California’s Proposition 2, requiring that eggs sold in the state only come from hens housed in roomier cages, went into effect on January 1. Approved by a two-thirds majority vote in 2008, the law also applies to eggs shipped into the state for retail sale. As reported in Digital Journal on Dec. 13, at least 30 percent of eggs sold in California are from out-of-state egg producers.
Even though egg producers nationwide certainly had plenty of advanced warning on when the new law would go into effect, the nation’s $30.7 billion egg market is scrambling to meet the state’s demands. Last Wednesday, Jerry Hagstrom, editor of The Hagstrom Report, passed out pictures to his subscribers showing prices for cartons of eggs selling for $4.49 to $5.99 per dozen in a San Francisco Safeway store. In Denver, Colorado, eggs were selling for $1.84 per dozen to $3.88 per dozen in a local Wal-Mart store.
So will the price of eggs eventually come back down to something less that an arm-and-a-leg? Dan Flynn with Food Safety News says prices will eventually drop back down. But in the meantime, the law has forced some egg producers to go out of business. As for those egg producers willing to comply with the new law, remodeling hen houses will cost the farmer, and that cost will be pushed along to the consumer.
Iowa Egg Council’s endowed ISU Professor Hongwei Xin says it is hard to tell how long the price of eggs will remain high. He says some states, like Iowa, are making California a “specialty” market by installing the new regulation housing spaces. Xin says, “If you build a 100,000 layer house to meet the new regulation. We’ll be looking at about 3 million dollars.”
