What The Heck Is Happening With the Price of Eggs?

be a lot of puns. I have to say. That's my my warning for anyone listening to this episode is I'm going to crack a bunch of terrible chokes or should I say yokes? You want to keep going? You want to keep going, Tracy, I'm a real comedian. So egg prices are up a lot, and you know it's also personal to you because in addition to all these puns, you are an aspiring egg farmer, aren't you. I am like an armchair chicken breeder, like I would love to

raise a bunch of backyard chickens one day. I haven't yet had the opportunity although now that I have two and a half acres in northeast Connecticut, like maybe one day I'm getting closer. But yeah, my dream is to have a flock of chickens, preferably silky chickens. Have you ever seen them? They look like the fluffy little muppets. So some silkies and maybe some Easter eggers because they produced the really cool looking eggs, and yeah, declare egg independence.

Just have my own supply of eggs. So how about this. I have a good idea for this episode, probably like talk for about like five or ten minutes about why egg prices are going up, and then in just thirty minutes on sort of farming advice. Just sort of like a pure agricultural episode. That sounds perfect. Also, you're gonna have to include ten minutes for me to just like give all the random egg facts that I know. Well, okay, maybe we should also let the guests give every random

eg facts. Okay, okay, if we have to know, Okay, eggs have suddenly become a big talking point, and I'm a little bit unclear why. Because egg prices have been going up for a while. There's been this big outbreak of avian flu in the US and elsewhere in the world, feed prices have been going up, and so we did see, for instance, benchmark egg prices. There is an egg price

benchmark um go up. I think something like over the past year it was like a dollar for a dozen Midwest US eggs, and now it's up to more than four dollars. Egg c p I, which you can which you can measure, is up I think fifty nine percent year on year. But it has been happening for a while, and yet it seems to have exploded into the public consciousness relatively recently. That egg CPI chart is pretty wild.

We have it on the terminal going back to its shooting higher, and I would say egg was kind of like gasoline, are one of these highly salient prices that people notice in a way they buy them regularly. You know, it's like you just know. You probably people have some intuitive sense how much they pay for eggs, as opposed to I don't know how much they pay for like

auto insurance. It's something you're exposed to on a relatively frequent basis, and it does become personal because the way that you buy eggs also impacts the prices you're seeing. So if you live out in the country and you're buying eggs from a local farmer, the prices might well be lower than in the grocery store right now, because my understanding is that it's the big, big producers, the supermarkets, or the people who supply the supermarkets, who have actually

been hit the hardest by the flu. All right, well, let's let's learn more from our guests. We have I believe, the perfect guest to talk about eggs and how to how to price them and how to make them. We're gonna be speaking with Glenn Hickman. He is the president of Hickman's Family Farms, a company that has tenderly and chickens producing eggs overall in the company. So, Glenn, thank you so much for coming on odd lots my pleasure.

Thanks for inviting me. Uh you know, before we even get into the price of eggs and all that, what do you tell us a little bit about Hickman's Family Farms, Like how big is it? How does it compare, how does it distribute? Like just describe? Why should why should we listen to you? Uh? Well, thanks, Joe, It's yeah, It's the only job I've ever had. So if I'm not very good at it. I can't think about anything else.

So our our business started. My grandmother had five hundred backyard chickens and you know, sold eggs to her neighbors off of the back porch. And I'm the third generation to run our business along with my siblings, and we've expanded from grandma's back porch to a multi state operation. We primarily market eggs across the Southwest, from southern Wyoming to Hawaii, and we've got about a nucleus of about ten million laying hens and we produce all different kinds

of eggs. We produce brown eggs and white eggs, and organic eggs and just about any type of of eggs that are demanded by the consumers. So, just before we dive into why egg prices are going up, follow up question here, but can you give us the sort of uh, I say, I'm not doing this on purpose, but the lay of the land. No, this one just came to me. The lay of the land when it comes to the

egg industry. So what proportion of America's eggs supply comes from you know, smaller farms or even independent backyard breeders versus big industrial agricultural corporations and do we import any eggs? I honestly have no idea, Tracy. The American Egg Board is our promotion and marketing arm of the egg industry. And everyone that has seventy five thousand laying hens and higher is part of the American Egg Board of contributes to the promotion of eggs. You know, that helps educate

people and and hopefully drives demand. So if you look at the seventy and up, I would suspect there's about two hundred uh farms across the country. If you look at the top twenty in the in the United States, probably eighty plus percent of the eggs in the country are produced by the by the twenty largest firms there are. You know, there's been a proliferation of of kind of backyard and semi commercial layers over the past ten years.

As you know, you know, Tracy, people get a little bit of land and decide that they like to have a few chickens and then face face the same thing that every farmer has is moderating their supply and demand and trying to come up with the right amount of products. So, uh, it's there has been a proliferation of backyard and semi

commercial farms in the last ten years. One of my core memories Joe, when I was like six years old, is going to a very big chicken farm in Arkansas and thinking it would be really fun to play with a little like fuzzy yellow chicks. And I don't know if you've ever been to one, but that like there are dead chickens everywhere, or at least so it turned into a bit of a nightmare. But I still want chickens, some mince a little quickly, you know, just one more

question about size. So it's ten million eggs and where does that put you in the rankings? Just so I get a sense of like what a mega producer looks like, how many chickens would like some of the big and who are the biggest producers of chickens. Cowmede Foods is the largest of chickens in the country. They got about I think forty four million birds. And then there's there's several other UH operations that are that come right under them, and so we're we're up there, Yeah, we're up there.

But there you know, there's a family behind Cowmane Foods. There's a there's a family virtually behind every single egg farm. Any anyone that thinks that, uh, farming and especially animal production is not still family owned and operated, it's probably a little bit, a little bit stretch of the truth. We're all we're all in this because, um, you know, it's a family business. So why don't we jump to the topic at hand and talk about what's been going

on with egg prices? So, first of all, what have you observed from your own seat in terms of prices? How much have they gone up for you versus you know, say a year ago, And what do you think is driving the increase? Well, Tracy, the the egg industry, by and larger is price takers. You know, there's a market, just like there's a market for corn, a market for soy beans and those kind of things, and so we

price against that market. The previous three years n twenty one where some of the most horrendous years in terms of negative returns that the egg industry has ever experienced. So whenever you have negative returns, you do have people that eggs at the business are downsize of those kind of things. And then when bird flu happened, uh, you know, we started to lose birds in um in February and

it's it's become you know, it's it's not stopped. We have Hickman's um is the last commercial farm to break. We had a a farm in Colorado with three hundred thousand organic birds and they broke on December seventeenth, So it's knocked on wood. It's been a month since we have we've had a commercial farm outbreak, but it's mostly in the wild bird population and um. You know, if you're gonna bring air to everything, from air to people, from the outside to the inside of your barns, you

have it. You have a chance for to to spread infection. What happens, So how do you discover the incidents of avian flew among your the population within a farm? How do you how do you, Oh, we have it, and then what do you have to do? At that point? Every single barn, every single aviary is walked every single day by the caretaker of that barn. Any kind of surge immortality which avian influences cause a surge immortality is

immediately identified and uh, corrective measures taken. So maybe it's a it's a situation where some hands got scared and they piled in a corner and those kind of things, But you try to figure out why, how to prevent that the next time. With avian flew, the spread of infection is so fast and so deadly that maybe one day you'll have ten jet chickens in a barn, the next day you have a hundred, the next day you'll have a thousand, and with it just to very few days,

you know, the entire farm is involved in it. So avian flu is a disease that has been identified by the federal government as something that we need to address aggressively. So when you get identified as avian flu, the federal government mandates that the entire flock is euthanized. And that's what's happened in the in the AAN. So we've lost, you know, close to fifteen per cent of our nation's laying flock just this year. Some of that has been

repopulated already, but a large amount hasn't. And you know that's that's led to constriction and supplied which in a commodity market, you know, they're either a demand surge or a supply um deficit leads to higher prices. We had this same situation you guys probably remember one that long ago.

But and uh, you know in November, all the news was about the scare city of turkeys and high turkey prices because turkeys have been involved in AVIA two and Thanksgiving is traditionally the highest demand for turkeys, so you had that confluence of high demand and restricted supply. What's happened in the egg business is exactly the same. Our best market for the year is always during the holidays, when there's extra family occasions going on, when there's extra

baking going on and those kind of things. So we had the maximum constriction of supply at the same time we had our historical highest demand period since the holidays, you know, in terms that your you know, all listeners would understand, We've been almost limited down every day in the egg market. So the prices are fast correcting as we've seen a reduction demand. This is why I didn't really understand the timing, because like everyone started talking about

it right when prices actually started going down. So I have so many questions already. Um, But on the bird flu itself up, one thing that I heard was like it risks becoming endemic. So once a bird has the virus, they sort of like carry it in them at all times and it can come out again at a later date, can you maybe talk a bit more about like how possible is it to eradicate avian flu altogether or once it's widespread, does it basically just become something that you

have to deal with constantly. Tracy, we can kind of compare it to covid that there's been mutations that become more infectious but less lethfual and and those kind of things, and I think that's the same kind of pattern we're seeing with avian influenza. So you know, when when we think about eradicating um, that that ship has sailed, will never eradicate avian flu because then the wild bird population and as it mutates those wild birds, you know, are

our super spreaders. They might great they they land in the same ponds that some of our domestic water values

and stuff like that. So, um, you know, there is there's you know, taco vaccine for avian fluid um, but that's a that's a different road that you know, will will involve all commercially all commercial poultry probably globally, and so it's it's really has to be well thought out, and um, it's probably a couple of years away from having any kind of decision where there might be widespread uh Avian influenza vaccines that we can start to use commercially. You know, I want to sort of I want to

get back to the current details in a second. But other eggs futures, because I don't think I've ever seen them, And yet my the CNME, I think was founded in the Chicago butter and egg board are the futures there? Do you have some other way of like hedging these kinds of risks as a major operator? Know, we don't. I think that the egg futures were kind of delisted in the early seventies because even back then the concentration was so high that there wasn't enough liquidity to to

keep it from being manipulated. Oh interesting, because when you say the concentration, the concentration of production was such that and is that still the case? Like Joe, I'm so fair enough, fair enough my memory when I was ten years old, Joe, you and I can hatch a plan

to relaunch egg futures. Um. So one other thing when it comes to what's driving up egg prices, and there seems to be a little bit of debate about whether it's mostly the flu or whether it's also down to factors like higher chicken feed or combination some combination of both. Can you talk about maybe the input costs that go into having a egg slash chicken farm, Tracy and Joe. When and um, the Ukrainian War started, it really added

fuel to a fire that already existed. So our grain costs have just exploded, and probably every businessman will tell you between labor utilities and everything in our environment has just gone up, you know, exponentially in some cases. So the at some point in time, even though we're priced takers, that has to be reflected in the selling price or

you won't have anyone around to sell eggs. So, um, there is a there is a degree of higher costs that have been reflected into the price of eggs, and it it kind of has to happen, are you know, like you said, corn price you know, just blew up when the Ukrainian War started, and we haven't got much relief since then. I want to go back, you know. One of the themes that comes up on this podcast from time to time is how we pay the price

during sort of inflationary surges of any sorts. It's often us paying the price for a downturn that happened before, and you know, a washout happens, farms or entities come out of the market and then supplies constraint. Prior to this sort of like boom that it was actually a

very rough couple of years for the industry. Can you talk a little bit about what you know, the last few years prior to the surgeon prices, what was causing it and you know, just the experience COVID itself and the pandemic and the sort of an initial uh, the initial effects that that had on egg production. Well, you guys, you know, I think it's you know, it's seen in

a lot of industries. You know, when the price of oil gets ugly and people stopped drilling, and the semi conductors become too too many, and people stopped building new factories and those kind of things, and then to demand catches up and then the same thing happened with a supplies. We have a we have a situation where we had very very poor we we had negative returns as an industry for three years running. And that causes you know, constraint of of expansion, capital and growth, and that's kind

of what happened. And so now you know, we're probably going to see some some growth in our in our country, we have to uh. We have several states that have mandated cage free laws. We have several large customers that have adopted cage free as their uh future. And in most cases, a cage facility doesn't lend itself to an easy remodel to cage free, and that takes a lot of capital. So we're going to see some constraints when it comes to expansion because of of not really knowing

what the market is going to demand. And we'll have to kind of play that by years as as the situation you know, plays out. That's interesting. I just want to go back those three years that you're talking about bad return. What was going on that cause I'm still trying to wrap my head what caused those three rough yards. Well, the price of grain started to go up, like I said, about three years ago, and then just let the fire

when the Ukrainian War happened. In in context, you guys, a laying hand, it's kind of kind of you know, works out this way. One laying hand will eat one bushel a corner year that one laying and will also produce enough eggs for one person. And so when the bushel of corn in some area and some uh our our costs went up by two and a half times, then that's got to be you know, reflected all the way down the uh the in the rest of the

food chain. You know, we we have a we have a policy in this in this country where you know, whether you're talking about ethanol or bio diesel, they come from food crops. And you know, when we are as a country we've made a decision that we're going to burn part of our food to make ethanol or or part of our soybeans to make biodiesel, that does also

carve into the supply that's available for livestock. So just on on on the sort of cyclical note when it comes to for instance, if you have an outbreak of avian flu and you have to destroy a large chunk of your flock, do you get compensation from the from the government for doing that if you're mandated to do it? And also a similar question for the transition to cage free chicken raising, do you get grants or something like

that for the further capital investment? So since the government government does mandate that you have to depopulate your farm. They do pay a bit of a stipend, so that it basically pays your cost of depopulation, your cost of cleaning and disinfecting, and approximately the value of the birds that were in the barn at the time. It doesn't pay you for the loss of eggs. It doesn't pay to buy a new chicken to put in the barn. So it really does lack um you know, a component

of a full compensation for the disaster that happened. You know, since your company has been around for so long, I feel like it might be uniquely positioned to answer this. But I'm curiously efficiency gains over time in the egg business, or like how much human labor is required to produce I don't know a million eggs versus how much it

would have taken twenty years ago. It's how has it changed over time and the operations of farming, its scale that you've seen, and what kind of games you know, how does it look different than if a time traveler

had come from twin years ago? The big changes? Joe, I looked at a study um that goes back to nineteen sixty and to kind of give you a um uh ballpark, But if you take it from the production of corn through the production of the eggs four times as efficient today that that acre of of of grain production will produce four times as many eggs as it did in nineteen sixty. Almost all of that efficiency has been reflected in the marketplace. It's a highly competitive marketplace.

So as soon as a producer figures out how to cut their costs and they feel like they have a market advantage, they might reflect that in their price to win greater market share. And so, um, I think that's you know, the American consumer up until recently. Um. You know, we a year ago last summer, we were selling eggs for virtually the same price that we did in nineteen sixty, and so all of that, all of those efficiencies have

accrued basically to society's benefit. You know, You've mentioned several times that egg farmers are price takers, and I'm wondering as you see the prices shoot up and we see more and more people apparently talking about this, you know, here in New York, I think it's gone up from like two or three dollars per dozen eggs to like maybe seven or eight recently. And I've seen some people on Twitter joking that the price of a carton of eggs is higher than the minimum wage per hour in

certain states. Now do you see the consumers start to push back as the prices go higher? I guess another way of asking that is, you know, how how elastic is demand for eggs? Egg demand is very any elastic tracy. What you do see is some of these higher levels is a family that might have bought, um, five dozen eggs, uh, might go in and decide, I'm only going to buy a dozen and a half or eighteen eggs and see if the prices come down next week. And we have

seen that happen. So there's been some of that, you might say consumer pullback also in the you know kind of the industrial uses. You know, if if a bakery is a commercial bakery might be making a recipe that takes thirty pounds of eggs per hundred pound batch of whatever they're making, that might be you know, cutting back to twenty nine or eight to to you know, try to make the egg supply last a little bit longer and there So there's all different kinds of coping. We

have retailers, uh, you know, across the country. Some have reflected the price of eggs um and and some have not. And so there's all kinds of different strategies that are deployed by retailers and and frankly, we I can't begin to understand any of them just on this note. You know, if if I'm a big food producer, say I'm Kraft Heinz or someone like that, and I'm buying an enormous amount of eggs per year, do I buy them on

a long term basis? Do I have like an annual egg contractor am I going out every week and tapping suppliers? I don't want to speak to either of the companies that sure, just generally generally, if I'm a big egg continuer, yes, we we have all kinds of different arrangements with our customers. So yes, some some of them do you know, forward purchase, you know, six months or a year in advance, and some prefer to buy basically on the spot market, and

we have everything in between. So it's, you know, just kind of the strategy that that that customer wants to execute. I'm still a little unclear, okay when you talk about the spot market for eggs. So let's say a grocery store, um that you distribute, Uh, your eggs in are they like? Uh, I'm trying to think about how to frame the question, but is there like, is there a de facto competition between you and other egg producers regularly and who gets that shelf space? Do they put out a bid? Do

they put out a price? Like? How does that actually work? Uh? In practice the setting of the wholesale price at a retail outlet. Yeah, generally, you know, Joe, We've had relationships with some customers, you know, since the beginning of our company, and we've had relationships that are annual bids and sometimes you win the bid and sometimes you don't, and we

have everything in between. So there is a lot of of of I guess strategy that goes into building your your universe of customers and and balancing you know, you don't want a customer base that is a medium eggs because you know, chickens don't lay a hundred percent medium makes so you have to kind of balance that with what you with what your production is, and what your what your desired customer basis. So, in the current environment of higher egg prices, what do we see egg producers

doing in response? Is it all out expansion to try to take advantage of the price increase or are you still a little bit cautious given given the recent history of the past couple of years that you were discussing,

what exactly do you do here? Crazy? We had a pretty industry wide I think we had a pretty good hole to fill, and uh so that was that was what happened with the with the earnings that when we started to experience the elevated prices due to avian flu and so as a I can't speak to the industry. I as a company, we don't see the demand for

eggs um warranting a big expansion. We're not going to We're not going to go from our current flock size and add a million birds just because there's a temporary shortage. Those those cages that are empty due to due to aving influenza will be refilled at some point in time, and we're hustling to refill ours. And I'm sure everybody that has been affected as hustling to refill theirs. I see, So you have because you because you have spare capacity.

There's no necessarily need for like extra capital investment. It's sort of just the natural process of repopulating the existing space. Well, Joe about you might say, typical layer barn is designed to last thirty years, So you know, there's there's three percent of the of the population that needs to be rebuilt or or start over every single year. And when you had a period of time where you where you really had negative returns, you might have some deferrals that

you need to catch up on. So I think there's you know, there's probably as as many answers to that question as there are egg producers. Glenn. I'm looking at your website, which by the way, is full of chicken

and egg punds, so um, I love that. But there's there's a little press release on your on your what's cracking plog um about you expanding into feed production in and I'm wondering if that kind of I guess vertical integration is the future for farms if they're dealing with you know, the prospect of higher grain prices, um and things like that. Is that something we're going to see more of egg farmers who are also producing their own chicken feed. You know, we're a little bit novel in

that we are vertically integrated. We we we make our own packaging, we grow our own replacement stock. We we cook eggs in terms of hard boiling them. We have a liquinate plan. We uh we actually the the what you're reading on there is back then we built a new feed all that allowed us to bring the entire train. So the Southwest doesn't produce any green. So we have a train to part Iowa every three weeks and the entire hundred ten cars come to count our farm and

and we unload. We sent it back to get another load. So um, that's everything that we do is to try to gain little efficiency and and try to reduce our our cost of production. You know something that's interesting on your website you talk about a re entry program and having a significant amount of hiring among the formerly incarcerated. Talk to us about what should people know or what should policy makers know about creating jobs and the opportunity

in this area, because I think it's really interesting. And of course, with the sort of supposedly very tight labor markets, I imagine you have a lot of employers trying to look for pools of potential labor that they perhaps hadn't considered before. Joe, we we started our our program and when we started, uh, you know, re employing, employing uh

X inmates. And you have to remember that very few, very very few inmates get life sentences, so everybody is going to be released from prison at some point in time. Agriculture sometimes is not seen as the most attractive job out there, so it's always been difficult to get labor to work with animals and they're you know, they're dusty, they're smelly, all those kind of things. So we've been an employer of of x ndmates since then. We actually have a full time manager who um, if needbe, he'll

pick him up on their release date. He'll take him into town, he'll get him a I D. You know, social Security number again and those kind of things. And we have we have forty what we refer to as transitional housing apartments that we allow them to live there for a a stipend and for one year and if they'll if they'll lead between nine and fifteen months, we give them half their rent back. We want to continue their transition into society, not just you know, go from

one institution to another. And it's been very, very successful, and we've got a lot of folks who you know, probably wouldn't have had as many opportunities that they're working force post release and even after they we've had we've had inmates working force for twenty years and raising families and paying taxes, um Glenn, very important question. But you know, we talked about wholesale egg prices starting to turn down. Now what are you seeing in terms of the trajectory?

Are we going to see egg prices go back to where they were you know, a year ago? How quickly is that going to unfold? I'm probably not a very good predictor when when, and probably every investor shares a little bit of this. When things are really really bad, you can't see the end of it, and when things are really really good, you can't see the end of it. And so we're in the correction phase right now. Where that where that correct too? Is anybody's guests? I suspect

that we will. We will correct to a level that is is probably higher than what we've saw in the previous three years, but less than what we saw in the previous you know, a couple of months, I wanna, I wanna have a couple of minutes for advice on

Tracy's egg operation. But before we do, you know, you're in Arizona, and Um, I'm curious about how big of a deal water is or and you know, there's all there's so much development in Arizona, but from housing, it's all the semiconductor factories coming in that employ a lot of or that need a lot of water to wash

the silicon, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about the significance of a water in your business and how you think about like maintaining a future sort of like secure water supplies so you can continue with your farm over time. Joe. Water has been an issue in Arizona ever since the ho Ho Kom Indians started digging ditches, and so um, it's going to continue to be an issue. It's uh no one wants to admit that there may

not be enough. Our desert gets between six to nine inches of rainfall a year and that doesn't support a lot of uh, you know, people or plants, and so we have to depend on either groundwater or or surface water that's delivered from far away our farms. We have the luxury of of of we drilled wells, We have great um aquifers, and we own the water rights to continue to you know, produce all the water we need for for our operations, So I'll buy on the backyard

chicken education. What chicken breeds do you recommend for the best um egg product activity, Tracy. If you're not gonna allow me from dissuading you from from e then it just depends the Virtually all the commercial layers are either a white legger or brown lager in that is uh, the most prolific um layer, and that when we say prolific it, what we mean is it'll it lays the

most eggs relative to the feed consumed. And so you get some of your some of your smaller breeds that that they don't eat as much feed, but they don't lay as much eggs, and you get some of the larger breeds like Rhode Island reds, and some of those that are gonna are gonna eat more per dozen eggs. So um, if if you're if you're in a production, then a white lager In is your is your choice. If you're if you're interested in in in plumage or

hll color, then the sky's a limit. I am almost exclusively interested in those things and also building the world's cutest, most adorable chicken coop. But Glenn can I just ask, why do you want to dissuade me from from starting a backyard flock? Would be competition? Um. So, you guys and everybody in animal agriculture really really takes our responsibilities

very very uh carefully. And so when we take an animal, whether you're talking about your dog or a chicken or anything in between, and we take away its ability to forage and find for itself, then we have a moral obligation to take care of that animal. So, you know, we see a lot of backyard pets and animals and those kind of things that the owners go away for a weekend and maybe they don't get fed, maybe they

don't get watered, and those kind of things. So owning an animal is that especially you know, um in your backyard is something that you want to really think carefully about. And that's any animal, Tracy. So I'm just I'm just telling you might be might be easier to get a neighbor to watch your kids than it is to watch chickens over the weekend. That is totally fair. And this is actually exactly why I do not yet have chickens. But one day, one day, when you're not going back

and forth between Connecticut and New York City. Lenn Hickman, president of Hickman's Family Farms. I learned so much about the egg business from chatting with you. Really appreciate you coming on the oddlines, happy to for the opportunity. Guys can tell me any time. So Tracy're gonna hold off for a little while. Yeah, I mean, look, I've been not holding off for years now, so I think I can do it a little a bit longer. But one day, one day I will have my flock of muppet looking

silky chickens. You know. It's it's so funny. It's so interesting thinking about like animals as essentially these machines for turning like grains into like really delicious food. In the math of like, okay, one uh, one chicken one bushel of corn a year equals one human, about as much as a human would eat in here. It's pretty nice. It's a nice little it's a nice nice math there. Uh yeah, And I mean Glenn kind of touched on it.

But the whole efforts of the industry to breed the most efficient chickens possible, not just in terms of egg laying, but also in terms of breast size and things like that, and that that stand about how an acre of corn uh resulted four times as many eggs as it did in the sixties. You know again, that's that's technology there. We don't really think about tech right as a egg,

but that's like that's egg tech. Yeah. Um. The other thing that was really interesting and I hadn't realized that the past couple of years had been bad one I hadn't, but then it a lot of sense. Why are we paying so much? It's it's that, I guess yet another combination of lower production and supply kind of being taken out by the Avian flu plus rampant demand around the holidays just pushed everything up. Trying to think of some like egg related pun on perfect storm. You know, you

can't think of any egg pun. It's so easy perfect or should I say over easy? We should Okay, all right, I'm sorry. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe wi Isn't all.

You could follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand and Dashville Bennett at dashbot, and follow all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts, and for more odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we have transcripts, we blog, and we have a we Clean newsletter that you can get every week in your inbox. Go sign up for it. Thanks for listening.