The price of chicken feed ain’t chicken feed anymore. And the nationwide epidemic of avian flu has landed in New York. And that leaves Emily Harding of Dryden looking at her chickens and wondering if she can keep her flock profitable – and safe.
A few miles away, Matt DeHart looks into his cooler of eggs at Anderson’s Farm Market and wonders how he can make his margins when he’s having trouble getting the variety he wants.
Egg prices, fueled by an epidemic of avian flu that has led to the death or destruction of 156 million birds, and by rising chicken feed prices dating back nearly five years. It’s adding up.
“When I first started my business, like nine or 10 years ago, I think I sold eggs for $2.50 or $3 a dozen and now they’re up to $5.50,” said Harding, owner of Daisy Hollow Farm in Dryden.
The average price per dozen nationwide hit $4.15 in December. That’s not quite as high as the $4.82 record set two years ago, but the U.S. Agriculture Department predicts prices will soar another 20% this year.
THE COST OF EGG PRODUCTION
U.S. egg prices are likely to remain high past Easter and well into 2025, largely because of avian flu, according to CoBank, a Denver-based provider of loans and other financial services to the agriculture sector.
Bird flu has been the main cause of that nationally – the highly contagious virus has affected nearly 100 million egg-laying hens in the U.S. since 2022. But another big factor is feed prices.
“When I determine what I can sell a dozen eggs for, definitely rising feed prices goes into that, so does the price of how much all the different varieties of eggs cost in the grocery store, or in other small farm stores like mine,” Harding said. “I mean I can’t sell eggs for $8, if I did I wouldn’t sell any, but how much am I actually making at $5.50 a dozen? Not very much.”
“We actually did the math last night, so feed prices have gone up 32% in the last three months,” said Brandon Liddle, co-owner of Our Liddle Homestead. “We’re not trying to make a buck, we’re trying to come as close as possible to breaking even, so we raised our egg prices up a dollar more.”
Our Liddle Homestead in Solon, owned by Liddle and Heather Arnold, sells produce and eggs at a farm stand.
“We do it more for ourselves for canning and preserving our own nutritious food, and then whatever we have extra, we sell to the public at as cheap a price as we can afford,” Liddle said.
”We don’t make any money, we actually are running at a deficit and have been for the last three years, and it’s getting worse.”
Another issue for farms is keeping the birds healthy, while keeping costs down.
“If I wanted to buy the cheapest feed on the market, that’s also full of hormones and all sorts of stuff,” Harding said. “I get my feed from a local source, and it’s all natural, it doesn’t have any additives to it. Then there’s organic feed which I have used in the past, which is even more expensive.”
GROCERY STORES
Those rising prices from sellers creates a ripple effect. DeHart, the owner of Anderson’s Farm Market in Homer, said he’s also had to raise prices.
“Oh absolutely, I mean yeah I gotta be able to make my margins that we try to set for eggs.” DeHart said. And he hasn’t been able to carry the usual variety. “For the last month or so, month and a half, we’ve been carrying just the cage-free eggs because the price is stable on those.”
“Right now I think we’re at $6.99 on large white (eggs).... and some people are like ‘You know what? I’m gonna do without eggs,’” DeHart said. “I think probably volume-wise because of the price, we’ve probably seen a reduction of sales of maybe 25% or 30%.”
DINERS
Hyde’s Diner in Cortland has had to pay the higher prices, too, so it raised its prices. Diners go through a lot of eggs.
“We just did yesterday, because we were losing money on the prices,” said Tanesha Henriques, the manager and the daughter of the owner at Hyde’s Diner, on Friday. At least it’s not instituting an egg surcharge, as some diners have done.
“We’ve had a really bad issue with the rise of the egg (prices), we haven’t had a problem receiving them quite yet, but we are up to 85 cents an egg before we cook them,” Henriques said.
BIRD FLU CONCERNS
New York began 2025 with an increase in H5N1 cases, found in nearly 40 wild birds in the year’s first five weeks, Cornell Wildlife Health Lab reports. But it was found in seven birds in and near New York this week, prompting the state to shut down all the live chicken markets in and around New York City.
On Jan. 30, the Yates and Ontario County health departments announced that testing for H5N1 is underway following the discovery of 50 dead geese on the west side of Seneca Lake.
“We have a cute little picnic table feeder but we can’t put food on that because you know the blue jays, the crows and chickadees will come down and eat from that too,” Liddle said. “We can’t feed our wild birds outside either, because we want to keep them as far away as possible.”
“At this point, if someone called me and said ‘Hey I’m moving, and I have a dozen chickens that can’t go with me, can you take them?’ I would definitely think twice about taking them,” Harding said. “If I did take them I would put them in a different section of the farm before I moved them in with the rest of my birds.”
“They’re all preparing for it but unfortunately they’re raising the prices a little bit to help cover expenses,” DeHart said. “If they have to kill their whole flock they have nothing, so that’s unfortunately what’s been happening in other places around the country, so they’re just bracing for impact.”
CUTTING COSTS
Ways to cut costs are weighing heavily on the minds of business owners and farmers. “Well the questions have come up, it’s like do I continue to raise enough chickens to make eggs available to my customers?” Harding said.
“We’ve even considered what we’re going to do with our bakery products,” DeHart said. “Eggs go in a lot of stuff like cookies, and stuff like that, so we’re sort of seeing where things are going to go with that. We might have to either raise prices or maybe discontinue some of the ones that aren’t really great sellers.”
“We’re going to have to cross that bridge when we get to it, but we’re looking to see how we can alleviate that or make it so that we can still offer something,” DeHart said.
Henriques said she’ll endure the increases and stick with her local supplier.
“If we switched and went somewhere else that would be hurting another local family business like ours,” Henriques said. “They still have to make a living.”
