US Egg Shortage: Why I’m Not Panicking

Since January this year, the US has faced a widespread egg shortage triggered by avian flu. With supplies running low, numerous supermarkets have imposed purchase limits, and empty shelves have become a frequent sight. Meanwhile, egg prices have soared in response. Americans, accustomed to the daily availability of cheap eggs, have been left voicing widespread frustration.

This scenario strikes a chord of familiarity; after all, the last egg shortage was merely two or three years ago. Yet to me, these reports remain strictly headlines on screens, for my own supply has gone uninterrupted. When the 2022 egg crisis hit, the ten hens in my backyard were at their laying peak, providing six to nine eggs a day, allowing us to weather the storm with ease. Though my own coop is now silent, I am well connected with direct-to-consumer organic smallholders within a few dozen miles. Consequently, my family’s weekly requirement of four to five dozen eggs has remained steadily met.

As recently as two days ago, I spotted Valori—whom I call my ‘egg lady’—posting in our local community group to let people know she was well stocked. Her organic free-range eggs go for $6 a dozen, undercutting supermarket prices.

I live in a small ranching town in Texas. I’ve checked the local supermarkets, as well as several stores in a larger nearby city with a population of 120,000. Regardless of whether you’re looking for standard, organic, or free-range eggs, stock remains relatively plentiful. Prices have ticked up slightly, by roughly $0.50 a dozen on average.

The current shortage appears to be concentrated in California and major eastern cities. Yet experiences vary even within California itself. A close friend of mine, Maya, who lives in central California, told me she buys her eggs from a neighbour who keeps a backyard flock. At $6 less a dozen than supermarket prices, it’s a bargain. Her neighbour’s birds roam free outdoors and are untouched by the avian influenza outbreaks plaguing intensive farms, so Maya has no fears of running out. By contrast, every supermarket in her vicinity has already put up signs restricting purchases to two cartons per customer.

Meanwhile, my friend Nichole, who lives in central Pennsylvania, says she had just been to the supermarket, where even a dozen of the most basic non-organic eggs were costing $9. “I could barely believe my own eyes.”

Like me, Nichole has her own local “egg lady”. Though our egg ladies are worlds apart, their standards are identical: the hens are kept free-range outdoors and fed organic feed. The price is even better: $4 a dozen. Neither their supply nor their prices have been touched by bird flu. Nichole says she’s grateful that her egg lady hasn’t taken advantage of the shortage to hike prices, continuing to sell eggs to her at the original rate.

I checked in with the farming enthusiasts in my online circles, and the picture is pretty consistent: for those of us who already established local egg supply chains, the egg shortage has barely made a dent.

As for the root cause of the US egg shortage, my answer is unequivocal: it is an inevitable recurrence brought about by concentrated rearing and centralised supply chains. The United States’ recent egg shortages have all erupted within intensive factory farms. Modern society is conditioned to laud industrial livestock farming, regarding the cheap meat, eggs, and dairy it delivers as a boon to humanity. Yet, the frequent safety and hygiene failures of industrial farming have long laid bare just how fragile our modern food supply chain truly is. Nevertheless, most people seem to cling to an almost faith-like devotion to industrial agriculture.

As part of the minority, I have turned my back on supermarket aisles and shifted to raising my own hens and sourcing free-range eggs from local organic smallholders, primarily for two reasons.

The first is health. I have long been aware of numerous studies indicating that free-range eggs contain significantly higher levels of various nutrients than those from intensively farmed birds. To cite just one instance: in 2014, German scientists found that eggs from outdoor free-range hens contained 3.76 times the vitamin D3 of those from hens kept indoors.

Ordinary consumers cannot simply go around testing eggs for nutritional profiles or veterinary residue levels, but our palates can serve a function not unlike analytical instruments. For the past four or five years, the eggs in my household have either come from our backyard flock or been purchased from neighbouring smallholders practising organic regenerative agriculture. On the rare occasions I have had to resort to supermarket eggs, even when labelled organic, my children have complained that they are bland and lack that rich flavour.

Why, then, do supermarket eggs lack flavour when they are both labelled organic? It becomes easy to understand once you examine their respective “business models”. When I buy eggs from a supermarket, only a small fraction of what I pay actually reaches the poultry farmer. Within this economic and logistical model, the sole incentive for farmers and breeders is to constantly drive down costs to maximise profit.

Meanwhile, as egg industry associations persistently lobby lawmakers to relax standards, the labels on supermarket egg packs have increasingly become hollow selling points. Take “cage-free” and “organic”, for instance. They sound wonderful, yet most supermarket eggs carrying these labels actually come from airtight, factory-style conditions. As long as they meet the bare minimum legal and certification requirements, they pass. Once subjected to chemical washes, disinfectant dips, and long-haul transport, these eggs cannot compare in either nutritional value or flavour to the eggs from my own backyard hens.

The German study mentioned earlier indirectly confirms this. While the eggs the researchers tested were sourced from flocks strictly following indoor and outdoor management protocols, the “free-range” eggs they bought from supermarkets contained surprisingly low levels of vitamin D.

But if my money goes straight to the smallholder farmers in my locality, I can cut out all the middlemen. Only within a system that directly rewards high-quality farming practices do farmers have the genuine incentive to uphold rigorous husbandry standards.

Furthermore, I believe that even setting financial returns aside, whether an egg seller’s customers are local or not profoundly shapes their mindset. Whichever local farm I visit to buy eggs, I can see the living conditions of the hens and exactly what feed they are given. This establishes a form of direct oversight. But more fundamentally, I believe that any producer is naturally more inclined to feel accountable for food safety and quality when serving neighbours in their own community. Conversely, when customers are strangers hundreds of miles away, the producer’s sense of responsibility towards those consumers inevitably dwindles to virtually nothing.

In truth, I believe this very distance is the root cause of modern food safety and quality concerns. Those who grow food and those who eat it are strangers separated by vast distances and an enormous, complex supply chain. Within such a system, producers have little incentive to worry whether pesticide residues might harm consumers, just as consumers remain largely indifferent to whether chemical use degrades the farmland and jeopardises the health of the farmers themselves.

Second, it comes down to my firm conviction that “food production and distribution must be decentralised”. I believe that whether we consider food quality or economic justice, our support should go to small-scale independent farmers, rather than to multinational food conglomerates and the downstream links in their supply chains.

I firmly believe that eating is a political act. For the average American, no matter how heated the Washington election coverage becomes every four years, or which party takes the reins, nothing is more important than tending to one’s own local food ecosystem. During this egg shortage, most people simply sat back passively, waiting for the poultry industry to return to normal. Very few were willing to do as my friends and I have done: stop relying on chain supermarkets as our sole source of food, take a little action, and support the small farmers right in our own communities.

Finally, I’d like to share a small incident from three years ago. It cemented a core belief of mine: only husbandry methods that align with nature provide the fundamental defence against avian disease.

Three years ago, my local friend B and I each kept ten backyard chickens. My birds were free-range in the garden behind movable pens, with their grazing area rotated every few weeks. I bought a coop to shelter them at night, but it was designed to move along with the fencing. To save time and effort, friend B built a permanent, stationary coop that severely restricted the hens’ range. We fed them the exact same organic feed and kitchen scraps.

Compared with intensive poultry farms, the housing in Coop B was already fairly spacious. Each bird had nearly a square metre of space to move around, with good natural light and ventilation. Yet when the summer heatwave struck, nine of her birds suddenly fell ill and died. By contrast, my flock, kept entirely free-range in the open outdoors, weathered Texas’s sweltering summer without a single loss or illness.

These experiences have only strengthened my conviction: reliance solely on top-down policies, legislation and industry regulation will not only fail to deliver food security, but will also be powerless to prevent the next egg shortage.Ultimately, only by rousing more people to channel their own resources and efforts into building localised food systems—for production, transport and supply—that are less susceptible to the grip of large capital, can we find a viable path through the current egg shortage and the increasingly frequent food crises of the future.

Unless otherwise stated, all images are courtesy of the author.

Editor: Tianle