Colorado’s high egg prices are blamed on bird flu, but there’s more to the story – The Colorado Sun

The Colorado Sun
Telling stories that matter in a dynamic, evolving state. Editor’s Picks: The lone wolf of Colorado skiing | Colorado shop class | Immigrant nonprofit ordered to stop workWalk into nearly any grocery store at the moment and the price for a dozen eggs may shock you — if any eggs are in stock at all.More than anything else, blame bird flu, say Colorado egg farmers, the grocery stores, the state agriculture department and nearly anyone involved in getting fresh eggs to consumers. The contagious virus can wipe out entire flocks of egg-laying chickens in days.Coloradans already went through this three years ago when egg prices spiked after 85% of the state’s egg-laying hens were destroyed. There was also high inflation, the state’s looming cage-free law and shortages at pretty much every grocery store. This time, it’s not just new cases of bird flu but old cases, plus out-of-state cases. There are other reasons contributing to price increases and shortages. Some have minor impacts, like Colorado’s cage-free law, which passed in 2020. It went into full effect last month and requires stores to only sell cage-free eggs. The Colorado Egg Producers Association, which represents local egg farmers, said that regulations would add 16% to 18% to a producer’s costs because they had to uncage the chickens and make facilities roomier. But that would have just raised prices by 30-50 cents, not the several dollars consumers are seeing on store shelves. A dozen large eggs at a King Soopers in Centennial on Tuesday was $7.49. Shoppers in Colorado Springs reported paying about $10 for 18 eggs at Walmart on Sunday and a bargain hunter nabbed the last pack of 5 dozen at Costco in northeast Denver for $18.67. At Safeway stores in Salida and Broomfield, a half-dozen pasture-raised eggs was about $6.50. According to the U.S. Consumer Price Index, the average price for eggs as part of a customer’s shopping cart, was up 37% in December from a year earlier, and up 25% since June. A similar CPI measure for average price data was higher. Nationwide, the average price for a dozen grade A eggs was $4.15 in December, up 65.4% from a year earlier and up 52.7% since June. Bill Scebbi, executive director of the association, considered the cage-free law a minor cost increase for the benefits it provides. He even opposed a bill introduced this year to repeal the cage-free law. The bill did not get far.“That’s worth the price if we have an environment that’s more humane,” said Scebbi, who points some blame on higher egg prices on retailers. “Why do some markets have a manager’s special on eggs? (It’s) to get people in. … I think the laws of marketing and the price control at the retail level have more to do with the price of eggs than perhaps the production of eggs.” Many stores are willing to lose money on eggs to attract shoppers. For Natural Grocers, which subsidizes the cost of a dozen free-range eggs for $3.99 for its {N}power loyalty program, the motive is to provide customers with an affordable, healthy meal. “Costs did not increase due to the cage-free laws — because we’ve always been cage-free,” spokesperson Katie Macarelli said in an email. The store hasn’t changed the price since 2022.That doesn’t mean Natural Grocers has an unlimited supply, though. Demand is outpacing supply, she said, and other costs have risen, such as feed prices and packaging costs. Extreme weather had strained “every stage of the supply chain,” she added. “This is especially significant for us because we only carry free-range eggs — meaning our suppliers’ hens must have outdoor access.”Natural Grocers’ farms and vendors that supply eggs have also somehow avoided the avian flu. But what happens elsewhere “still leads to overall supply shortages,” Macarelli said. So … bird flu, also called the highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI. The virus, which can cause a high rate of poultry mortality within days, tends to spread way too easily by infected wild birds during migration season. It has jumped species in recent years, infecting cattle and humans. The current solution, at least for birds, is culling the entire flock.Last July, the virus was discovered at three Weld County egg-laying facilities. More than 3.4 million chickens were soon slaughtered to avoid further spread, according to the state Department of Agriculture. Some workers disposing of the chickens also got sick, bringing the total human infections for the current outbreak to nine in Colorado, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their cases were considered mild and they recovered. The heavy egg losses last year cut into Colorado’s egg supply, which was still recovering from earlier outbreaks in 2022 and 2023 that decimated pretty much the state’s entire 6 million flock of egg-laying hens. Rebuilding flocks can take more than a year. There’s the bird removal, decontamination and cleanup, plus another 100-days-or-so quarantine to make sure the virus is eradicated. Only then can the farmer repopulate the coop, which means buying pullets, or young hens, and raising them to laying age.“But right now, you can’t even do that,” Scebbi said. “If you try to buy baby chicks, you’ve got a three-month waiting period.”Scebbi said that his network of egg producers are currently providing 60% of the eggs they once did. There are still eggs in Colorado even though production is down.“I will tell you that every one of our farms have told me that they have met the demands of the orders that they’ve gotten from stores,” he said. “When people call and say, ‘I can’t find eggs,’ I tell them ‘Go to another store. And when you do buy eggs, buy a pack of 18 or 24 eggs. Don’t go hog wild and buy 15 dozen, because this is still a perishable commodity.’”Colorado is not an island either. Other states that supplied Colorado with extra eggs during the last outbreak may now be sick with the flu themselves. In December, California’s governor issued a state of emergency because of the virus, after the state had a devastating 17.2 million chickens slaughtered and the largest outbreak nationwide. Other factors are at play and could be working in Colorado egg producers’ favor. The state’s cage-free law is one of a handful nationwide. And California, which went cage free before Colorado, has an egg shortage due to its avian flu outbreak. “All of a sudden, our cage-free eggs have huge competition where instead of our eaters buying them, California will, and on average pay $1 or $2 more for them,” said Dawn Thilmany, an agricultural economist at Colorado State University. “Maybe our eggs are getting shipped into California? And you can’t fault the producer for that because if they can make a better price on something by shipping it over a couple of states, they’re going to do it. That’s why this whole global market thing works. It can help them somewhere far away but it might still affect our market.”Thilmany said she doesn’t know for sure if a portion of the state’s meager supply is getting shipped out of state. But others agreed that that’s a likely scenario. Eggs are going in both directions, according to the Department of Agriculture.“We have a number of producers in California who’ve been certified by our department to bring eggs into Colorado,” said Olga Robak, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. “And the fact that so many egg-layer facilities in California were impacted is definitely having an effect on Colorado prices.”Any California farms with bird flu aren’t allowed to ship to anyone. The eggs and hens are destroyed, as part of the USDA trade agreements affecting nationwide egg supply.In 2022 and 2023 during Colorado’s bird-flu outbreak, the state offset low egg supply by getting eggs shipped from other states. Colorado got most of its eggs from Iowa, Missouri, Kansas and Arizona, according to the Department of Agriculture. With outbreaks now in other states, Colorado’s returning the favor.“There are only five commercial egg layers in Colorado. The whole egg system is very interconnected. So just because we have eggs produced in Colorado doesn’t mean we get them,” Robak said. “There’s a lot of shipping between states.”The current strain of bird flu, H5N1, was discovered in 2022. It’s been difficult to eradicate the virus, even after wiping out Colorado’s entire chicken population. Two of the three Weld County farms were previously infected and had already gone through a decontamination process. One was on its third round, Robak said.If you want to get a little technical, when H5N1 was first discovered in dairy cows last year, it had undergone some mutations and genetic changes to genotype B3.13 and appears to be better suited to mammals. But then the dairy strain jumped back to birds, reinfecting the three Weld County egg farms.Farmers are relying on biosecurity measures, such as wearing protective clothing before entering a hen house. Vaccines, while available, have not been adopted by the USDA for birds or humans.  “We keep thinking we have a handle on it. And when we find a strategy, it mutates so that strategy isn’t as effective as we had hoped,” said Thilmany, with CSU. “The ripple effect is … there’s people with various choices of how to use their production resources. At some point in time, they may step away and pivot to a different production enterprise because there’s just too much risk that they don’t want to bear because there really aren’t even very good risk management products or insurance products for this kind of thing.”Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Tamara Chuang writes about Colorado business and the local economy for The Colorado Sun, which she cofounded in 2018 with a mission to make sure quality local journalism is a sustainable business. Her focus on the economy during the pandemic…
More by Tamara Chuang
The Colorado Sun is an award-winning news outlet based in Denver that strives to cover all of Colorado so that our state — our community — can better understand itself. The Colorado Sun is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. EIN: 36-5082144(720) 263-2338Got a story tip? Drop us a note at tips@coloradosun.com

Source: http://coloradosun.com/2025/02/05/colorado-high-egg-prices-bird-flu/