AgriLife Expert: Higher egg prices will be the norm for years

Laying facilities will take years to recover

Writer: Robert Burns, 903-834-6191, [email protected]

COLLEGE STATION – It will be several years before laying facilities recover from the recent outbreak of avian influenza in the Midwest and for egg prices to return to pre-outbreak levels, according to a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service poultry expert.

Though Texas poultry producers have so far been spared from the latest outbreak, Iowa is the top egg-producing state in the U.S., and tens of millions of laying hens were lost, said Dr. Craig Coufal, AgriLife Extension poultry specialist, College Station.

“It’s a matter of supply and demand, analogous to the rise in beef prices because of lower herd inventories due to the drought,” Coufal said.

And also like beef herd rebuilding, getting new flocks raised to where production can begin again will take years, he said.

“It takes 17 to 18 weeks for a day-old baby chick to become a mature hen to start producing eggs,” he said. “So right there, you got about five six months before you get some new laying hens producing at a high rate.”

Also, most larger egg facilities are “multi-age farms,” Coufal said. This means that a egg facility may have 10 houses on the farm, but all 10 houses will have different age birds.

“That way, when they rotate the old flock out and bring a new flock in, they are continuously going through that cycle from house one to house 10 over time, and they have constant egg flow,” he said. “They don’t replace all 10 houses at once, so they don’t lose all production when they rotate the old birds out. In order to rotate those flocks in and replace them, it’s going to take years.”

But before flock rebuilding begins, the facilities must dispose of millions of dead birds and completely clean and sanitize the houses, “right down to any cobwebs,” to ensure there’s not another outbreak, Coufal said. This process is currently ongoing, and it will be months before they can bring in the first laying flocks.

Coufal said the larger laying facilities – those with the infrastructure for million bird capacities – will likely have the capital to recover. Some of the smaller farms – those with a 100,000 birds or less – may not, but their share of the production will eventually be taken over by the larger producers.