Bird Flu Outbreaks Continue to Disrupt US Egg Supply & Prices

Whitney Marr collects eggs at her farm in Green Forest. Marr raises 60,000 egg-laying hens for Happy Egg Co. of Rogers. (Michael Woods)

The average price of a dozen Grade A eggs at the supermarket dropped nearly 18% in April, the first monthly drop in price since October, but consumer egg prices still remain historically high.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of a dozen eggs was $5.12 nationally, down $1.11 from a record high in March. Compared with April 2024, egg prices have increased 79%.

Egg prices have become an important economic metric nationally and a political issue. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced in February a $1 billion plan to fight highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), which has plagued egg farmers since 2022 and is a major reason why the price of eggs has skyrocketed.

“The Biden administration did little to address the repeated [HPAI] outbreaks and high egg prices that followed,” Rollins said. “By contrast, the Trump administration is taking the issue seriously.”

HPAI, commonly referred to as bird flu, has cycled through wild and commercial flocks at intervals for decades. The latest strain has been particularly stubborn, hitting first in February 2022 and then returning in the spring of that year and again in 2023 and 2024.

When bird flu first hit in February 2022, a dozen eggs cost consumers $2.01. Year over the year, the price went to $4.21 in 2023, back to $3 in 2024 and $5.90 earlier this year.

Each discovery of bird flu in a flock means its wholesale eradication to prevent the virus’ spread. This has been especially troubling in the egg industry since egg-laying hens are not as quickly replaced as broiler chickens, the birds that are raised for consumption.

Broilers are typically slaughtered at between 6 and 8 weeks old, and there is a scheduled pipeline to refill broiler houses every few months. Egg layers, however, don’t start producing eggs until 5 months old and then lay eggs for more than a year.

Brian Moscogiuri, vice president of the supplier Eggs Unlimited of Irvine, California, said more than 125 million egg-laying hens have been killed because of the recurring bird flu in the past three years. The USDA reports more than 31 million hens were slaughtered the first four months of 2025, although a vast majority of those cullings happened in January and February.

Supply Problems

The bird flu has been particularly virulent in the states that are the most productive egg producers in the country.

Iowa, the nation’s No. 1 egg producer, was hard hit in 2024; Ohio and Indiana, No. 2 and No. 3, were pummeled in the first two months of 2025. Arkansas, the eighth-most productive egg state, has been relatively untouched by HPAI.

“We haven’t been affected by that, or anybody really in our area hasn’t been affected by that,” said Whitney Marr, who runs an egg farm in Green Forest for Happy Egg Co. with her husband, Shane. “Now we have seen more biosecurity-type issues that have come up, that [Happy Egg] has been more apt to apply and to deal with, to keep us from getting the avian flu and things like that.”

Bird flu is difficult to prevent, either at a free-range farm such as Marr’s or a caged farm where the hens never venture outside. Migratory birds carry the virus and can infect a farm directly through droppings or indirectly through ventilation systems.

“It seems like the strain of avian influenza is just more persistent,” Moscogiuri said. “It’s in dairy cows. It’s in the wild birds, it’s in turkeys, it’s in humans, it’s in mammals. It just seems to be widespread.

“It’s on the ground and in the dust. And it’s 50-mile-an-hour winds in dry Iowa. We really don’t know exactly how it’s getting in. It could be in the flies. Who knows?”

Chris Meador, chairman of the Arkansas Farm Bureau’s poultry division, said egg-laying hens are a specialty breed so there aren’t as many of them as broiler chickens. That makes them harder to replace when millions die unscheduled in a month.

Ohio, for example, lost 7.8 million layers in January and another 5.4 million in February.

“There are these certain lines of hens that these people use,” Meador said. “With bird flu, it really bottlenecks the supply chain.”

Hot-Button Issue

Moscogiuri said there are plenty of eggs for the public consumer even with all the setbacks during the past three years.

Part of the reason for the soaring prices, Moscogiuri said, was a bit of media-induced hysteria. Egg prices went up as bird flu raged, and people began to fear there would be an egg shortage.

“It’s a compounding issue on the supply side because so much happened in such a small period of time when we were already dealing with supply chain challenges, and it really just put a bottleneck,” Moscogiuri said. “The media created almost a rush of demand. There was all this information about bird flu and shortages and potential for record highs that the consumer actually rushed the stores and created a demand cycle that you know typically didn’t exist. People started hoarding eggs like it was back in COVID with toilet paper or [during] a major snowstorm.”

The egg industry is healthy, Moscogiuri said. Even with production obstacles, 93.1 billion table eggs were produced in 2024, just 1% less than the year before.

Many distributors are increasing production. Marr, the Green Forest farmer, has three barns and 60,000 hens; she wants to expand with another 50,000-hen barn.

It’s an expensive undertaking. Marr and her husband buy the birds — which cost more than broilers — and are responsible for their feed as well as the machinery and equipment to collect the eggs.

“There’s more money in one of these birds than there are in 100 broiler birds,” said Marr, who raised broilers for years. “You can get a broiler chick for 19 cents. When we bought these pullets, they were $9 a bird; it’s very expensive to buy them.

“Plus you house them and you put in all the feed. By the time you’re done with it, you’re probably about $30 a bird. It was a month before we ever got eggs from our birds to pay for the feed.”

Eggs Futures

The easiest solution for the industry is the avoidance of the bird flu.

The federal government’s $1 billion plan includes $500 million for biosecurity and $100 million in vaccine research. Growers are already reimbursed for losses.

The problem has eased somewhat because the high price of eggs caused a reduction in demand. Some people, rather than hoarding, decided they could live without eggs until prices came down.

“We’re contracted farmers, so our prices are going to be set for a period of time that our contract happens,” Marr said. “When you see those big price jumps in the store, the farmer is not getting any of that because we’re set at a certain price regardless.”

Moscogiuri said prices will come down as demand moderates back to normal and supply refills.

“The producers are expanding; the markets have been high, and the producer has been profitable,” Moscogiuri said. “They’re going to add more chickens and expand their farms and diversify their supply chains. We imported some eggs from other countries to help on the processing side and add supply overall.

“All of those factors help, but really it’s a matter of not seeing more avian flu.”