February 21, 2025 • 16 mins
The price of eggs was up 15% in January, driving overall inflation higher. The cause? Bird flu.
We’re joined by farmer Jim Hayes, as well as the hosts of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, to talk about how bird flu threatens the chicken supply chain and public health — and what, if anything, can be done to lower egg prices.
Listen to Beak Capitalism from Odd Lots.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
What are your favorite egg dishes?
Speaker 3 (00:10):
Egg dishes? Yeah, oh, I like fried eggs. I have
fried eggs every morning sunnyside up, yep. And we make
a lot of kish so that's good too.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
Today, like everyone else, you know, we're talking about the
price of eggs.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
I'm Jim Hayes. I work at my farm with my family,
and it's located in West Fulton, New York. It's upstate
New York.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
And how many egg laying hens do you have?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
We have right now we have about one hundred and fifty.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
Jim's a small scale farmer on Sapbush Hollow farm. He
raises chickens for eggs and meat. He also has hogs
and sheep. He sells locally, not to national grocery stores,
but like many poultry farmers in the US right now,
he feels his business is under threat from bird flu.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Well, we go in and out of the barn, you know,
we wash our feet and with the disinfectant and try
to be as calutious as we possibly can. The main
problem where we might get birds the infected is from
traveling waterfowl, and in fact, in our area we had
two identified with bird flu about six or seven miles
(01:23):
from here last week, so we're pretty concerned.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Jim's hens are healthy for now, but he knows how
quickly that could change if.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
The disease gets into your flock. All right, As a
state vet says, you don't have to worry about treating him.
You identify it, call him as soon as possible. But yeah,
I sorry that the majority of the birds will be
dead within forty eight hours. And if they're not, they
come in and they will kill all the birds, all right,
I mean dispose of them.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
The state vet will kill them.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, the state will come in and kill them if
they're not dead already.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
And what would that mean for you if bird came
to your flock and all your chickens had to be killed.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
It's the poultry is diversified. It wouldn't wipe us out,
but it would be a significant hit to our operation,
all right. I would say it would cut our income
by at least thirty five percent.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Jim says he's recently raised his egg prices a little bit,
but if you've been to the grocery store recently, you've
probably seen eggs with eye popping new markups. And even
limits on Carton's per customer. Bird flu is having a
serious effect on the chicken industry, and so in this episode,
we're turning to Bloomberg's Joe Wisenthal and Tracy Alloway. They're
(02:43):
the hosts of the odd Locks podcast, and they've recently
reported out a special series called Beak Capitalism. It's all
about the poultry supply chain. We'll talk about how this
latest outbreak of bird flu is rocking the chicken and
egg markets in the US and what it means for inflation.
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
(03:03):
Bloomberg News. Joe, Tracy, have you tried to buy eggs recently?
How did that go?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
You know what, I'm gonna tell you a secret, which
is I could see this coming months ago, and I
stocked up on a bunch of eggs, So if anyone
needs them, I have a whole fridge filled with eggs.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
I feel guilty about buying eggs like these are like
really hard to get. Or when I go to a
restaurant and I order an omelet, I'm like, Oh, I
wonder if they're now losing money on this because they
haven't updated their menu prices. And stuff like I have
this like every time I just sort of enjoy an egg,
it's like, oh, this is I'm really indulging in a
luxury here.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
The price of pretty much everything at the grocery store
has gotten more expensive over the last few years. But
lately the price of eggs has been hitting record highs,
and Joe and Tracy say bird flu is to blame.
I don't think.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
There's any other real catalyst for some of the increases
we've seen, like, you know, fifteen percent jump in January.
I think over seven dollars as of February seventh average
for a dozen eggs with seven thirty four. You know,
obviously when egg prices went up a lot in twenty
twenty one during the general inflation, you know, there was
(04:18):
a bird flu, but it was also widespread inflation, and
the were issues with feed and there were issues with fertilizer.
This is not really a story of general inflation right now.
This is relative prices and it's eggs specific. It is
unambiguously the bird.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Flu story at a basic level, how do producers set
the price of eggs?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
So this is interesting. It's actually more complicated than maybe
you would have thought. There is an egg board. They
sort of set either baseline prices or wholesale prices the farmers.
The egg farmers will sell their eggs, they'll agree contracts
to sell to wholesalers, think about the big grocery stores
(05:02):
like a Walmart or something like that, and then Walmart
will decide what the final retail price is going to be. Obviously,
they want to make a profit over the wholesale price
that they paid the farmer, and so that's where there's
a decent amount of discretion. I would say for farmers,
some of their contracts they might be locked into a
specific price for a longer period of time, so they
(05:25):
might not necessarily be able to adjust their prices as
quickly if there's a shortage. But certainly on the retail side,
nowadays people can change prices very very quickly in ways
that maybe twenty years ago you really weren't able to
do that much.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Right.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
What about how do producers set the price of chicken?
Is that a similar process? Is there a chicken board?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
I am not sure if there's a chicken board, But
what I would say a lot of people have been asking, well,
if there's all this bird flu and there's an egg shortage.
Why is there not a chicken shortag? Why aren't we
seeing the price of meat go up? And the answer
to that is very simple. It takes a lot longer
to grow an egg laying hen than it does to
(06:09):
grow a meat chicken. Meat chickens, if you don't know,
live very sad and very short lives. They're killed after
basically a few weeks. They hatch, they eat a lot
to get big and fat, and then they're killed and
that takes like a month or a little over a month.
Egg laying chickens you have to wait for them to mature,
(06:31):
and that takes something like six months at least, And
so that's why you're getting this gap. When farmers have
to destroy chickens because they found bird flu in their flock,
it takes them half a year to rebuild that egg
laying flock.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
If a farmer does have to kill all of their
chickens in accordance with federal rules, they will get some
compensation for that loss, but as the upstate New York
poultry farmer Jim Hayes says, that money likely won't replace
the loss in profits.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
I don't know what it would be, but I assure you. Historically,
all over the world where they've had to do this,
none of the farmers has been happy.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
If this government response of killing birds and compensating the
farmers sounds drastic, it's because bird flu has proven to
be highly contagious.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Once it gets in, all right, they come and contact
each other when they go to feed, all right, they'll
go to a feeder, peck a little feed, and then
they'll leave, and then another will go there and they'll leave,
you know, the disease and it's highly contagious, and it
transfers very rapidly, and the morbidity mortality rates morbidity and
(07:41):
mortality are exceedingly high.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Would that be emotional for you if all your chickens doyn.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Of course, yeah. Anytime you know, you've got birds, you
got any animal, all right that dies like that, then
we try to do our best to put it up
with it. Like my grandchildren, the two that are operating
on the farm, all right, once twenty one and one sixteen,
but they each have a couple of pet chickens, all right,
(08:09):
and a pet goose, and they would all go, you know,
so it would be a be significant, all right. It's
a public health situation, and there is the concern now
that this flu has jumped to Derek Cows. One person's
died from it. But as the state that indicated, this
is a flu which is mutating very rapidly, so we
(08:32):
don't know what's going to happen. They could jump into
humans and be a real problem, and that's a concern
and why they're trying to control it.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Coming up after the break, Joe and Tracy on what
bird flu means for the eggs on your plate, whether
you're cooking them at home or eating out, and what
if anything, the Trump administration can do to bring soaring
egg prices back down. I wanted to ask Oddlot's hosts
(09:06):
Joe Wisenthal and Tracy Alloway about how this disease is
starting to impact a few very important stakeholders, the people
and companies who buy eggs.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Restaurants would be an obvious one, and in fact, we've
seen some restaurants respond to this. Waffle House famously has
now instituted a fifty cent surcharge on its egg dishes,
which is disappointing for me and Joe because we're big
waffle House fans, But again, you know, the consumer, the
customer is mostly willing to accept these price hikes because
(09:40):
we know, we all listen to the news and we
hear how big a deal Avian flu is.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
I mean, look, the other thing is part of the
point of price increases is demand destruction, right Like, there
are obviously going to be people at the margin, unfortunately
for whom the price hits a point where like, I'm
going to buy fewer eggs because market it's a balance
out buyers and sellers, and so part of the you know,
one of the things that a price increases do is
(10:05):
decrease the amount of buyers. Now, how many people aren't
ordering an egg at waffle Houser, aren't ordering an omelet
or sunnyside up eggs because of the search arge. I
have no idea, but of course these things will have
an effect on demand, and we you know, we've talked
about it, just like people buying fewer eggs right now
because of the reality of.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
This great eggs are considered an essential but that could
start to change if it hits a certain threshold.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, that's why this is so like such a serious
existential issue for the econversy. Yeah, I know, I didn't
mean to eggs stential, but like you know, we're not
talking about the price of persons here, where it's like.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
A liver, you can live a great shortage of five.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
This is like an essential end product eggs, and also
an ingredient into all kinds of things.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
One of Donald Trump's promises coming into the White House
was to lower the price of eggs. It was a
campaign issue, but the Consumer Price Index shows inflation is
getting worse in general, and in January, egg prices hit
another record high. Is there anything the Trump administration can
do to ease inflation on egg prices? And is he
(11:20):
doing it?
Speaker 2 (11:21):
So this has been the big talking point basically since
the pandemic. Inflation went up for a whole bunch of
reasons that you know, largely were outside of policy makers control.
So it's a little bit ridiculous to see JD. Vance
standing in a grocery aisle saying stuff like from day one,
(11:41):
we're going to lower egg prices, because as we've seen,
it's not that easy. These are very complicated real world problems.
They're difficult to solve, and they certainly take time to solve,
and there's always the risk that bird flu might come back.
That said, you know, there are some things that could help.
(12:02):
So there is a bird flu vaccine specifically for birds,
and some places around the world they use it. The
reason the US doesn't vaccinate its chickens is because of
the export market.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
The US exports a lot of chicken meat and products,
about five point five billion dollars last year, but many
of our trading partners won't import chickens that have been vaccinated.
This has put players within the US poultry industry at
odds with each other. Egg producers tend to be in
favor of a national vaccine strategy, while meat processors are
(12:39):
largely opposed.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Well.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Other parts of the world have been affected by bird
flu outbreaks in the past. Do we know what the
lasting effects of the virus have been on their economies?
Speaker 2 (12:50):
You know what? My favorite example of this is actually
swine fever in China, and this had a really interesting
economic effect. So China had a really bad outbreak of
swine fever. A lot of pigs died, and then the
government basically said, well, we need you to rebuild all
your pork supplies because we don't have enough meat. Meat
(13:12):
is very expensive, and so you saw a bunch of
new pork companies start up business and basically say we're
going to do what the government wants us to do,
and we're going to produce a bunch of pigs. And
then lo and behold, you had an explosion in pork
meat in China and suddenly there was too much capacity,
(13:33):
and so a bunch of these new pork companies ended
up failing because prices went down. Too many of them failed,
and then pork got expensive again, and then ever since then,
this has been going on for years now. You've sort
of seen this boom bust dynamic in China's swine industry,
which kind of highlights again these are difficult problems to
(13:56):
completely eradicate, but also you can be dealing with downstow
stream effects for many many years. Once the economy is
disrupted or a particular industry is disrupted in these types
of ways, it can reverberate for a long time.
Speaker 4 (14:13):
My last question for you too is have we hit
peak eggflation or could things get worse before they get better.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Certainly things can get worse before they get better. I
think the bigger concern is probably can they get better
for how long? If that makes sense. So, again, the
pattern that we've seen is we have these outbreaks, people
kind of get a handle on them, but then maybe
a year or a couple years later, they come back.
(14:45):
And that's a big issue for farmers over the long run.
You know, it's going to make the business not as profitable.
People might decide, you know, it's not worth it being
a chicken farmer anymore. And it certainly makes it difficult
to calibrate how much space they need, how many commercial
houses for chickens, how much investment they should put into
(15:06):
the business. So that's really the big difficulty.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
People at Bloomberg would understand this. Normally, high risk business
has the potential for high return. Agriculture doesn't work that way.
High risk. You're very high risk business, but the return
is very low.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Why do you do it then?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Because you love it?
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Yeah? Yeah, And as I always tell people to visit,
you know, if you can't stand up in the middle
of it today and look around you and enjoy that,
then you'd better not do it.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Jim, You're welcome. Have a good day.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by Alex Hye and David Fox.
It was edited by Tracy Samuelson and Millie Mumshi. It
was fact checked by Adrian A. Tapia and mixed and
sound designed by Alex Sugia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven.
Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is
(16:13):
Nicole beemsterbor Sat Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If
you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review
The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps
people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back
next week.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
What are your favorite egg dishes?
Speaker 3 (00:10):
Egg dishes? Yeah, oh, I like fried eggs. I have
fried eggs every morning sunnyside up, yep. And we make
a lot of kish so that's good too.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
Today, like everyone else, you know, we're talking about the
price of eggs.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
I'm Jim Hayes. I work at my farm with my family,
and it's located in West Fulton, New York. It's upstate
New York.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
And how many egg laying hens do you have?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
We have right now we have about one hundred and fifty.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
Jim's a small scale farmer on Sapbush Hollow farm. He
raises chickens for eggs and meat. He also has hogs
and sheep. He sells locally, not to national grocery stores,
but like many poultry farmers in the US right now,
he feels his business is under threat from bird flu.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Well, we go in and out of the barn, you know,
we wash our feet and with the disinfectant and try
to be as calutious as we possibly can. The main
problem where we might get birds the infected is from
traveling waterfowl, and in fact, in our area we had
two identified with bird flu about six or seven miles
(01:23):
from here last week, so we're pretty concerned.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Jim's hens are healthy for now, but he knows how
quickly that could change if.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
The disease gets into your flock. All right, As a
state vet says, you don't have to worry about treating him.
You identify it, call him as soon as possible. But yeah,
I sorry that the majority of the birds will be
dead within forty eight hours. And if they're not, they
come in and they will kill all the birds, all right,
I mean dispose of them.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
The state vet will kill them.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, the state will come in and kill them if
they're not dead already.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
And what would that mean for you if bird came
to your flock and all your chickens had to be killed.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
It's the poultry is diversified. It wouldn't wipe us out,
but it would be a significant hit to our operation,
all right. I would say it would cut our income
by at least thirty five percent.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Jim says he's recently raised his egg prices a little bit,
but if you've been to the grocery store recently, you've
probably seen eggs with eye popping new markups. And even
limits on Carton's per customer. Bird flu is having a
serious effect on the chicken industry, and so in this episode,
we're turning to Bloomberg's Joe Wisenthal and Tracy Alloway. They're
(02:43):
the hosts of the odd Locks podcast, and they've recently
reported out a special series called Beak Capitalism. It's all
about the poultry supply chain. We'll talk about how this
latest outbreak of bird flu is rocking the chicken and
egg markets in the US and what it means for inflation.
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
(03:03):
Bloomberg News. Joe, Tracy, have you tried to buy eggs recently?
How did that go?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
You know what, I'm gonna tell you a secret, which
is I could see this coming months ago, and I
stocked up on a bunch of eggs, So if anyone
needs them, I have a whole fridge filled with eggs.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
I feel guilty about buying eggs like these are like
really hard to get. Or when I go to a
restaurant and I order an omelet, I'm like, Oh, I
wonder if they're now losing money on this because they
haven't updated their menu prices. And stuff like I have
this like every time I just sort of enjoy an egg,
it's like, oh, this is I'm really indulging in a
luxury here.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
The price of pretty much everything at the grocery store
has gotten more expensive over the last few years. But
lately the price of eggs has been hitting record highs,
and Joe and Tracy say bird flu is to blame.
I don't think.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
There's any other real catalyst for some of the increases
we've seen, like, you know, fifteen percent jump in January.
I think over seven dollars as of February seventh average
for a dozen eggs with seven thirty four. You know,
obviously when egg prices went up a lot in twenty
twenty one during the general inflation, you know, there was
(04:18):
a bird flu, but it was also widespread inflation, and
the were issues with feed and there were issues with fertilizer.
This is not really a story of general inflation right now.
This is relative prices and it's eggs specific. It is
unambiguously the bird.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Flu story at a basic level, how do producers set
the price of eggs?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
So this is interesting. It's actually more complicated than maybe
you would have thought. There is an egg board. They
sort of set either baseline prices or wholesale prices the farmers.
The egg farmers will sell their eggs, they'll agree contracts
to sell to wholesalers, think about the big grocery stores
(05:02):
like a Walmart or something like that, and then Walmart
will decide what the final retail price is going to be. Obviously,
they want to make a profit over the wholesale price
that they paid the farmer, and so that's where there's
a decent amount of discretion. I would say for farmers,
some of their contracts they might be locked into a
specific price for a longer period of time, so they
(05:25):
might not necessarily be able to adjust their prices as
quickly if there's a shortage. But certainly on the retail side,
nowadays people can change prices very very quickly in ways
that maybe twenty years ago you really weren't able to
do that much.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Right.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
What about how do producers set the price of chicken?
Is that a similar process? Is there a chicken board?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
I am not sure if there's a chicken board, But
what I would say a lot of people have been asking, well,
if there's all this bird flu and there's an egg shortage.
Why is there not a chicken shortag? Why aren't we
seeing the price of meat go up? And the answer
to that is very simple. It takes a lot longer
to grow an egg laying hen than it does to
(06:09):
grow a meat chicken. Meat chickens, if you don't know,
live very sad and very short lives. They're killed after
basically a few weeks. They hatch, they eat a lot
to get big and fat, and then they're killed and
that takes like a month or a little over a month.
Egg laying chickens you have to wait for them to mature,
(06:31):
and that takes something like six months at least, And
so that's why you're getting this gap. When farmers have
to destroy chickens because they found bird flu in their flock,
it takes them half a year to rebuild that egg
laying flock.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
If a farmer does have to kill all of their
chickens in accordance with federal rules, they will get some
compensation for that loss, but as the upstate New York
poultry farmer Jim Hayes says, that money likely won't replace
the loss in profits.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
I don't know what it would be, but I assure you. Historically,
all over the world where they've had to do this,
none of the farmers has been happy.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
If this government response of killing birds and compensating the
farmers sounds drastic, it's because bird flu has proven to
be highly contagious.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Once it gets in, all right, they come and contact
each other when they go to feed, all right, they'll
go to a feeder, peck a little feed, and then
they'll leave, and then another will go there and they'll leave,
you know, the disease and it's highly contagious, and it
transfers very rapidly, and the morbidity mortality rates morbidity and
(07:41):
mortality are exceedingly high.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Would that be emotional for you if all your chickens doyn.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Of course, yeah. Anytime you know, you've got birds, you
got any animal, all right that dies like that, then
we try to do our best to put it up
with it. Like my grandchildren, the two that are operating
on the farm, all right, once twenty one and one sixteen,
but they each have a couple of pet chickens, all right,
(08:09):
and a pet goose, and they would all go, you know,
so it would be a be significant, all right. It's
a public health situation, and there is the concern now
that this flu has jumped to Derek Cows. One person's
died from it. But as the state that indicated, this
is a flu which is mutating very rapidly, so we
(08:32):
don't know what's going to happen. They could jump into
humans and be a real problem, and that's a concern
and why they're trying to control it.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Coming up after the break, Joe and Tracy on what
bird flu means for the eggs on your plate, whether
you're cooking them at home or eating out, and what
if anything, the Trump administration can do to bring soaring
egg prices back down. I wanted to ask Oddlot's hosts
(09:06):
Joe Wisenthal and Tracy Alloway about how this disease is
starting to impact a few very important stakeholders, the people
and companies who buy eggs.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Restaurants would be an obvious one, and in fact, we've
seen some restaurants respond to this. Waffle House famously has
now instituted a fifty cent surcharge on its egg dishes,
which is disappointing for me and Joe because we're big
waffle House fans, But again, you know, the consumer, the
customer is mostly willing to accept these price hikes because
(09:40):
we know, we all listen to the news and we
hear how big a deal Avian flu is.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
I mean, look, the other thing is part of the
point of price increases is demand destruction, right Like, there
are obviously going to be people at the margin, unfortunately
for whom the price hits a point where like, I'm
going to buy fewer eggs because market it's a balance
out buyers and sellers, and so part of the you know,
one of the things that a price increases do is
(10:05):
decrease the amount of buyers. Now, how many people aren't
ordering an egg at waffle Houser, aren't ordering an omelet
or sunnyside up eggs because of the search arge. I
have no idea, but of course these things will have
an effect on demand, and we you know, we've talked
about it, just like people buying fewer eggs right now
because of the reality of.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
This great eggs are considered an essential but that could
start to change if it hits a certain threshold.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, that's why this is so like such a serious
existential issue for the econversy. Yeah, I know, I didn't
mean to eggs stential, but like you know, we're not
talking about the price of persons here, where it's like.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
A liver, you can live a great shortage of five.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
This is like an essential end product eggs, and also
an ingredient into all kinds of things.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
One of Donald Trump's promises coming into the White House
was to lower the price of eggs. It was a
campaign issue, but the Consumer Price Index shows inflation is
getting worse in general, and in January, egg prices hit
another record high. Is there anything the Trump administration can
do to ease inflation on egg prices? And is he
(11:20):
doing it?
Speaker 2 (11:21):
So this has been the big talking point basically since
the pandemic. Inflation went up for a whole bunch of
reasons that you know, largely were outside of policy makers control.
So it's a little bit ridiculous to see JD. Vance
standing in a grocery aisle saying stuff like from day one,
(11:41):
we're going to lower egg prices, because as we've seen,
it's not that easy. These are very complicated real world problems.
They're difficult to solve, and they certainly take time to solve,
and there's always the risk that bird flu might come back.
That said, you know, there are some things that could help.
(12:02):
So there is a bird flu vaccine specifically for birds,
and some places around the world they use it. The
reason the US doesn't vaccinate its chickens is because of
the export market.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
The US exports a lot of chicken meat and products,
about five point five billion dollars last year, but many
of our trading partners won't import chickens that have been vaccinated.
This has put players within the US poultry industry at
odds with each other. Egg producers tend to be in
favor of a national vaccine strategy, while meat processors are
(12:39):
largely opposed.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Well.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Other parts of the world have been affected by bird
flu outbreaks in the past. Do we know what the
lasting effects of the virus have been on their economies?
Speaker 2 (12:50):
You know what? My favorite example of this is actually
swine fever in China, and this had a really interesting
economic effect. So China had a really bad outbreak of
swine fever. A lot of pigs died, and then the
government basically said, well, we need you to rebuild all
your pork supplies because we don't have enough meat. Meat
(13:12):
is very expensive, and so you saw a bunch of
new pork companies start up business and basically say we're
going to do what the government wants us to do,
and we're going to produce a bunch of pigs. And
then lo and behold, you had an explosion in pork
meat in China and suddenly there was too much capacity,
(13:33):
and so a bunch of these new pork companies ended
up failing because prices went down. Too many of them failed,
and then pork got expensive again, and then ever since then,
this has been going on for years now. You've sort
of seen this boom bust dynamic in China's swine industry,
which kind of highlights again these are difficult problems to
(13:56):
completely eradicate, but also you can be dealing with downstow
stream effects for many many years. Once the economy is
disrupted or a particular industry is disrupted in these types
of ways, it can reverberate for a long time.
Speaker 4 (14:13):
My last question for you too is have we hit
peak eggflation or could things get worse before they get better.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Certainly things can get worse before they get better. I
think the bigger concern is probably can they get better
for how long? If that makes sense. So, again, the
pattern that we've seen is we have these outbreaks, people
kind of get a handle on them, but then maybe
a year or a couple years later, they come back.
(14:45):
And that's a big issue for farmers over the long run.
You know, it's going to make the business not as profitable.
People might decide, you know, it's not worth it being
a chicken farmer anymore. And it certainly makes it difficult
to calibrate how much space they need, how many commercial
houses for chickens, how much investment they should put into
(15:06):
the business. So that's really the big difficulty.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
People at Bloomberg would understand this. Normally, high risk business
has the potential for high return. Agriculture doesn't work that way.
High risk. You're very high risk business, but the return
is very low.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Why do you do it then?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Because you love it?
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Yeah? Yeah, And as I always tell people to visit,
you know, if you can't stand up in the middle
of it today and look around you and enjoy that,
then you'd better not do it.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Jim, You're welcome. Have a good day.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by Alex Hye and David Fox.
It was edited by Tracy Samuelson and Millie Mumshi. It
was fact checked by Adrian A. Tapia and mixed and
sound designed by Alex Sugia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven.
Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is
(16:13):
Nicole beemsterbor Sat Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If
you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review
The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps
people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back
next week.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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