Demand hits hatcheries hard
High prices, food insecurities spur shortage of fresh chicks of prolific egg-laying breeds
Which shortage came first: the chicks or the eggs?
Spooked by a huge spike in egg prices, some consumers are taking steps to secure their own future supply. Demand for chicks that will grow into egg-laying chickens — which jumped at the onset of the pandemic in 2020 — is leaping again as the 2023 selling season starts, leaving hatcheries scrambling to keep up.
“Everybody wants the heavy layers,” said Ginger Stevenson, director of marketing at Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa.
Her company has been running short on some breeds of especially prolific egg producers, partly as families try to hedge their bets against skyrocketing prices and constrained egg availability.
“When we sell out, it’s not like, well, we can make another chicken,” she said. McMurray’s experience is not unique. Hatcheries around the country are reporting demand is surprisingly robust this year. Many attribute the spike to high grocery prices, and particularly to rapid inflation for eggs, which in December cost 60% more than a year earlier.
“We’re already sold out on a lot of breeds — most breeds — until the summer,” said Meghan Howard, who runs sales and marketing for Meyer Hatchery in northeast Ohio. “It’s those egg prices. People are really concerned about food security.”
Google search interest in “raising chickens” has jumped markedly from a year ago. The shift is part of a broader phenomenon: A small but rapidly growing slice of the U.S. population has become interested in growing and raising food at home, a trend that was nascent before the pandemic and has been invigorated by the shortages it spurred.
“As there are more and more shortages, it’s driving more people to want to raise their own food,” Stevenson observed on a January afternoon, as 242 callers to the hatchery sat on hold, presumably waiting to stock up on their own chicks and chickrelated accessories.
Raising chickens for eggs takes time and upfront investment. Brown-egglayer chicks at McMurray’s cost roughly $4 apiece, and coops can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to construct.
The surge in bird-raising interest underscores how America’s first experience of rapid inflation and shortages since the 1980s is leaving marks on society that may last after cost increases have faded. And the story of the chick and the egg — one in which supply problems have piled atop one another to create rapid inflation and inflict hardship on consumers — is a sort of allegory for what has happened in the economy as a whole since 2020.
Prices on a wide variety of products have soared in recent years as unusually strong demand for goods — spurred by pandemic lifestyle changes and savings amassed from stimulus checks — choked global shipping routes and overwhelmed factories and other producers.
Prices for eggs have started to decline. The Agriculture Department said recently that the average price of a carton of large eggs was just under $3.40, down from more than $5.00 at the start of the year.
But that’s still about twice what a carton of eggs cost at this time last year, and it could take months for prices to return to more normal levels as commercial farms rebuild their depleted stocks.