I heard that the egg prices are out of control due to bird flu and greed. How did this situation impact the chicken meat prices?
It’s hard to google local prices actual people pay in other countries for commodity goods like chicken and bread :/
I’m forgetting what exactly the reasoning was, but I looked this up at one point and apparently there’s a difference between the chickens used for laying eggs and the chickens used for meat. It’s not that one is resistant to the virus or anything, but apparently we aren’t concerned about the stock for meat. It won’t be affected as much as eggs.
Prices haven’t changed for meat by me. $3.99/lb for the cheap supermarket “brand” as it always has been.
Edit: I looked it up and actually the chickens used for meat, broilers, are apparently more resistant to the virus but also live MUCH shorter lives. They were bread to bulk up quickly to go to slaughter as fast as possible while chickens used for eggs take more time to get to egg laying age and are more likely to get the flu and die.
Yeah, different breeds for one, but meat birds are often only raised to a number of weeks in commercial ops (I want to say 6-8 depending upon the breed and other factors, but I’m not 100% on that).
Layers don’t put on the weight like meatbirds nor in the same places. They also tend to have useful laying lives measured in years (I want to say 3 at peak production, but again I only know a tiny bit).
That’s exactly it. In meat production, if you have to sacrifice the entire stock because of flu, in six weeks you’re back in busines.
For a hen to lay eggs it needs to reach maturity, that takes at least 20 weeks.
From what I hear, the hatcheries are (or at least were) super screwed. Some did specifically switch from layers to almost exclusively meat birds based on the random farming youtubers I watch.