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hey capitalism, how are you doing?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
yeah..
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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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Link to the actual article. It's a good read, and in no way does it try to justify the raise in egg prices. It talks about the history of chicken and egg farming in the 20th century, the supply chain needed to bring as many eggs to consumers, and is critical of how the growing demand led to factory farming and horrible conditions for the chickens.
For such a long article it’s really disappointing they didn’t at all go into how chicken farmers themselves are ratfucked by contracts with processing plants and live below the poverty line if they don’t have a second job.
I am not all that knowledgeable on the US egg industry, but wouldn't this mainly just the small scale farmers that would be struggling?
As it mentioned in the article, the large companies will have the leverage to raise the prices (article describes it as cartelization). And are then encouraged to keep the scale with compensation and I guess subsidies.
My knowledge is more related to the meat side of things than the egg side honestly, but here’s a citation: 70 percent of chicken farmers with no other job live below the poverty line. That’s not people who work on a chicken farm (although they’re certainly not paid well either), that’s the people who own it.
These farms may technically be ‘small scale’ in that they aren’t owned by a giant corporation, but they often contain multiple times as many chickens as their European counterparts, in more crowded conditions, which is part of why disease spreads so fast.
For meat, the reason the farmers are in this mess is because separate companies buy and process the chicken, and they won’t buy from you if you don’t follow their arbitrary and frequently changing guidelines. They also don’t pay a given amount per pound, they pay you depending on the yields other chicken farmers got on their farms. And the farmers don’t have another place to sell their chickens, it’s these companies or nothing, as 20 companies control basically the entire US market.