The economics of bird flu, and don’t eat raw food if you are a cat
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/business/egg-prices-bird-flu-producers.html
… The egg production industry has consolidated over the last three decades. Cal-Maine has acquired more than two dozen companies since 1989. It and four other large producers control roughly half of the egg market in the United States. The others are privately held and don’t make their financials public. The second largest of the group, Rose Acre Farms, has 17 facilities in seven states across the South and Midwest. Another large producer, Daybreak Foods, supplies eggs to McDonald’s, and Hillandale Farms sells in grocery stores under its own name and as a private label brand. (None of the companies responded to requests for interviews.)
The bird flu that hit the United States in 2022 has infected or killed 162 million birds thus far, slashing the number of egg-laying chickens. Cal-Maine has reported outbreaks at two of its farms in the last two years, which resulted in the loss of 2.6 million chickens and young hens.
But as consumers confront empty shelves in their grocery stores and prices soar in some places to over $10 for a dozen eggs, the concentration of egg production in fewer hands is raising concerns, stoked by previous findings. Two years ago, the largest producers were found liable for inflating prices in the 2000s. Now, some lawmakers are calling for federal regulators to investigate the industry….
According to the Financial Times, the private majority owners (4 daughters and a son-in-law of the founder) of Cal Maine are working to cash out their shares. Why not, when they are remarkably high?
Meantime, cats seem particularly susceptible to severe illness from bird flu. Two lots of RAW cat food were found to cause the disease in cats. Good thing we are not cats.
From Matt Stoller:
The immediate problem with eggs, for instance, is high prices and shortages, but the longer-term problem is that the industry is destroying itself. Usually what happens is that monopolists or cartels impose bureaucratic hurdles inside an industry, which manifest as endless red tape, junk fees, bullshit certification requirements, exclusive dealing arrangements, kickbacks, or otherwise fake prices. The increasing Soviet-style experience we’re having opens the space for someone like Elon Musk to make a broad claim about an unaccountable bureaucratic elites running roughshod over everyone else, and use it to dismantle public institutions. Musk is framing America as in crisis, unable to build or solve problems. And he’s not wrong about the diagnosis.
Clearly, there is a lot of work to be done to get the production of foodstuffs in the US back on track. I published an earlier version of the graph below in early 2024. This version came from Matt Stoller. Since early last year, the US has been importing even more of our food, which is a dangerous place to be for the former breadbasket of the western hemisphere.
