If I’m following the egg-price information correctly – both in this thread and some similar commentary on other online platforms – it seems like egg availability and pricing is a very local thing. A healthy supply of eggs in the New Orleans area, say, doesn’t help the egg supply/prices in the Chicago area, or the Northeast or California or anywhere else, really.
Are there any areas of the US that don’t have much in the way of local poultry production? With “local” meaning “as far as it’s reasonable to truck eggs to grocers”? I don’t mean just Tyson or Perdue mega-plants – I also mean smaller-scale poultry farming.
Do you know if those little farms are big enough to sell to local groceries in some quantity, even if only intermittenly? That’s more what I was thinking about – how brick-&-mortar grocery stores are stocked with eggs and how much that stocking is dependent on the specifics of local poultry production.
I doubt it. There are local farmers markets and co-op places, but not during winter.
Our supermarkets are definitely the “truck in a pallet” level for supplier sources, while the local farms may not have a full dozen to sell you and you have to bring your own carton.
Around here, some are and some aren’t. Without a lot of climate control and a lot of artificial lighting on carefully controlled timers, however, chickens aren’t going to lay much in the Northeast winter. And some little farms keep their layers more than one year; so they’re going to have to moult at some time, anyway (and won’t lay while they’re moulting); may as well let them do it in the winter.
A lot of on-farm stands close here in the winter.
You might want to, sometime. Depending on how they’re raising their chickens, there may be a noticeable flavor difference.
Don’t be too startled if you get bright orange yolks, instead of the groceries’ pale yellow. This is dependent on what the chickens are eating, and is likely to go with better flavor.
Huh? I’ve always thought the industrial chicken farmers would feed their chicken food enhanced with beta-carotin to get more orangey yolks, while small and organic farmers mostly do without it.
If the chickens are actually pastured they’ll find themselves quite a range of stuff to eat, which depending on time of year and available foodstuff can lead to dark colored eggs.
So can feeding a lot of orange vegetables.
(Genuinely pastured chickens also won’t be eating a vegetarian diet. Chickens are not vegetarians, if given the chance otherwise. The point of bragging about vegetarian diets is that at one point some places were feeding chicken meal as part of their chickens’ diet; I don’t know whether any of them still do.)
Large scale chicken operations are feeding a diet carefully calculated to give the most possible eggs in a given year from the least and cheapest possible feed that will allow producing all those eggs. This diet apparently causes pale yellow yolks. Their customers are used to those pale yellow yolks and don’t mind – some of them will refuse to eat orange-yolked eggs because they think they’re too weird.
So it seems to be a social difference between the US and Germany. Here, people seem to assume that a good, healthy egg has an orange yolk and dislike the pale ones. I personally don’t care at all because I know that it only depends on what the chickens were fed.
Except that what the chickens were fed can affect both the flavor and the nutritional quality of the eggs. – granted, if the yolks are orange because the chickens were basically fed orange dye, then that’s unlikely to improve either.
Oh, definitely, I want the chickens that lay the eggs I eat to be fed well, and treated well, out of interest for animal welfare and my health in the end. I just don’t care about the color of the yolks.
i go to Fred Meyer when we need Omega-3 margarine. The local supermarket charges half again as much, so I go to Fred Meyer to stock up. (Needed butter too, and Sara Lee Delightful bread.) I looked at the eggs while I was there. They have lots of eggs. Lots and lots. I didn’t pay enough attention to the prices, but they had cartons of two dozen eggs (I think. may have been 18 eggs, but I think it was 24) for $15. They had ‘cases’ of eggs for $29. ISTR seeing eggs for $6.99/dozen. So eggs were more expensive than they were pre-avian flu. The important thing is that they’re the only place I’ve seen recently that was fully stocked.
Lidl near me (just outside NYC) had them for 4.15 a dozen this weekend. Much better than the 6.99 I paid at a supermarket a few miles away the previous week!
A local news station in Connecticut just ran a story about a farm that’s offering to “rent” chickens to people, though I can’t imagine this is cheaper than buying eggs from the supermarket.
Dude, go to Aldi. I bought eggs for I think $4.39/dozen over the weekend. I pretty much exclusively buy milk and eggs at Aldi these days, unless someone is having a loss leader on one of those items. (Just checked my Target, too, and it’s $7.99/18 at my local Chicago store.)
You’re not wrong in terms of raw pricing but Aldi was in the other direction from where I was and it’s hard to justify going significantly out of the way with an extra stop just to save $3 or $4.
You gotta plan these things! (I have my routine. There’s like four main stores I shop at, so I have to strategize. To be fair, if it’s just to save two or three bucks a week, it’s probably not worth the while, but I’m one of those who scans the circulars and plans out his shopping over the course of a week.)
Wilcox Farms is a big operation here in Washington, and they are a member of our Association. Here’s an article with embedded interview with Wilcox Farms CEO Brian Wilcox.
He’s hopeful that a vaccine will be developed under the new administration. Given the defunding of every useful government department, I’m not so hopeful.
(I have my routine. There’s like four main stores I shop at, so I have to strategize. To be fair, if it’s just to save two or three bucks a week, it’s probably not worth the while, but I’m one of those who scans the circulars and plans out his shopping over the course of a week.)