The Price of Eggs Here and There

Posted by on December 27, 2024

[pho­to — 4H Ontario]

I worked on a cou­ple of chick­en farms when I was a teenag­er, so I’ve always kept an eye on the busi­ness. Egg prices have gone up some­what in Cana­da, but not even close to the price ris­es in the U.S. over the same peri­od. They are 16.5% high­er now than they were one year ago — and there is no short­age of them. Canada’s eggs are most­ly pro­duced by fam­i­ly oper­a­tions, while the U.S. is dom­i­nat­ed by large cor­po­ra­tions. The aver­age egg farm in Cana­da has about 25,000 lay­ing hens, while the aver­age “farm” in the U.S. has about two mil­lion. In Cana­da, avian flu has affect­ed %6 of pro­duc­tion, which is less than half of the dis­ease rate in the U.S., most­ly because of the absence of giant cor­po­rate fac­to­ry “farms.” Amer­i­cans pay an arm and a leg for an egg. Cal-Maine Foods is the largest pro­duc­er and dis­trib­u­tor of shell eggs in the U.S., with a total flock of about 42 mil­lion lay­ers. It is trad­ed on the Nas­daq, and has seen its share price soar %45 over the past year. As a rule, things tend to cost more in Cana­da than in the U.S., because the coun­try is huge and thin­ly pop­u­lat­ed, with greater ship­ping dis­tances and high­er costs, so the fact that we aren’t suf­fer­ing short­ages or ridicu­lous price hikes looks to me to have a dif­fer­ent expla­na­tion. I see it as a dif­fer­ence between unchecked cor­po­rate greed and inef­fi­cien­cy in the U.S, com­pared to a pro­duc­er-to-cus­tomer ori­ent­ed mar­ket here. The U.S. agri­cul­tur­al sys­tem now much more close­ly resem­bles the col­lec­tivist sys­tem of the old Sovi­et Union than it does any­thing like a “free mar­ket.’ The real eco­nom­ic sys­tem that dom­i­nates the U.S, is best described as “Cor­po­rate Com­mu­nism.” With Trump in the White House, you can expect it to go Full Stalin.
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