you don't want to personally, support the right of those around you to, please.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Generally, mixing livestock and people in the confined conditions of a city is a very bad idea (if you're talking about suburbs, then that's a completely different thing, and I would agree with you about supporting it).
  - silisili 2y ago
    Ah yes, typically suburbs. Cities that adopt it generally have regulations around it, such as needing an inspection and nominally priced permit. The inspection just makes sure it's sanitary and follows certain rules about distance from house and whatnot. I definitely don't advise raising chickens in an apartment or some such.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      Most places that allow them don't have much in the way of inspection, etc, until you start selling the eggs. Amusingly enough, rural towns are more likely to prohibit backyard chickens than suburbs of major cities these days. This is because if you want chickens in a rural area, the assumption is you'll buy just outside town; the people who moved into town don't want to hear roosters (which are often banned or severely limited even where chickens are allowed).
      - silisili 2y ago
        Noticed that too. The two rural towns near me bans any poultry with under 5 acres, which is essentially the entire town. Luckily I live right outside their limits. RE: roosters, a lot of cities that permit backyard chickens do not allow roosters as they're considered a bit of a nuisance. As I'm sure you're aware(though I've found many people aren't), roosters are not required for the keeping of chickens nor the production of eggs.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Canadian and Mexican egg prices haven’t budged because they vaccinate their chickens [1]. I’m not a fan of factory farming. But this isn’t a story about that. It’s a story about American (a) producers favouring cheap production by avoiding the cost of vaccination and (b) regulators favouring a policy of trade protectionism that keeps our neighbours’ cheap eggs off our grocery-store shelves. [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chickens https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chicke...
- mplanchard 2y ago
  I think both causes can be true, and both are relevant to modern food production.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > both causes can be true They can be but they’re not. Canadian and Mexican factory farms are not being affected sufficiently to raise prices. The cause of the price rise is not factory farming. It’s vaccination practice and trade policy.
    - mplanchard 2y ago
      I was curious about this, being neighbors with Canada, and I'm not seeing it mentioned in any articles about their egg prices. Most of these are instead about their supply management system and smaller farms, e.g.: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/supply-management-eggs-1.6736500 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/supply-management-eggs-1.67... https://globalnews.ca/news/10981016/egg-prices-us-bird-flu-canada/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10981016/egg-prices-us-bird-flu-c... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-us-1.7450654 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-u... Can you point me to some sources on your claim? The post you linked originally doesn't mention Canada.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Buried in that story is one more important point: if you vaccinate many countries will not let you sell that chicken to them anymore. US exports a lot of chicken to such countries and if we vaccinate that market dies. (or we can vaccinate some but not others and then deal with the supply chain complexity)
njarboe 2y ago
The local eggs here have the same price but they are selling out very quickly. $9.50 a dozen and used to have them all week. They come in on Friday evening and now sell out quickly. People are probably buying more than they used to when available and that is making the scarcity worse.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  We're lucky enough to have a pretty substantial network of local suppliers. Our grocery carries eggs from at least six local farms that I can think of off the top of my head. I've read that some of the farms are having a hard time keeping up with both the increased demand from groceries and also trying to keep eggs available for their regular farmstand customers and such, but it seems like so far there is enough slack in the system that it's working out okay.
whateveracct 2y ago
If I avoid name brand stuff, my prices generally aren't bad. Like you said, the local eggs have been stable. Locally sourced chicken also is reasonably priced and often on sale. There was BOGO (mix and match) last week so I got a whole chicken and a 2lb pack of breasts for $12 total. Both beautiful quality. With a bunch of minor cheap produce, herbs, and pasta..that's chicken soup + a chicken one pot meal that'll last us all week. Sometimes those whole chickens are on sale for 99c/lb!
- TylerE 2y ago
  That is likely to change. Why should they sell a superior product for less?
  - mplanchard 2y ago
    Well, if you know your local farmers and buy from them regularly, it doesn't look great if they jack their prices up unnecessarily. They also know that they're competing against the perception that local food is more expensive. In normal times, factory farms can always undercut their prices, so it would make sense for them to use the current situation as an opportunity to get more people to start buying local (due to the prices!) and hope that they will continue to buy local once the prices invert again (due to the quality).
  - hammock 2y ago
    Why not?
    - TylerE 2y ago
      Because capitalism? Small farmers are already fighting brutal economies of scale.
      - hammock 2y ago
        If they don't want to charge more though?
likeabatterycar 2y ago
Ok, but, you can't feed 340M people with "fresh, local eggs". While it's nice you buy six eggs at a time from Joe Farmer off the back of his '72 Ford, but factory farms are an unfortunate necessity to feed everyone that isn't so privileged.
- AngryData 2y ago
  To an extent, yeah. But farmland utilization has been dropping for decades. We are nowhere near not having enough farmland to feed people even if production efficiency was to drop significantly.
- roughly 2y ago
  We’re not reliably feeding 340M people eggs right now, either. The current system has significant friction points and deadweight loss.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  Man, if only it were possible to adjust the number of eggs that we eat in order to account for the increased cost of eggs that are farmed humanely and whose purchase benefits the local economy instead of massive corporate conglomerates. But alas, 340 million souls need their daily eggs.
  - B-Con 2y ago
    Your solution to a supply and demand mismatch is that everyone regulate their demand to match the local supply? Your solution is for a problem that doesn't exist.
    - mplanchard 2y ago
      Yes? I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I think that if you can’t produce something ethically at scale, the right thing to do is to produce less, ethically, and for people to consume less of it. For example, I buy more expensive meat from places that treat their animals well, and as a result I eat less meat than I would otherwise.
GeoAtreides 2y ago
someone is leaving money on the table no reason not to hike up the prices: a. if everyone is doing it b. if the demand > supply
- kamarg 2y ago
  | no reason not to hike up the prices Because they're happy with the income they're making from it probably. Not everything has to make the absolute maximum amount of profit possible.
nnurmanov 2y ago
I should have invested in eggs and bitcoins
taeric 2y ago
This is the kind of advice that can work for anyone, but can't work for everyone. Scale kills all things.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  Not necessarily. Supporting local is the opposite of supporting scale, it's supporting decentralization. A single local provider might not be able to sustain all local demand, but there need not be only 1 local provider.
  - taeric 2y ago
    Somewhat exactly? Supporting local is largely the opposite of supporting scale. Unless you have the idea that local farms can make up all of the sales that are done, then you are arguing for a practice that will result in a lower supply of goods. With a lower supply, you expect prices to rise until the demand adjusts down to a lower value, as well. No? Hence, this is great advice for anyone to try. But if everyone does it, things get more expensive as you lose out on the very advantages that led to the "at scale" solutions in the first place.
    - xboxnolifes 2y ago
      Decentralization doesn't necessarily imply lower supply of goods, but it does almost certainly result in higher cost of goods (outside of compared to monopolies). That's the cost of market resilience: higher average cost for lower variance over time. Higher cost of goods may result in lower demand and then lower supply, but the causal order is the opposite direction from assuming decentralization means lower supply.
      - taeric 2y ago
        Fair, I was sloppy there. My assertion is better stated that it will be a different supply curve with higher unit costs. Which should be expected to have a different intercept with demand on where you expect things to even out.
djtriptych 2y ago
Came to say the same thing. Fortunate to have a store front on my block in brooklyn that sources primarily from area farms. No interruption in supply or change in prices (though I've always been paying in the $7 range). Besides all the arguments around diverse food supply and economic SPOFs, it just feels so much better to shop this way.
jmyeet 2y ago
What I find endlessly fascinating is how often I see anti-capitalist sentiment, which your comment is, in the context of how often and how much people will defend capitalism and attack socialism. For the record, I don't know if the second part applies to you, specifically. This is a general observation. Local food production is quintessential socialism: it is quite literally the workers (the farmers) owning the means of production (the farm). When people hear that, they so often reject it with some variant of "no, that's a business; that's capitalism". Businesses (and markets) existed millenia before capitalism and exist in every economic system. The defining characteristic of capitalism is exploitation by capital owners. In the eggs case, it's Cal-Maine Foods (or any other large company) owning the land and in all likelihood employing undocumented workers because they can pay them sub-minimum wage. At least that's how the likes of Tyson produces chicken. It's also worth adding that something like avian flu is used to justify price hikes well beyond what the supply change would otherwise warrant.
dawnerd 2y ago
What I find weird is people’s aversion to buying the organic and local eggs. They had them for half the price as the factory farm eggs yet people weren’t touching them.
- soerxpso 2y ago
  I think it's largely a matter of routine. People have been buying the same eggs for years; switching is perceived as a risk by our monkey brains.
- monetus 2y ago
  A lot of local eggs here will have slightly orange yolks and my family just won't do it, not even in cornbread.
  - whalesalad 2y ago
    the orange yolks are usually a sign of better hen health... the irony of this. they taste a lot better, too.
    - monetus 2y ago
      Sad, for sure.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
virtualwhys 2y ago
$4 and change here for locally sourced eggs in San Diego, CA, at an organic food store no less. Meanwhile, $9+ at commercial supermarket for bottom of the barrel factory produced eggs -- strange times...
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. Same here. Local eggs have gone up a bit, but it's mostly the cheap (caged) eggs from large producers that have shot up in price or are unavailable. We eat plenty of eggs and haven't felt the effect of the "egg crisis". But then again, I buy local eggs and don't shop at Walmrt/Kroger/etc.
malkia 2y ago
We were thinking the other day getting some from the local farmer's market, but then hearing about the bird flu, and decided against it... :(
Sparkyte 2y ago
This is how it should be. Consolidating egg production is a bane on society. It might make the profit cheaper but it also greatly increases the opportunity for cross contamination to occur due to the distances they have to travel. I always buy locally sourced.
BeefWellington 2y ago
One of the things that's come up in several trade deals Canada has negotiated is how protectionist we (as a country) are when it comes to dairy. We have not experienced the massive increases in pricing on eggs. The supply management system effectively works to keep farms roughly below a certain size, and seems to have helped avoid large impacts on certain staple foods. The usual rhetoric against this is that we should be getting cheaper prices by letting in foreign competition. This ignores that doing so would allow foreign subsidies to wipe out our local supply of critical foodstuffs, then making us dependent. It's not an ideal system but it seems to have yielded some tangible results when things like bird flu are making their rounds.
cpursley 2y ago
I built a little project to help with this over the break, still needs a lot of work - hopefully helpful for folks looking to connect with their local farmer: https://www.farmersstand.com/farmers-markets https://www.farmersstand.com/farmers-markets
Sokron 2y ago
Ballsack

perfmode 2y ago

I’ve always bought the most expensive pasture raised free range cage free eggs at Whole Foods. If I recall they used to be around $10 per dozen. Been a while. Anyone know Is this still the case?

garyfirestorm 2y ago
its 3-4$ at trader joes - still 8ish in WholeFoods in Michigan
- RyanOD 2y ago
  I've definitely noticed the pricing for eggs at our neighborhood Trader Joes staying constant while the pricing at our neighborhood Safeway has doubled.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Trader Joes is like Costco and is known for driving hard bargains; they likely have a long-term contract. You overpay a bit but guarantee stability.
- jcdavis 2y ago
  Still $3.50 at TJs in SF last week still, which is by far the cheapest around (that I'm aware of). Pretty surprised they are still that low given prices elsewhere.
  - _joel 2y ago
    Loss leader, perhaps, to get people through the door and buy other stuff at a better markup. That and/or they've got long-term fixed price contracts.
agloe_dreams 2y ago
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.
wiredfool 2y ago
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.
- schnable 2y ago
  free range isnt the same as pasture raised.
  - likeabatterycar 2y ago
    [flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- perfmode 2y ago
  Free-range hens have some outdoor access, but pasture-raised hens roam outdoors freely with significantly more space to forage.

afavour 2y ago

This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
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?
- financetechbro 2y ago
  Feels like we’ve swung exceedingly far. Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale make us very vulnerable to systematic disruption
  - Karellen 2y ago
    > Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale Is that what's happened here? It looks to me more like the billionaire/PE class's drive to capture rents through monopolies is a more accurate lens to view the situation through. Especially as it's the trope namer for chickenization https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/ https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickenization&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickenization&ia=web
    - graemep 2y ago
      I think both are true. It also goes far beyond farming - it applies to many supply chains.
- afavour 2y ago
  To my mind there's no question that it's swung too far. But it's very easy for me to live in the country and say "oh I get all my fresh produce from the local farm!" when there are cities of millions of people that need feeding too. Scaling while retaining resiliency is not easy.

vlan0 2y ago

Yes. Vital Farm eggs. Been $8 a dozen for a long time. No change in price. What we're seeing are the consequences of factory farming and not treating animals like the living beings they are.

tcdent 2y ago
I've been paying almost $11 for them.
- vlan0 2y ago
  Big city "tax"? Whole Foods and the local co-op out in WNY are both $8 a dozen.
  - lacksconfidence 2y ago
    My city has 30k people, although we are part of a larger metro. Store brand eggs are $9.50/dozen. Alternatively Costco is still selling 60 packs for $20, although they have had per customer limits recently and don't alway have stock. Works out to $4 per dozen. But thats a lot of eggs.
  - HelloMcFly 2y ago
    I'm in a major metro area and Vital Farms eggs are still $7.99 from Kroger.
- Digit-Al 2y ago
  Wow! That's crazy. Here in the UK, the most expensive eggs in my local supermarket - which are Clarence Court Burdord Brown eggs - are only the equivalent of $5.08 per dozen. Those are the posh, expensive, eggs that only those with a bit of extra cash in their pocket, and a desire to eat more healthily, would buy.
  - likeabatterycar 2y ago
    I love how British eggs have deep, amber yolks. Are they force-feeding the hens Earl Grey?

uticus 2y ago

> they are now often cheaper...increase the resilience of the system as a whole cheaper and resilience are not proportional here. in fact, cheaper is proportional to efficient, which large producers are better at (apart from questions of healthiness, etc). i can't argue against resilience though, although that comes at a cost. speaking as a backyard-chicken-raiser of some years.

roughly 2y ago
"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.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Many of your small producers are not counting their full costs. They see they $ from selling eggs, but don't count the cost of the barn, their labor, the land the chickens are on... A real accountant would find all those hidden costs and figure out how you allocate the cost of the light bulbs in the barn to each chicken - only when you have all those numbers can you really see if it works out.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    This is so common in small businesses. The biggest example I see is single-family landlords who are notoriously bad at doing the honest math. This is often why small businesses survive until the owner dies/retires, because the were making much less money than needed to continue. The biggest one is ignoring location costs because they own the building (avoiding rents or mortgage which would immediately put the business way underwater). Combine the above with small farms often ALSO being the home of the owner, and it gets quite flexible.

fatnoah 2y ago

I'm 50 and grew up in a medium sized New England mill town. One of the few memories I have of my grandfather is taking a quick trip to the local egg farm to get some eggs. These have all but disappeared from New England.

mplanchard 2y ago
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.

jghn 2y ago

This. I buy my eggs at the farmers market from a local, actually small, farm. I pay $8/doz. In normal times this is very expensive. But you know what? Tomorrow when I go to the farmers market they'll still cost me $8/doz.

bityard 2y ago
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.
- jghn 2y ago
  Because in setups like I'm describing the farmers tend to start building relationships with their customers. Price gouging is generally not the best way to maintain those relationships. In previous egg shortages over the years the couple of farmers I use would sometimes impose limits like 1 carton per customer or something like that. But not jack up prices.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Smaller farmers usually want to make money to cover their costs, and if they weren't doing that, they're already in a huge pickle. As you mention, they'll impose limits (or perhaps offer "shiny brown eggs for $1 more") rather than piss off the customers, who 90% of the time have cheaper options already.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Are rising costs the reason for store-bought eggs' rising prices?
      - HDThoreaun 2y ago
        Yes but its because all their chickens keep dying because of the factory farm conditions that local farms might not have

jl6 2y ago

Are small local farms able to keep producing as normal because the birds aren’t getting bird flu or because they’re not testing/killing them?

mplanchard 2y ago
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).
hwillis 2y ago
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.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  I was wondering how I could provide evidence for you other than walking to the grocery and taking a picture, but I found at least one of our local farms that has their prices online: https://www.maplewindfarm.com/collections/retail-store https://www.maplewindfarm.com/collections/retail-store -- I'd expect it would be quite easy for them to change their prices on their own storefront and in their farmstand, where I often buy their eggs. A dozen large eggs there right now is $7.90, which is right in line with what their costs have been for at least the last year (they are one of the more expensive local brands). Unfortunately I just went to the grocery last night, so I don't have any reason to swing by today, but next time I do I'll try to remember to snap a pic of the egg section to share. I've seen a bunch of posts online from the farms about how they're doing biosafety protocols, keeping groups of chickens isolated from each other, etc. I'm sure that increases their costs somewhat, but whatever they're doing seems to be keeping them insulated from the worst of the flock die offs, and regardless, their prices haven't really changed.

silisili 2y ago

My local sellers are $4/doz for the good ones, $5/18 from another seller whose eggs taste 'off' so I quit buying them. I think $4/doz for quality eggs is worth it. This is also hopefully a catalyst to get people to petition their city for backyard chicken rights. Raising chickens is relatively easy and can be rewarding. Even if you don't want to personally, support the right of those around you to, please.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Generally, mixing livestock and people in the confined conditions of a city is a very bad idea (if you're talking about suburbs, then that's a completely different thing, and I would agree with you about supporting it).
- silisili 2y ago
  Ah yes, typically suburbs. Cities that adopt it generally have regulations around it, such as needing an inspection and nominally priced permit. The inspection just makes sure it's sanitary and follows certain rules about distance from house and whatnot. I definitely don't advise raising chickens in an apartment or some such.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Most places that allow them don't have much in the way of inspection, etc, until you start selling the eggs. Amusingly enough, rural towns are more likely to prohibit backyard chickens than suburbs of major cities these days. This is because if you want chickens in a rural area, the assumption is you'll buy just outside town; the people who moved into town don't want to hear roosters (which are often banned or severely limited even where chickens are allowed).
    - silisili 2y ago
      Noticed that too. The two rural towns near me bans any poultry with under 5 acres, which is essentially the entire town. Luckily I live right outside their limits. RE: roosters, a lot of cities that permit backyard chickens do not allow roosters as they're considered a bit of a nuisance. As I'm sure you're aware(though I've found many people aren't), roosters are not required for the keeping of chickens nor the production of eggs.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Canadian and Mexican egg prices haven’t budged because they vaccinate their chickens [1]. I’m not a fan of factory farming. But this isn’t a story about that. It’s a story about American (a) producers favouring cheap production by avoiding the cost of vaccination and (b) regulators favouring a policy of trade protectionism that keeps our neighbours’ cheap eggs off our grocery-store shelves. [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chickens https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chicke...

mplanchard 2y ago
I think both causes can be true, and both are relevant to modern food production.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > both causes can be true They can be but they’re not. Canadian and Mexican factory farms are not being affected sufficiently to raise prices. The cause of the price rise is not factory farming. It’s vaccination practice and trade policy.
  - mplanchard 2y ago
    I was curious about this, being neighbors with Canada, and I'm not seeing it mentioned in any articles about their egg prices. Most of these are instead about their supply management system and smaller farms, e.g.: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/supply-management-eggs-1.6736500 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/supply-management-eggs-1.67... https://globalnews.ca/news/10981016/egg-prices-us-bird-flu-canada/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10981016/egg-prices-us-bird-flu-c... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-us-1.7450654 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-u... Can you point me to some sources on your claim? The post you linked originally doesn't mention Canada.
bluGill 2y ago
Buried in that story is one more important point: if you vaccinate many countries will not let you sell that chicken to them anymore. US exports a lot of chicken to such countries and if we vaccinate that market dies. (or we can vaccinate some but not others and then deal with the supply chain complexity)

njarboe 2y ago

The local eggs here have the same price but they are selling out very quickly. $9.50 a dozen and used to have them all week. They come in on Friday evening and now sell out quickly. People are probably buying more than they used to when available and that is making the scarcity worse.

mplanchard 2y ago
We're lucky enough to have a pretty substantial network of local suppliers. Our grocery carries eggs from at least six local farms that I can think of off the top of my head. I've read that some of the farms are having a hard time keeping up with both the increased demand from groceries and also trying to keep eggs available for their regular farmstand customers and such, but it seems like so far there is enough slack in the system that it's working out okay.

whateveracct 2y ago

If I avoid name brand stuff, my prices generally aren't bad. Like you said, the local eggs have been stable. Locally sourced chicken also is reasonably priced and often on sale. There was BOGO (mix and match) last week so I got a whole chicken and a 2lb pack of breasts for $12 total. Both beautiful quality. With a bunch of minor cheap produce, herbs, and pasta..that's chicken soup + a chicken one pot meal that'll last us all week. Sometimes those whole chickens are on sale for 99c/lb!

TylerE 2y ago
That is likely to change. Why should they sell a superior product for less?
- mplanchard 2y ago
  Well, if you know your local farmers and buy from them regularly, it doesn't look great if they jack their prices up unnecessarily. They also know that they're competing against the perception that local food is more expensive. In normal times, factory farms can always undercut their prices, so it would make sense for them to use the current situation as an opportunity to get more people to start buying local (due to the prices!) and hope that they will continue to buy local once the prices invert again (due to the quality).
- hammock 2y ago
  Why not?
  - TylerE 2y ago
    Because capitalism? Small farmers are already fighting brutal economies of scale.
    - hammock 2y ago
      If they don't want to charge more though?

likeabatterycar 2y ago

Ok, but, you can't feed 340M people with "fresh, local eggs". While it's nice you buy six eggs at a time from Joe Farmer off the back of his '72 Ford, but factory farms are an unfortunate necessity to feed everyone that isn't so privileged.

AngryData 2y ago
To an extent, yeah. But farmland utilization has been dropping for decades. We are nowhere near not having enough farmland to feed people even if production efficiency was to drop significantly.
roughly 2y ago
We’re not reliably feeding 340M people eggs right now, either. The current system has significant friction points and deadweight loss.
mplanchard 2y ago
Man, if only it were possible to adjust the number of eggs that we eat in order to account for the increased cost of eggs that are farmed humanely and whose purchase benefits the local economy instead of massive corporate conglomerates. But alas, 340 million souls need their daily eggs.
- B-Con 2y ago
  Your solution to a supply and demand mismatch is that everyone regulate their demand to match the local supply? Your solution is for a problem that doesn't exist.
  - mplanchard 2y ago
    Yes? I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I think that if you can’t produce something ethically at scale, the right thing to do is to produce less, ethically, and for people to consume less of it. For example, I buy more expensive meat from places that treat their animals well, and as a result I eat less meat than I would otherwise.

GeoAtreides 2y ago

someone is leaving money on the table no reason not to hike up the prices: a. if everyone is doing it b. if the demand > supply

kamarg 2y ago
| no reason not to hike up the prices Because they're happy with the income they're making from it probably. Not everything has to make the absolute maximum amount of profit possible.

nnurmanov 2y ago

I should have invested in eggs and bitcoins

taeric 2y ago

This is the kind of advice that can work for anyone, but can't work for everyone. Scale kills all things.

xboxnolifes 2y ago
Not necessarily. Supporting local is the opposite of supporting scale, it's supporting decentralization. A single local provider might not be able to sustain all local demand, but there need not be only 1 local provider.
- taeric 2y ago
  Somewhat exactly? Supporting local is largely the opposite of supporting scale. Unless you have the idea that local farms can make up all of the sales that are done, then you are arguing for a practice that will result in a lower supply of goods. With a lower supply, you expect prices to rise until the demand adjusts down to a lower value, as well. No? Hence, this is great advice for anyone to try. But if everyone does it, things get more expensive as you lose out on the very advantages that led to the "at scale" solutions in the first place.
  - xboxnolifes 2y ago
    Decentralization doesn't necessarily imply lower supply of goods, but it does almost certainly result in higher cost of goods (outside of compared to monopolies). That's the cost of market resilience: higher average cost for lower variance over time. Higher cost of goods may result in lower demand and then lower supply, but the causal order is the opposite direction from assuming decentralization means lower supply.
    - taeric 2y ago
      Fair, I was sloppy there. My assertion is better stated that it will be a different supply curve with higher unit costs. Which should be expected to have a different intercept with demand on where you expect things to even out.

djtriptych 2y ago

Came to say the same thing. Fortunate to have a store front on my block in brooklyn that sources primarily from area farms. No interruption in supply or change in prices (though I've always been paying in the $7 range). Besides all the arguments around diverse food supply and economic SPOFs, it just feels so much better to shop this way.

jmyeet 2y ago

What I find endlessly fascinating is how often I see anti-capitalist sentiment, which your comment is, in the context of how often and how much people will defend capitalism and attack socialism. For the record, I don't know if the second part applies to you, specifically. This is a general observation. Local food production is quintessential socialism: it is quite literally the workers (the farmers) owning the means of production (the farm). When people hear that, they so often reject it with some variant of "no, that's a business; that's capitalism". Businesses (and markets) existed millenia before capitalism and exist in every economic system. The defining characteristic of capitalism is exploitation by capital owners. In the eggs case, it's Cal-Maine Foods (or any other large company) owning the land and in all likelihood employing undocumented workers because they can pay them sub-minimum wage. At least that's how the likes of Tyson produces chicken. It's also worth adding that something like avian flu is used to justify price hikes well beyond what the supply change would otherwise warrant.

dawnerd 2y ago

What I find weird is people’s aversion to buying the organic and local eggs. They had them for half the price as the factory farm eggs yet people weren’t touching them.

soerxpso 2y ago
I think it's largely a matter of routine. People have been buying the same eggs for years; switching is perceived as a risk by our monkey brains.
monetus 2y ago
A lot of local eggs here will have slightly orange yolks and my family just won't do it, not even in cornbread.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  the orange yolks are usually a sign of better hen health... the irony of this. they taste a lot better, too.
  - monetus 2y ago
    Sad, for sure.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

virtualwhys 2y ago

$4 and change here for locally sourced eggs in San Diego, CA, at an organic food store no less. Meanwhile, $9+ at commercial supermarket for bottom of the barrel factory produced eggs -- strange times...

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. Same here. Local eggs have gone up a bit, but it's mostly the cheap (caged) eggs from large producers that have shot up in price or are unavailable. We eat plenty of eggs and haven't felt the effect of the "egg crisis". But then again, I buy local eggs and don't shop at Walmrt/Kroger/etc.

malkia 2y ago

We were thinking the other day getting some from the local farmer's market, but then hearing about the bird flu, and decided against it... :(

Sparkyte 2y ago

This is how it should be. Consolidating egg production is a bane on society. It might make the profit cheaper but it also greatly increases the opportunity for cross contamination to occur due to the distances they have to travel. I always buy locally sourced.

BeefWellington 2y ago

One of the things that's come up in several trade deals Canada has negotiated is how protectionist we (as a country) are when it comes to dairy. We have not experienced the massive increases in pricing on eggs. The supply management system effectively works to keep farms roughly below a certain size, and seems to have helped avoid large impacts on certain staple foods. The usual rhetoric against this is that we should be getting cheaper prices by letting in foreign competition. This ignores that doing so would allow foreign subsidies to wipe out our local supply of critical foodstuffs, then making us dependent. It's not an ideal system but it seems to have yielded some tangible results when things like bird flu are making their rounds.

cpursley 2y ago

I built a little project to help with this over the break, still needs a lot of work - hopefully helpful for folks looking to connect with their local farmer: https://www.farmersstand.com/farmers-markets https://www.farmersstand.com/farmers-markets

Sokron 2y ago

Ballsack