Betsy Babcock on The Changing American Egg Industry

he is Bill Maloney. Good afternoons, Charlie. It's been a quiet day for the main U s averages with the Dow currently lowered by thirty two points. SUPs Game three in NAZAC rises five, the small cap six under rises one point, and the US ten yield drops to one

point for five percent. Seven out of ten sub sectors are higher lit by games and telecomm, utilities and energy, materials, Industrials and financials fell down, DRAN sports drop thirteen, as a by text rise twelve, Utilities climbed four, and the vix is down by five percent. Down Leaders and Procter and Gamble, Verizon and Microsoft, well like some mobile, McDonald's and Visa led to the downside. Live from the First Breaking news that stom Bill Maloney. Charlie all right, hey,

thank you very much, Bill Maloney. Enjoy your weekend, and here live breaking news over your Bloomberg tipe Squawk SQ you a w K on your terminal. I'm Charlie Pellet and that's a Bloomberg business flash. You're listening to taking stock with pim Box and Kathleen Hayes on Bloomberg Radio. The egg industry, the egg industry is a ten billion dollar a year business and just in April alone, more than seven billion eggs were produced in the United States.

But what kind of eggs? Well, here to tell us is the co founder of Handsome Brooke Farm, Betsy Babcock, and she joins us now, Betsy, thanks very much for being with us. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Before we get into the details of comparing one kind of egg production to another, I'm just warning if you could give us some background and explain how did you become a farmer an egg farmer? I would say that I am

the accidental eggs farmer. We started um Handsome Brook Farm back in two thousand and seven as a farm state that in breakfast at Upstate New York, and we were about three and a half hours from New York City, and our customers who would come stay with us were

raving about our eggs. And what we learned quickly was what made our eggs different from what they could get in the grocery store was that our chickens were actually outdoors, eating bugs and grass and outside, and that makes a huge difference in terms of quality and taste in the egg. And so from two thousand and seven until now, we have formed a model where we work with other small farms who produce eggs with chickens that are going outside eating bugs, and market it at Handsome Brook Farm past

your raised eggs. So it's been very exciting. Matt Miller here joining pen to day. I love eggs, and when I go to the store, I want to buy eggs that aren't from chickens who suffered some kind of horrible baraca kind of life, you know. So I always try and get eggs that say they're organic, that their cage free, and that they're free roaming. I imagine my chickens walking around and pecking it stuff. Those chickens you're telling me are actually raised in a barn crowded in with fifty

two hundred thousand other chickens. Is that true? That is corrected so many cases in a cage free environment. Even though it's sounds perhaps like the chickens are going outside in being chicken like outside, unfortunately the case in most cases that those chickens are confined with about one square foot of space inside and no u no outdoor engagement at all. And the same can go for free range is a very broad term. Pre range chickens may never step foot outside, or in some better cases, they may

have a little bit of outside area. But there's no legal definition or requirement for a free range chicken to spend outside on pasture. So your chickens are pasture, your eggs are pasture raised. That means your chickens are actually walking around outside in the sunlight. Is there some kind of regulation um that guarantees me when I go to a store and I see pasture raised that I know that this chicken lived a pretty decent life. There's no

legal definition or no federal regulation for pasture raised. What we do now, we started doing this in this year, actually is participating in the American Humane certification process. And so when you see a pasture raised egg, that has an American Humane logo on it. That means that they are meeting specific outdoor requirements and so you can have some assurance that those chickens are actually going outside on vegetation,

not just on a concrete patio, but outside on vegetation. Betsy, what's the difference between pasture raised conventional eggs and pasture raised organic eggs? For we, we carry both. We offer both. Most of the eggs that we sell our pasture raised organic. We have some that are pastor raised conventional, which is actually how we started um. And the difference for us is really the pastures themselves are both not sprayed and could qualify, you know, as an organically grown pasture. There's

no sprayer, herbicides. But the difference is the feed that they get, because even chickens that are outside on pasture need to have some supplemental feed. So for pasture raised organic, the feed that we provide our chickens is organic feed, certified organic feed. For the conventional pasture raised that feed is not certified organic. So the differences in the feed.

What about the price, any any differences in price? Yeah, the price for organic again for us runs about fifty to seventy a dozen more than the price for the conventional and that's because of the difference between the cost of the organic feed versus a conventional feed. But one one interesting now perhaps is that even though the organic pasture raised are a little bit more expensive, most of our our sales are the organic. People are willing to

pay more for pasture raised organic. Yeah. I was gonna ask about that. I mean, for me when I go to the grocery store, I don't. I mean, I'll pay as much as I have to, uh to get that image of a chicken getting its beak melted off out of my mind. Um, to your customers care, I mean, our price is elastic at all, they do care. I mean philosophically, we really want to make our eggs as affordable as possible for customers, so we do not gouge

on our pricing to customers. Um. But people are willing to pay for the quality and for the animal welfare, so they will pay a premium for a pastor raised organic egg over a free range or a cage free X. I wish you could do it, Bacon. I wish you probably, Betsy. Betsy, thanks so much, really appreciate you joining US, and I think it's a fascinating topic that a lot of people really do care about. So, uh, there you go. Pasture raised eggs are the ones that you probably want to get.

Betsy Babcock is the co founder of Handsome Brook Farm and they sell those eggs, and she gave us all the info that we probably could have could have learned in in at ten minute interview on eggs. Pim This is taking Stock. I'm Matt Miller filling in for Kathleen Hayes today with PIM Fox. This is Bloomberg coming up

on taking stock. Bill Fitzpatrick, global equity analyst at Manu Life Asset Management, given us his perspective on the Bank of Japan and investing in equities outside the United States of