FAYETTEVILLE — That omelet is costing more again thanks to highly pathogenic avian influenza, but Jada Thompson says the egg price rollercoaster has a downhill side too.
According to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, since February 2022, HPAI has been detected in more than 1,400 flocks affecting 149.96 million birds. From Jan. 1-30 of this year, more than 19.63 million birds have been affected including 71 commercial flocks and 43 backyard flocks. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS, is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“The same similar thing happened at the end of 2022 and into 2023,” said Thompson, associate professor and poultry economist with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
“What you have is very tight supply,” she said. “We were down about 3 percent in egg layer supply at the time and we're down about 3 percent in supply right now.”
The number of egg crates in the grocery stores is also affected by a tiny bit of “just-in-case” buying by consumers.
“We see the egg prices, and then consumers are responding,” Thompson said. “There's a bit of people buying all the eggs because they're concerned about the availability”
Flu cycles
While the season for bird flu cycles with spring and fall wildfowl migrations, the rhythm of the egg cycle has its own complexities. Thompson said the retail cycle moves with the holidays when consumers tend to buy more eggs. And then there’s the biology.
“The high demand tends to coincide with periods of the year where egg laying kind of drops off a little, due to it being colder and the amount of light changes. There are hormonal effects to egg laying,” she said. “Then in summer, the bird flu starts ebbing and then it picks up in the fall.”
When bird flu is detected, the flocks need to be depopulated because the current strain of the disease has such a high mortality rate. Whether it’s turkeys, broilers or egg layers, it takes time to replace the birds — “there's also kind of a bit of a biological lag in that price recovery system and for the supply chain.”
Looking back at 2023, as spring moved on, “we didn't have as many cases of bird flu. We didn't have as many birds out of the system, and so prices kind of recovered, and those stories fall away, and we don't think about it,” Thompson said.
However, 2024 is reminding consumers of what was forgotten in the summer of 2023.
“We started seeing a bit more of an uptick. We saw a little bit more shocks to the market,” she said.
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