Just over our northern border, eggs remain plentiful, while in the U.S. supermarkets are limiting high-priced egg purchases.
“We have not had any shortage of eggs,” says Mike von Massow, a food economist at the University of Guelph, in Ontario. “We can choose from 14 different types of eggs.”
With domestic egg prices reaching all-time highs, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is looking to other countries for solutions to the avian flu devastion in the industry, where tens of millions of egg-laying chickens have been destroyed.
It’s not that Canadian chickens are better than their American cousins. But there are explanations for the limited impact on Canadian farms.
It gets colder in Canada, so barns are more tightly sealed, which helps keep flu virus carried by wild birds out.
Canada also has fewer free-range chickens, which are more susceptible to getting infected.
But likely the biggest difference is that the typical egg farm in Canada has about 25,000 laying hens, whereas many farms in the U.S. have well over a million. In effect, American farmers have put a lot more of their eggs in a relatively small number of baskets.
The typical egg-laying farm in the U.S. has quadrupled in size since the late 1990s because the market pressure to produce cheap eggs has forced farmers to increase in volume.
Automated equipment requires a high volume of birds to be cost-effective, and delivers savings for consumers. Eggs have been typically cheaper in the U.S. than in Canada.
But if a disease enters an industrial size farm, the consequences affect a much larger population of egg producers, with all chickens killed to limit the spread.
Canadian egg farms have been able to remain small by the government managing its supply system, guaranteeing even small farms enough profit to stay in business.
Canada protects its smaller farms by restricting imports of farm products like eggs and dairy from the U.S., which is one source of friction in the Trump trade war.
