How does cage free make this worse? The supply shortages are coming from avian flu in every report I have heard.

It increases the cost of egg production which shifts the supply curve left raising the market clearing price. If it were cheaper then all egg producers would be doing it.

Well, that'd depend on the law's definition of a cage but it's a hell of a lot easier to protect chickens that are fully enclosed vs those that are free range.

This is a very wrong interpretation of a cage. Cages are matrices of 3 cubic foot volumes with a few pieces of wire separating them. All but the top row are toilets.

That's true when you're talking about foxes and wolves, but not if you're talking about an airborne flu.

Rows of adjacent cages keeping groups of chickens in close proximity with each other with shared air.

Many cage free chickens are also free range chickens, where they can roam outside. That massively increases their chances of picking up the bird flu, as opposed to those they are inside all day.

I'm not advocating for one or the other, just explaining. Even cage free chickens will come into close enough proximity where they will all die if just one chicken picks up the flu. It's incredibly virulent.

> That massively increases their chances of picking up the bird flu, as opposed to those they are inside all day

Are they getting bird flu at a higher frequency?

I'm in a turkey producing area - one of the largest in the country. What helped massively in 2015 was to simply put fine netting over the windows to the turkey barns, keeping other birds and at least some of their excrement out.

This is from Australia, but whatever:

"In Australia, indoor and free-range poultry, are at risk of contracting avian influenza due direct and indirect contact with waterfowl who may carry avian influenza virus in their nasal and eye discharge or faeces, farming and biosecurity practices.

Indoor (barn or shed) systems limit poultry from direct exposure to wild birds, but these are not immune to avian influenza risks due to indirect contact. This is because equipment, vehicles and human movements between farms can introduce the virus indoors, in particular when on-farm dams or open water sources act as a permanent residence for waterfowl.

Birds with outdoor access (free range) are at risk of coming into direct or indirect contact with wild waterfowl. Vegetated range areas may attract waterfowl, in particular if poultry are given feed or water outdoors. In free-range production systems, producers should therefore focus on managing these systems to reduce the risk of avian influenza."

https://kb.rspca.org.au/knowledge-base/what-is-the-risk-of-f...

You really, really need to be citing your sources. You have been bouncing back and forth between sounding authoritative and making assumptions or asking questions (or just being plain wrong).

I'm in a major turkey producing area and my wife worked for a national turkey producing company for 10 years. In 2015 it was all anyone heard about around here for months.

Granted, I don't know much about chickens, but a lot of this is common sense. I'm not sure what you think I'm wrong about.

Yes that's true they can roam outside, but roaming outside does not massively increase their chance of picking up bird flu.

For the same reason that the main guidance during COVID was "be outside if with other people" and not "stay inside if with other people".

Typical cage-free chickens are almost as cramped, they're just not (cruelly) confined to a cage. They're still sharing the same air. If one bird gets it in either situation the whole flock will need to be culled, as they're all going to die (more painfully) regardless.

Caged vs cage free chickens are getting bird flu at about the same rate though, so this claim doesn’t really add up. It’s not like the caged chickens are in hermetically sealed chambers their whole lives, they’re shoulder to shoulder with some wire between them.

It's another requirement to comply with. More work for the producer == higher cost for the consumer.

But the claim is that the shortage has been made worse by cage free laws. Any higher cost from cage free laws would already have been part of the price.

I'm saying the prices are what's been made worse. But suppliers haven't converted over so that doesn't help the shortage.

When California’s anti animal cruelty measure went into effect the price difference was negligible.

Thus stuff is not related, wild to see people trying to conflate it.

Could be that normally this wouldn't have caused much shortage or price increase, but that in conjunction with avian flu it escalated.

seems such laws would benefit the prices in neighboring areas, as 'non-cage-free' producers seek available markets. but i have not seen this to be the case, strangely.

Monopolies have no incentive to lower prices.

If it were actually impossible to have affordable eggs without confining chickens to tiny cages for their entire lives, that would be a damning indictment of our entire food system.

But luckily that isn't actually the case. The price difference between cage-free and "caged" eggs is negligible. I'm in New York City, not known for its local egg production, and I can still get cage-free eggs for $4/dozen. Kroker/Walmart is just ripping you off.

I think the most brutal thing is when the male chicks are immediately sent into a shredder damn. Out of sight out of mind

That's where I can be a proponent of lab-grown meat without consciousness

My rooster was a jerk, but he deserved to die the way he did, which was the way he lived: picking fights with things that could kill him in an instant if they bothered to care. I'm glad that he died fighting the beak and talons of an osprey or bald eagle, and not to the remorseless (literal) machinery of market efficiency.

Sure, it's brutal; but roosters don't get along. You would have to have a huge amount of space to raise all the males. For mammals, you can castrate the males and raise them for meat, but that's not feasable for birds.

> For mammals, you can castrate the males and raise them for meat, but that's not feasable for birds.

capons? We've been doing it for millennia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capon

EDIT: possibly you meant non-feasible since it's too expensive anyway, which it probably is.

A messed up thought is I wonder if they have looked at trying to get chickens to produce only female chicks not sure how some hormone or the eggs are injected without compromising integrity

My understanding is that the main improvement being implemented is determining the sex before the eggs hatch, and destroying the eggs.

Looking around, this seems like an area with a lot of interest (for a long time, usda has a description of a pamphlet from 1921 [1]).

Here's a scientific looking study about adjusting incubation temperature in Korat Chickens. [2]

TLDR: higher than standard temperature results in similar hatch percentage, but more genetic female, morphological male chicks. Lower than standard temperature results in a lower hatch rate, but more genetic male, morphological female chicks.

I saw some less scientific articles that attributed higher surviving female chicks at lower incubation temperature to male chicks being less likely to survive in those conditions, but since this paper did genetic analysis, it appears there's some amount of temperature dependent sex determination in addition to genetic sex determination. I didn't look around to see if I could find a paper showing this in more typical US livestock breeds of chickens, and at least from these results, it seems like while the proportion of female to male chicks increased, the number of female chicks at 5 weeks after hatching, did not due to differences in mortality.

I also saw a news release about giving the mothers stress hormone and seeing more female chicks, but that artificial hormones is not acceptable practice in the poultry industry, so they were looking for other ways to induce that reaction. [3]

I also saw some references to determining (presumably genetic) sex before hatching, which could lead to earlier intervention, which may be more humane. It didn't look like there was anything definite there, but I'm going to stop going down the rabbit hole here.

[1] https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/ipd/frostonchickens/exhibi...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645652...

[3] https://www.poultryworld.net/health-nutrition/stressful-bird...

You should see what the roosters do when we let them live…

Just paid $3.59/doz at Kroger here in Ohio about an hour ago (plain store brand). They were stocked pretty well.

The Target brand Good & Gather eggs were $9.49 in Boulder Colorado this week.