Summary
Canada has avoided the severe egg shortages and soaring prices seen in the U.S. due to differences in farming practices and regulations.
While avian flu has devastated large American egg farms, Canada’s smaller farms and tightly sealed barns have limited the impact.
The U.S.’s industrialized egg industry, driven by cost efficiency, is vulnerable to supply shocks when outbreaks occur.
Canada’s supply management system ensures stable production and restricts imports, keeping farms smaller. Meanwhile, U.S. consumers face continued egg price surcharges and supply pressures.
Another major factor is that Canada raises more of their chickens indoors due to how cold it gets, significantly decreasing their risk of exposure to avian flu.
The US has way more free-range chickens, and free-range chickens are most at risk.
Yes and no. Free range in America means “raised in a huge building and never seeing sunlight.” Basically what separates them from cage free is that thousands of birds all share one giant cage instead of four birds to a cage inside the larger cage.
Pasture raised are the ones that get to go outside and eat bugs in the sunshine.
Canada is a bit different in its designations. ‘Free run’ means they’re in the barn and ‘free range’ means they have access outside the barn (weather permitting ofc).
Yeah, but to how much outdoor area? IIRC it’s still pretty factory farm. Maybe you can get super-freerange eggs as well, but not at my local store.
Backyard hens are dope.
The chickens that are outside eating bugs in the sunshine are the most likely to catch avian flu due to exposure to wild birds 😕
they are more spread out, so less chance of getting h5n1, some brands use pasture, garden raised and they are less likely to be recalled for avian flu, of course these are more expensive too.
when you are super-crowded indoors, viruses spread more easily.
Do you have a source that free range chickens are less likely to get avian flu? Because in the article it mentions chickens that don’t have contact with nature outside a facility are less likely to get it
I remember when there was some … what was it, hoof & mouth disease, or something, in the UK?
The Problem™, was that farms for these animals are crowded,
AND trades of animals were sooo quick, that by the time they clued-in that this was happening, many farms were infected,
& they weren’t able to just identify all the now-infected farms, because that wasn’t part of their national management system, apparently…
Remapping it to mega-chickenfarms,
I’d bet they’ve got specialist chick-producing-farms, & then the mega egg-farms, & that they trade with each-other ( replacing dead birds, if nothing else )
& the transactions are happening at such a pace, at national-scale,
that any infection which gains ground somewhere, can essentially “zerg rush” the entire-system, before the controls have a chance to clamp-down properly, AND many simply won’t obey any clamp-down order anyways, because obeying law is unAmerican, culturally…
iow, it’s in large part, a systems question.
The gestation-period for any illness makes trades that happen quicker-than-that systemically dangerous, when there’s some highly-transmissible pathogen going 'round ( whether we know about it, or not ),
& same as you have to slow the trades-cycle of stock-markets to human-scale ( say 2-second intervals for recording trades ), in order to take the stock-market back from the millisecond-trade-algorithms,
you also have to batch the trades in infectable-farm-animals so as to make it more-difficult for transmissible pathogens to OWN a national-economy, but … moneyarchy won’t allow that management, of course…
In the UK case, there was a clear division into superspreader farms vs normal farms.
I’m presuming the same will be true in all farm-animals-industries, at scale.
( sorry for breaking this into pieces, while writing it, but braindamage: it’s easier for me to understand the meanings when each piece is clear, by itself: it’s my mental-equivalent to a wheelchair, perhaps : )
PS: I just realized…
Some farmers are trading-addicted: it’s the “buzz” they get from the doing-deals, which they love sooo much…
I wonder if the superspreader sites were partly the result of that mode of operating a farm?
But if they do catch it, they’re way less likely to spread it to a literal million other chickens, so there’s that
That’s the rub.
And they pick each other to death in those “free range” areas.
Yeah…
“horrible creatures”, I was told by a former personal-scale chicken-farmer…
if human-nature & chicken-nature are related, then … that would actually explain one hell of alot, tbh…
actually its overcrowding in farms too, they have indoor farms where its considered free range, but enough chickens to become crowded and you see dead chickens that are discovered til later.
Not sure if it’s still this way, but a documentary years ago described the ridiculous technicality that allowed a farm to call themselves free range. It was like a door that led outside to a 4 foot cube area shared by thousands and thousands of chicken. Basically enough room for like three chickens to spread their wings… If they happened to find the door, and it wasn’t already crowded… And they were actually able to walk.
I’ve seen tons of videos of people who actually free range their chickens, actually outside, and they’ve had no avian flu problems with their chickens. 🤔
You’ve seen some videos of free range chickens that don’t have avian flu and think that constitutes evidence that avian flu isn’t a problem for free range chickens…?
I wish more people knew that information.