The end-of-day chitchat among the parents at my kid’s school tends to revolve around the usual pleasantries: soccer schedules, the weather, the latest snow report from Mt. Baker, our local ski resort. On a recent afternoon, however, the talk among the moms and dads as we kept half an eye on a hotly contested game of four-square swerved to a somewhat unusual topic—eggs.
Where was the best place to find them? Which brands were available? Were any stores completely out? Parents rattled off reports of what they had seen at various places, from the big box outlets to the local food co-op, from high-end Whole Foods to discounters like Grocery Outlet and WinCo. “And,” someone sighed, “Can you believe the prices?” I listened and nodded, secure in the knowledge that I had six fresh eggs, straight from the backyard, on my kitchen counter.
Eggs are suddenly a conversation starter as the latest wave of highly pathogenic avian flu clobbers U.S. poultry farmers in the worst outbreak of the virus since 2022. In December, some 13.2 million laying hens either succumbed to the disease or were culled as a result of the flu, dominated by the H5N1 subtype. In the first six weeks of this year, 23.5 million have already died. Altogether, more than 159 million poultry livestock in the U.S. have died due to the virus over the last three years.
So far, the risks to humans remains low. However, public health experts worry that the Center for Disease Control’s ability to release updates on the virus might be compromised. The agency recently found that the virus may be spreading undetected in cows and in veterinarians who treat them—but that study was omitted from an agency report released this month, after the Trump administration’s pause on federal health-agency communications.
Meanwhile, in a repeat of the 2022 outbreak, the virus has once again led to a sharp price spike and sent restaurants and shoppers scrambling for eggs. Social media is awash with reports of bare grocery-store shelves. Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen—an all time-record. The wholesale price restaurants pay is even higher, recently topping $7 a dozen. Waffle House recently announced that it was placing a 50-cent surcharge on every egg it cooks.
The virus’s impacts on the poultry industry—and, to a lesser extent, on dairy production—may well be the biggest interruption to the U.S. food system since the COVID-19 quarantine, which created a rush on vegetable seeds and baby chicks.
Such shocks to the food system are evidence of some of the inherent weaknesses of an industrialized and highly concentrated agriculture sector. Just 20 firms raise more than two-thirds of the roughly 380 million laying hens in America. To some people, such concentration is an asset, proof of the impressive productivity of modern agriculture. But concentration, it turns out, comes with its own risks—especially with a highly pathogenic virus on the loose.
When a few chickens get sick in a facility that has millions of other chickens, the whole flock gets wiped out. When that happens again and again, in state after state, prices inevitably shoot upward. Concentration may lead to efficiencies, but it also comes with brittleness. As a nation, we have too many eggs in one industrialized basket.
There are, though, other ways of making an omelet. Even though they are not immune from the ravages of the virus, smaller-scale and pasture-raised poultry operations have, so far, shown themselves to be more resilient against the outbreak, some experts say—even if that’s only because their smaller size is a check against hundreds of thousands of birds dying all at once at a single location.
And there’s another option for maintaining a steady supply of eggs: home-scale chicken flocks.
The eggs on my countertop came courtesy of the five laying hens my family keeps on our suburban Bellingham, Washington homestead. Such abundance affords me a measure of detachment when after-school talk turns to egg prices.
But as the virus spreads, and news comes of egg farmers holding emergency meetings in Washington, D.C. and of backyard birds getting sick too, I’ve begun to wonder whether my own chickens are worth the trouble, and whether keeping them is safe for my family.
The Origin of Bird Flu
Bird flu has been with us for nearly 30 years now. Most people first heard the term “avian flu” back in 1997, when a spillover event in Hong Kong led to six human deaths. Since then, human cases have been exceedingly, thankfully rare. But in the intervening decades the once-novel virus has become widespread among wild fowl. It has jumped to other animals, including domesticated cows and wild marine mammals like seals and sea lions. And it has infected humans, though the risk to the public is minimal, at least for now.
The virus can spread by direct contact, as well as through the air, which makes it highly contagious. Biologists estimate that in recent years millions of wild birds have died from the virus. The disease has been especially hard on waterfowl like geese and ducks, though few bird species have been spared. Bird flu has caused deaths of bald eagles, especially chicks before they fledge. An outbreak among the endangered California condors has set back efforts to recover that species.
“What we do know is that the virus is now endemic in some wild birds, like wild ducks that move through our country,” says Carol Cardona, a professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences at University of Minnesota. “We know that is partially why we keep getting these seasonal outbreaks.”
Every year, tens of millions of migratory birds travel from the northern latitudes southward, and they inevitably cross paths with domesticated flocks. During a recent briefing for reporters, Maurice Pitesky, a cooperative extension agent at the University of California, Davis used California as an example.
Source: Civil Eats
