About them egg prices

What is up with the high price of eggs?

The price of eggs continues to go up. It has become political and apparently goes beyond the free market system. You can blame the president if you want. I know that people definitely blamed the last president. Neither blaming the current president nor blaming the last one is going to make much difference since neither president has much to do with the price of eggs even if they claim to.

Now… What is really going on with them eggs?

Well… How far back should I go?

What follows is a VERY oversimplified version of what happened with egg prices: Note that I am NOT an economist.

Back in the day, Covid screwed everything up. People were made to stay home to Covid couldn’t spread so much. Money was borrowed or ‘printed’ to feed the people and that caused inflation and that caused prices to rise. That is what inflation does. Lots of things can cause inflation and most of them are beyond my pay grade.

OK, that is back in the day. What about now?

Right now it is the Bird Flu that is causing egg prices to go up. Farmers are being shut down because bird flu gets into their hen houses and the farmer has to euthanize all his chickens so that the flu has less chance of A. Jumping to other animals and possibly humans. B. Spreading to other chicken farms.

Say what you want about the politics of the deal, the facts are that chickens are being killed and that is causing the price of eggs to go up. Blame whoever you want, blame doesn’t help the price of eggs. Protesting in the streets might, but not simple blame and talking to your friends about that blame.

What can be done about it? Right now, not much. We are in the system we are in and that is the way it is. We made this bed and now we are going lie in it whether we like it or not.

Going forward then, what can be done about it? Well, not that you asked me, but I will tell you anyway. Remember that I a small farmer at heart so what do you expect me to say? Take what I say with a large boulder of salt.

Since only a single farm at a time has chickens that are being slaughtered because they have bird flu… How about we make more farms and split the farms up? How about we put some space between each of the smaller chicken farms? That will at least make the spread slower.

There are tradeoffs. More smaller farms means there will not be nearly the economies of scale that the big farms have. I don’t know the exact math but my experience tells me it takes one guy to feed and care for about 200 laying hens. That guy will also bed doing other things than taking care of those chickens. I would guess it also takes one guy to feed and care for about 20,000 laying hens as long as there is a bunch of automation and the chickens are not treated very well.

Once chicken lays about one egg per day while she is in her laying season. This is a rule of thumb and is not horribly accurate but it is the existing rule of thumb.

One guy for 200 eggs per day is going to bring the cost of eggs up also! Can’t we have both cheap eggs and small farms? Well… Probably not.

Here is some additional data just to make things interesting: I have a cousin who buys his eggs from an Amish neighbor and has been spending about a dollar per dozen for those eggs. My Amish meat chicken guy has eggs for sale SOMETIMES and they go for about 2 bucks per dozen. So that makes it sound like if the egg producer is doing other stuff besides producing eggs, he might be able to produce them cheaper? Maybe, it requires more study.

I brought eggs to customers in Chicago and Minneapolis about 3 years ago. That lasted for about 2 months. It was a LOT of work running around the country finding eggs, paying cash for them, bringing them home, sticking them in the fridge, bringing them to the cities without breaking them and while keeping them refrigerated. Those were the easy parts. I figured that part out pretty quickly. It wasn’t all that difficult, just took a bunch of work. Making sure that the Customer got her eggs and they weren’t still in the van after we left the customer’s stop was the hard part for me. Driving 50 miles back to that customer’s stop to deliver a dozen eggs after you get done with the route and find you have an extra dozen eggs still in the van is not fun, nor is it profitable. In the end, it was just too much work and hassle to build out a whole new delivery plan just for eggs. So we quit doing eggs. I think we were charging about 6 bucks per dozen back then for actual pastured eggs. That was about what pastured eggs were costing in Whole Foods at the time.

I guess the upshot of this post so far is that there are tradeoffs. It is either going to cost more to have a bunch of small farms making eggs OR it is going to cost more because the fragile system of producing eggs cheaply is going to crash once in a while.

Personally I think that if there were someone with a van who lived somewhat close to a city, he could make a living by going around to bunches of small farmers, picking up eggs and delivering them to health food stores in the city. The more distance you put into the equation, the harder it will be and the more it will cost unless there are some pretty significant economies of scale. There…. Economies of scale! We have the current system again!

I think I will just stick with frozen meat for right now. There might be someone out there who lives closer to the city who would be willing and able to do an egg thing.

IF someone does the egg thing successfully, there is a MUCH better chance of higher quality eggs being available for lower cost in the city. AND there is a much better chance of there being many more small farmers producing eggs for their neighboring city.

If someone out there knows somebody who might want to do the egg deal, here are some suggestions based upon my foray into the egg space and what I have learned by delivering meat the way we do now.

a. Live within 50 miles of the city.

b. Figure out what the licensing is. Maybe there are government license hurdles that make this plan impossible.

c. You will also need to learn about how clean the eggs need to be, how much time it takes to wash them if they need that, etc, etc. There are LOTS of things that you will need to learn.

d. Do NOT spend more money than you can gamble with. This is a gamble at least to start with.

e. DO THE MATH. Almost constantly. You need to at first guess and later know exactly how much it costs to drive a mile and that includes ALL costs of the vehicle, including repairs and licensing and insurance. There are MANY other costs: How much are egg cartons? How much is a used fridge? How much does it cost to stop at the Kwik Trip and get something to eat? How much should you pay yourself? On and on.

f. Locate how many egg farmers there are near you.

g. Find out how much they want for pastured eggs.

h. Figure out some quality control protocol to test the eggs because if you don’t you are going to wind up people raising chickens in dirty, crowded coops and your product will be no better than what is sold at the big box store. That will cause you to lose customers

i. Set up some kind of delivery thing. I suggest doing it without delivering eggs to every house. Make a pickup location thing if you can. You will be able to get more product out for less cost.

j. Start without spending a lot of money. Get some used fridges on Craigslist or FB Marketplace.

k. Once you have scoped out how to do the whole thing and have a small operation running, expand it.

l. Make sure you pay yourself something no matter how small your operation is. If you don’t pay yourself something, you will probably burn out and quit.

No worries.

SV