Last Thursday and Friday, (2/27 & 2/28/2025), the USDA held their annual February, Agricultural Outlook Forum in DC.  This marks the start of another growing season.  The February date allows for last year’s crop year data to be tabulated and forecasts of the new crop to be presented.

It is a landmark event for all of agriculture.  Since the pandemic, USDA has facilitated virtual attendance for free.  This is the first February since 2020, that Greenville University agribusiness students have not been required to report on one of the Outlook presentations.

Seth Meyer is USDA’s Chief Economist, and brilliant.  I think Seth was in the doctoral cohort behind mine.  We were in graduate school together, but not in the same classes.  I would not be surprised if he did not remember me, but I claim him.

The last few months, there have been many attempts to create a visual to describe what is going on with the price of US eggs.  This is one of the best charts of the 2-day USDA outlook.  I am still viewing presentations, but this was in Seth Meyer’s opening presentation.

Supply and demand almost never shows up like the supply and demand curves discussed in undergraduate economics.  While teaching I started undergraduate economics classes with Wall Street Journal headlines so we could look at applied supply and demand in real time.

This chart of layer hen losses from HPAI provides the essentials of the supply and demand of eggs.  The solid green bars represent egg supply.  The marginal (incremental) change in the national layer flock are annualized by quarter.  The bars that go below the x-axis are declines in the number of egg-laying chickens.  For most of the last 5 years the flock has been struggling to stay productive.

The red line represents the price of 1 dozen eggs at the wholesale price of New York.  Retailers purchase wholesale products to sell to their customers.  These egg prices represent, in this case, demand.

Prices are discovered where supply and demand curves intersect.  But in the absence of the corresponding equivalent supply curve, these egg prices still tell us the level of demand.  The longer the number of egg laying chickens declines, the higher the price of eggs.

When egg prices were more representative of the $2 to $3 dollar per dozen prices, we had enough laying hens (prior to 2019).

As we learned in the blog post, “Eggs at $5 per Dozen are Still Good Value,” a dozen large eggs weigh more than 1 pound.  Removing the shell (11 percent of the dozen), a dozen large eggs weigh 1.34 pounds.  So even $7 per dozen eggs provide us with eggs that cost $5.22 per pound ($7/1.34).  While that is 2 to 3 times more than we are used to, it is still cheaper than a pound of hamburger in most places.

Several poultry economists commented on my last egg-price post that it may be near summer before there is a chance to build the flock size up again.  The laying hens are very different than the meat chickens.  A laying hen will live several years where a meat chicken grows into chicken tenders in just a few months.  There is another step in the process of making egg laying chickens, and that is producing eggs in breeding hens that hatch and grow into chickens laying eggs for us to eat.  It is simply more complicated than flipping the ‘grow more chickens’ switch.

The other uncertainty that continues to be a problem is that the living chickens are still getting sick.  But there seems to be a sense with the folks who know that we will either cure the illness, or find a supplemental source of eggs relatively soon.

It is a roller coaster.  I find it exciting that eggs have become so important to our diets.  Thirty to Forty years ago, eggs were not viewed favorably due to cholesterol.  But we have learned about 30 years ago that they are more healthy for us than detrimental.

Which is great for me, because I love eggs!