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.
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?