Meat chickens and egg chickens are not the same. Egg chickens take longer to reach productive age, so the market finds it harder to react to supply shocks.
At best, layers take 10 more weeks to produce. The egg price spiked almost a year ago.
Focusing on meat vs egg chickens is beside the point. Cal-Maine’s profit has skyrocketed, even as prices on other things have come back down, so clearly they’re not merely passing their expenses on to the consumer. Read the link at top.
Cory Doctorow is no expert on the US egg/chicken industry. He's writing political opinion pieces here. Occasionally he writes science fiction. He also has big problems with hyperbole in his work.
The egg price spiked almost a year ago because we've been dealing with H5N1 since over a year ago and it has only gotten worse since.
An accusation brought to the FTC by an organization whose founding mission statement is that all of the problems in the farm industry are because of monopolistic corporations. Only a single member of their board/staff even owns a farm.
