3w ago

This is why Canada has plenty of eggs — and the U.S. doesn't

www.npr.org /2025/03/18/nx-s1-5330454/egg-shortages-record-prices-usda-canada

Summary

Canada has avoided the severe egg shortages and soaring prices seen in the U.S. due to differences in farming practices and regulations.

While avian flu has devastated large American egg farms, Canada’s smaller farms and tightly sealed barns have limited the impact.

The U.S.’s industrialized egg industry, driven by cost efficiency, is vulnerable to supply shocks when outbreaks occur.

Canada’s supply management system ensures stable production and restricts imports, keeping farms smaller. Meanwhile, U.S. consumers face continued egg price surcharges and supply pressures.

Politics @sh.itjust.works

pelespirit @sh.itjust.works

3w ago

This is why Canada has plenty of eggs — and the U.S. doesn't

www.npr.org /2025/03/18/nx-s1-5330454/egg-shortages-record-prices-usda-canada

75 comments

Despite the trade war, the U.S. government has one potential solution to help meet demand and keep egg prices from climbing even higher: temporarily increasing egg imports.
I think the world should tacitly embargo the USA for eggs, since Trump doesn't care to treat any trading partner well.
- I don't think it should be tacit. It should be explicit - no eggs, no meat, no fish, no natural resource produced within the USA should be imported or exported. And if the US government won't do that, let the rest of the world manage it.
- I think it would be more fun if they did it explicitly instead of tacitly.
- I think we should get Elon to attach rockets to America and launch the whole place into space
  
  I was thinking of building those border walls they want so much, and then put an airtight lid on it. That should calm them down.
  
  Nah just the white house.
  
  launch the whole place ~~into space~~ to Mars.
- Can't, would increase the trade deficit for US and then Trump will rave they're stealing and laughing at the them and use it to start new bullshit. Watch Trump's snake parable, he (now U S) is the snake or scorpion. Helping only hurts the one who shows what they will inevitably label as weakness.

It's worth noting that supply management is a type of central planning where we centrally determine how much we'll produce and what the price of production will be.
Individual, often small, farmers then produce those eggs and get paid this price. The price and quantities are set so that it's sustainable for farmers to produce. Farmers have the certainty they'll sell their product at a decent price. They aren't at the mercy of the market putting them underwater after they've spent large amounts of capital to produce.
Consumers pay a generally higher price for eggs than the absolute minimum possible, but we also avoid paying much higher prices during shocks and shortages. Our farming sector isn't consolidated by necessity of achieving the lowest price.
We do this with more than eggs.
- That sounds like socialism which is bad because it's bad. Look what happened in Canada, they didn't pay animal and worker abusingly low prices and now they don't have insanely high prices. Without causing these situations they are denying large parts of their population high sustained cortisol levels.
  This is why we need to maintain our threats of annexation. We must provide them the stress that their government denies them.
- Broiler chickens, dairy, and other poultry industries have this.
  We should bring it back for crops (return of CWB)?
  
  I think Harper sold it to the Saudis. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some provisions that bind Canada to not create a new board. With that said we should absolutely create a new board. Use the crisis. I guess we'll see how much of a Keynesian Carney is. Assuming we elect him of course.
- I mean, central planning would be more like the dairy board, but both the prices they sell for and the prices the farmers pay to suppliers are fixed at weird values, so they never can afford quite enough containers for the amount of product they produce, and have no reason to add new cheeses until things build to a crisis point and politicians are involved.
  Nothing is centrally controlled outside of what a normal business controls AFAIK, so it's more of a plain legally enforced monopoly, like monarchs used to grant by letters of patent.

But perhaps the biggest difference is that egg farms in Canada are much smaller, so when one farm does suffer a flu outbreak, the effects are less far-reaching. The typical egg farm in Canada has about 25,000 laying hens, whereas many farms in the U.S. have well over a million. In effect, American farmers have put a lot more of their eggs in a relatively small number of baskets.
About what you would expect.
- A million. Christ. Probably all caged living awful lives, poor things.
  I have 2 backyard chickens and they are really happy. Fresh eggs every day.
  
  Don't worry 50% get shredded instantly because they are riosters.
- The US has frequent salmonella outbreaks as well, most countries vaccinate the hens but the US poultry industry said that 14 cents per bird would harm profits....
- In other words - taking capitalism to the extreme to cut costs.
  “What if we just pay chicken farmers for their eggs and sell them?”
  “But it will be much more cost effective if we cram these million chickens into a warehouse and drive the small guys out of business!”
  
  This is not a capitalist-specific issue. This is an anti-competitive-specific issue.

driven by cost efficiency,
It's not so cost efficient now is it?
Poor safety standards is a short term strategy.
- Have you seen egg producer profits lately? It's great for them to have an opportunity to find out exactly how much consumers are willing to pay for their precious eggs. Super cost efficient, for them.
  
  Profits <> cost efficiency.
  Obviously those that have eggs good enough to sell, like small producers, make more money. But those that had to put down all their chickens are more likely to go bankrupt.
- Not necessarily. The long-term / short-term focus is a red herring. Without intervention, the system drives people to focus on ever shorter term in order to compete. Because firms can fail due to competition in the short run, before any negative effects of the short term thinking of the competitor have materialized. It's even possible to consolidate the market before "the chickens come home to roost." And then you have the mitigating factors - once you consolidate a critical market, your problems are the society's problem and the society will pay to resolve the issues from your short-term thinking. And then you have the ability to get out of the market before the big problems start showing up. Put all of this together and you can see that the completion for profit in a competitive market can easily drive shorter and shorter term planning without the winning players facing consequences. If it's not profitable to focus on long term planning and the system uses profit to determine success from failure... I think we can't expect individuals or even firms to focus on the long term.
  
  In theory that could all sound very true.
  But the investments need to pay themselves back, and setting up large agricultural production takes time to earn back the investment. So there are limits as to how short term you can invest.
  This is probably the lowest denominator disease, where investments become more and more irresponsible, because of lack of regulation that set a lower bar for how irresponsible you can be.
  Kind of the same as with the financial crisis almost 20 years ago, that caused an economic slump for 10 years. I wouldn't be surprised if the egg market similarly will take a decade to return to normal.

i'm kind of surprised us hasnt just been disregarding the avian flu and used the diseased chickens as if there was nothing wrong, that would fit with everything else going on
- RFK Jr seems to be leaning that way right now, suggesting they should just let it spread.

TL;DR version: Late Stage Capitalism
- Yuuuuuuup. Too many business went vertical and tried to claim majority of the market but that just doesn’t work long term. It’s all about small and medium size company’s growing horizontal and employing people. You can say these capitalist corporations put too many eggs and one basket and they’re showing in plain sight how they’re failing. Good example how other countries are doing is similar to Trader Joe’s and “hipster”(is there a better name for this?) restaurants working with small local farms. Medium scale is In n out/chipotle/chicfila & Costco. There shouldn’t be anything large scale except supply and employment.

So, to summarise, don't put all your eggs into one basket.

Another major factor is that Canada raises more of their chickens indoors due to how cold it gets, significantly decreasing their risk of exposure to avian flu.
The US has way more free-range chickens, and free-range chickens are most at risk.
- Yes and no. Free range in America means "raised in a huge building and never seeing sunlight." Basically what separates them from cage free is that thousands of birds all share one giant cage instead of four birds to a cage inside the larger cage.
  Pasture raised are the ones that get to go outside and eat bugs in the sunshine.
  
  Free range vs pasture raised in America
  Canada is a bit different in its designations. 'Free run' means they're in the barn and 'free range' means they have access outside the barn (weather permitting ofc).
  
  The chickens that are outside eating bugs in the sunshine are the most likely to catch avian flu due to exposure to wild birds 😕
  
  And they pick each other to death in those "free range" areas.
- Not sure if it's still this way, but a documentary years ago described the ridiculous technicality that allowed a farm to call themselves free range. It was like a door that led outside to a 4 foot cube area shared by thousands and thousands of chicken. Basically enough room for like three chickens to spread their wings... If they happened to find the door, and it wasn't already crowded... And they were actually able to walk.
- actually its overcrowding in farms too, they have indoor farms where its considered free range, but enough chickens to become crowded and you see dead chickens that are discovered til later.
- I wish more people knew that information.
- I’ve seen tons of videos of people who actually free range their chickens, actually outside, and they’ve had no avian flu problems with their chickens. 🤔
  
  You've seen some videos of free range chickens that don't have avian flu and think that constitutes evidence that avian flu isn't a problem for free range chickens...?

Eggs are now the most common thing being seized at the Mexican border too atm.

In the annals of future history, ww3 was started because of eggs.
- No, Civil War 2 is eggs, WW3 is because the US tried to take over Greenland, Canada, and Panama… perhaps to get more eggs.
  
  "These invasions, collectively called the Egg Wars..."

Maybe because Canada isn't a shithole country?

It’s one egg, Michael. How much could it cost? Ten dollars?

The US in this is the spitting stereotypical image of a man building something, and going "What's this? Don't need manuals. (Throws manual away)", and then wondering why nothing fits, why some parts don't seem to have a place to go, and some other parts are missing.
Why regulations? They serve no purpose. Why does no one import US hormone-riddled meat and heavily synthesized food products? I really wonder.
- It would be nice if that was the process. Instead it's the extraction of ever increasing profit that drives this. The big factory farms didn't occur out of not knowing how to farm. They were created as the well established way to decrease costs per unit produced, at least initially. Then large factory farms allow consolidation of production, since they can only be built and operated by large capital, and small farmers don't have it. Then the few owners of these farms are free to set the prices of whatever they produce as high as the market will bear. The owners now also have the leverage to get less regulation, since regulations generally increase costs.
- In this specific example the regulators are doing their jobs, although a few HHS employees were fired in the early days of the Trump admin there have still been large-scale culls for infected livestock to prevent further spread.
  Instead, this is an example of how important antimonopoly laws are and how the USA just straight up ignores it. Canadian egg farms are less than a twentieth the average size, less birds get infected and culled as a result.

I wonder if that’s also the reason pasture raised eggs are cheaper and more available than the other types of eggs where I live. I kid you not, the pasture raised eggs are $3-$4 less than the other types. Free range eggs are $2-$3 cheaper. There are also backyard eggs available for even cheaper.
- they usually are more expensive than free range, followed by garden and restorative which are the most expensive ones, plus the eggs that produce different color or textures, which uses different farming pratices.
- There are actually more free range chickens in the USA than in Canada due to the weather.

Eggs are so cheap here in Canada that I'm just buying them to throw them away!
- Help our neighbours to the south and hurl them at American owned businesses
- It's not your fault a cyber truck drove by
  
  Hm, it seems eggs stick to stainless steel pans particularly well, in case anyone finds that useful

That is also the reason why the US has to wash the eggs and chlorinate the chicken.
- they step in thier own shit and urine all day.

75 comments