The latest commodity to surge in price is eggs. And because eggs, like gasoline, is something that people purchase regularly and consider to be a staple, there's a visceral impact to the inflation there. So what's going on? Why such a massive surge? On this episode we speak with Glenn Hickman, the President of Hickman Family Farms about industry dynamics. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Key insights from the pod:
What is Hickman’s Family Farms? — 4:25
What egg production looks like in America — 5:46
How the price of eggs are set — 8:52
What happens when avian flu hits — 10:12
How does avian flu spread? — 13:28
Cost surge in the egg industry — 15:58
Efficiency gains in the egg industry — 22:18
What is the elasticity of egg demand — 24:00
Securing water rights in Arizona — 34:03
Advice to Tracy on how to start a backyard chicken coop — 35:01
---
Joe Weisenthal: (00:10)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy Alloway: (00:15)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe: (00:17)
Tracy, you know, it feels like to some extent that inflation is abating.
Tracy: (00:24)
Every time we start a podcast saying that, I think we're just jinxing it, but...
Joe: (00:29)
Well, we hope to be jinxing this particular one because there is one category that of food that is everyone is talking about these days.
Tracy: (00:40)
Eggs.
Joe: (00:40)
Eggs.
Tracy: (00:41)
I'm so excited to be talking about eggs. There are going to be a lot of puns. That's my warning for anyone listening to this episode, is I'm going to crack a bunch of terrible jokes. Or should I say yolks?
Joe: (00:55)
Do you have more? You wanna keep going? You wanna keep going Tracy?
Tracy: (00:58)
I'm a real comedi-hen.
Joe: (01:00)
So egg prices are up a lot. And it's also personal to you because in addition to all these puns, you are an aspiring egg farmer, aren't you?
Tracy: (01:09)
I am like an armchair chicken breeder. I would love to raise a bunch of backyard chickens one day. I haven't yet had the opportunity, although now that I have two and a half acres in northeast Connecticut, maybe one day — I'm getting closer. But yeah, my dream is to have a flock of chickens, preferably Silkie chickens. Have you ever seen those?
Joe: (01:29)
No, I don't think so.
Tracy: (01:30)
They look like little fluffy Muppets. So some Silkies and maybe some Easter Eggers because they produce the really cool looking eggs and yeah, declare egg independence. Just have my own supply of eggs.
Joe: (01:41)
So how about this? I have a good idea for this episode. How about we like talk for about five or 10 minutes about why egg prices are going up and then just 30 minutes on sort of farming advice, just sort of a pure agricultural episode.
Tracy: (01:56)
That sounds perfect. Also, you're gonna have to include 10 minutes for me to just like give all the random egg facts that I know.
Joe: (02:02)
Okay. Maybe we should also let the guest give random egg facts.
Tracy: (02:06)
Okay. If we have to. No. Okay. Eggs have suddenly become a big talking point. And I'm a little bit unclear why, because egg prices have been going up for a while. There's been this big outbreak of avian flu in the US and elsewhere in the world. Feed prices have been going up. And so we did see, for instance, benchmark egg prices — there is a egg price benchmark — go up, I think something like 300% over the past year.
It was like a dollar for a dozen Midwest US eggs, and now it's up to more than $4. And the egg CPI is up, I think, 59% year-on-year. But it has been happening for a while, and yet it seems to have exploded into the public consciousness relatively recently.
Joe: (02:52)
I mean, that egg CPI chart is pretty wild. We have it on the terminal going back to 1946. It's shooting higher. And I would say eggs, kind of like gasoline, are one of these highly salient prices that people notice, right, in a way. People buy them regularly. People have some intuitive sense how much they pay for eggs as opposed to, I don't know how much they pay for, like auto insurance.
Tracy: (03:15)
It's something you're exposed to on a relatively frequent basis. And it does become personal because the way that you buy eggs also impacts the prices you're seeing. So yes, if you live out in the country and you're buying eggs from a local farmer, the prices might well be lower than in the grocery store right now, because my understanding is that it's the big producers, the supermarkets or the people who supply the supermarkets, who have actually been hit the hardest by the flu.
Joe: (03:42)
All right. Well let's learn more from our guest. We have, I believe, the perfect guest to talk about eggs and how to how to price them and how to make them. We are going to be speaking with Glenn Hickman. He is the president of Hickman's Family Farms, a company that has 10 million chickens producing eggs. So Glenn, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Glenn Hickman: (04:07)
It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
Joe: (04:10)
Before we even get into the price of eggs and all that, tell us a little bit about Hickman's Family Farms. How big is it? How does it compare? How does it distribute? Just describe why should we listen to you?
Glenn: (04:25)
Well, thanks Joe. So it’s the only job I’ve ever had. I can't think about anything else. Our business started in 1944. My grandmother had 500 backyard chickens and sold eggs to her neighbors off of the back porch. And I'm the third generation to run our business along with my siblings. And we've expanded from grandma's back porch to a multi-state operation.
We primarily market eggs across the southwest from southern Wyoming to Hawaii. And we've got about a nucleus of about 10 million laying hens. And we produce all different kinds of eggs. We produce brown eggs and white eggs and organic eggs, and just about any type of eggs that are demanded by the consumers.
Tracy: (05:15)
So, just before we dive into why egg prices are going up, follow up question here, but can you give us the sort of — I swear I’m not doing this on purpose — the lay of the land when it comes to the egg industry? So what proportion of America's egg supply comes from, you know, smaller farms or even independent backyard breeders versus big industrial agricultural corporations? And do we import any eggs? I honestly have no idea.
Glenn: (05:46)
Tracy, the American Egg Board is our promotion and marketing arm of the egg industry. And everyone that has 75,000 laying hens and higher is part of the American Egg Board and contributes to the promotion of eggs. You know, that helps educate people and hopefully drives demand. So if you look at the 75,000 and up, I would suspect there's about 200 farms across the country.
If you look at the top 20 in the United States, probably 80+% of the eggs in the country are produced by the 20 largest firms. There's been a proliferation of kind of backyard semi-commercial layers over the past 10 years.
As you know Tracy, people get a little bit of land and decide that they'd like to have a few chickens and then face the same thing that every farmer has in moderating their supply and demand and trying to come up with the right amount of products. So there has been a proliferation of backyard and semi-commercial farms in the last 10 years.
Tracy: (06:57)
One of my core memories, Joe, when I was like six years old, is going to a very big chicken farm in Arkansas and thinking it would be really fun to play with the little fuzzy yellow chicks. And I don't know if you've ever been to one, but there are dead chickens everywhere, or at least there were there. So it turned into a bit of a nightmare, but I still want chickens of my own.
Joe: (07:19)
That just turned a dark a little quickly. But just one more question about size. So 10 million hens, where does that put you in the rankings? Just so I get a sense of like what a mega producer looks like. How many chickens would like some biggest producers of eggs have?
Glenn: (07:36)
Cal-Maine is the largest owner of chickens in the country. They've got about, I think, 44 million birds. And then there's several other operations that come right under them. So we're up there.
Joe: (07:52)
You're up there!
Glenn: (07:53)
You know, there's a family behind Cal-Maine Foods. There's a family virtually behind every single egg farm. Any anyone that thinks that farming and especially animal production is not still family owned and operated. It's probably a little bit, a little bit stretch of the truth. We're all in this because it's a family business.
Tracy: (08:34)
So why don't we jump to the topic at hand and talk about what's been going on with egg prices. So first of all, what have you observed from your own seat in terms of prices? How much have they gone up for you versus, say, a year ago? And what do you think is driving the increase?
Glenn: (08:52)
Well, Tracy the egg industry by and large are price takers. You know, there's a market just like there's a market for corn and a market for soybeans and those kind of things. And so we price against that market. The previous three years, ‘19, ‘20 and’ 21, were some of the most horrendous years in terms of negative returns that the egg industry has ever experienced.
So whenever you have negative returns, you do have people that exit the business or downsize or those kind of things. And then when bird flu happened, you know, we started to lose birds in February. And it's not stopped.
Hickman’s is the last commercial farm to break. We had a farm in Colorado with 300,000 organic birds, and they broke on December 17th. So it's, knock on wood, it's been a month since we've had a commercial farm outbreak, but it's mostly in the wild bird population. And you know, if you're gonna bring air to everything, from air to people from the outside to the inside of your barns, you have a chance to spread infection.
Joe: (10:02)
What happens? So how do you discover the incidence of avian flu among your the population within a farm? How do you know you have it? And then what do you have to do at that point?
Glenn: (10:14)
Every single barn, every single aviary is walked every single day by the caretaker of that barn. Any kind of surge in mortality, which avian influenza causes a surge in mortality, is immediately identified and corrective measures are taken. So maybe it's a situation where some hens got scared and they piled in a corner and those kind of things. But you try to figure out why, how to prevent that the next time.
With avian flu, the spread of infection is so fast and deadly that maybe one day you'll have 10 sick chickens in a barn. The next day you'll have a hundred. The next day you'll have a thousand. And within just a very few days, the entire farm is involved in it. So avian flu is a disease that has been identified by the federal government as something that we need to address aggressively.
So when you get identified as avian flu, the federal government mandates that the entire flock is euthanized. And that's what's happened in the ag industry. So we’ve lost close to 15% of our nation's laying flock just this year. Some of that has been repopulated already, but a large amount hasn't.
And, you know, that's, that's led to constriction and supply, which in a commodity market, you know, either a demand surge or a supply deficit leads to higher prices. We had this same situation, you guys probably remember, it wasn't that long ago, but in November, all the news was about the scarcity of turkeys and high turkey prices, because turkeys have been involved in avian flu too. And Thanksgiving is traditionally the highest demand for turkeys. So you had that confluence of high demand and restricted supply.
What's happened in the egg business is exactly the same. Our best market for the year is always during the holidays when there's extra family occasions going on, when there's extra baking going on and those kind of things. So we had the maximum constriction of supply at the same time. We had our historical highest demand period since the holidays. You know, in terms of — your listeners would understand — we've been almost limit down every day in the egg market. So the prices are fast correcting as we've seen a reduction in demand.
Tracy: (12:48)
This is why I didn't really understand the timing, because everyone started talking about it right when prices actually started going down. So I have so many questions already, but on the bird flu itself, one thing that I heard was it risks becoming endemic. So once a bird has the virus, they sort of carry it in them at all times and it can come out again at a later date. Can you maybe talk a bit more about how possible is it to eradicate avian flu altogether? Or once it's widespread, does it basically just become something that you have to deal with constantly?
Glenn: (13:28)
Tracy, we can kind of compare to Covid that there's been mutations that become more infectious, but less lethal and those kind of things. And I think that's the same kind of pattern we're seeing with avian influenza. When we think about eradicating it, that ship has sailed. We'll never eradicate avian flu because it's in the wild bird population.
And as it mutates those wild birds are super spreaders. They migrate — land in the same ponds that some of our domestic water fowls [are in], stuff like that. So you know, there is talk of a vaccine for avian flu. But that's a different road that will involve all commercial poultry, probably globally. And so it really has to be well thought out. And it's probably a couple years away from having any kind of decision where there might be widespread avian influenza vaccines that we can start to use commercially.
Joe: (14:42)
I want to get back to the current details in a second, but are there egg futures? Because I don't think I've ever seen them and yet the CME I think was founded as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board. Are there futures? Or do you have some other way of hedging these kinds of risks as a major operator?
Glenn: (14:59)
No, we don't. I think that the egg futures were kind of delisted in the early seventies, because even back then, the concentration was so high that there wasn't enough liquidity to to keep it from being manipulated.
Joe: (15:13)
Interesting. When you say the concentration, the concentration of production was such that [egg futures don’t make sense?], and is that still the case? Like could there be an egg futures market?
Glenn: (15:24)
I'm 61, not 91, so, my memory when I was 10 years old is stretched.
Joe: (15:27)
Fair enough. Fair enough.
Tracy: (15:32)
Joe, you and I can hatch a plan to relaunch egg futures. So one other thing when it comes to what's driving up egg prices, and there seems to be a little bit of debate about whether it's mostly the flu or whether it's also down to factors like higher chicken feed or some combination of both. Can you talk about maybe the input costs that go into having an egg/chicken farm?
Glenn: (15:58)
Tracy and Joe, when the Ukrainian war started, it really added fuel to a fire that already existed. So our grain costs have just exploded and probably every businessman will tell you between labor, utilities and everything in our environment has just gone up exponentially in some cases.
So at some point in time, even though we're price takers, that has to be reflected in the selling price, or you won't have anyone around to sell eggs. So there is a degree of higher costs that have been reflected into the price of eggs. It kind of has to happen. Like I said, corn prices, you know, just blew up when the Ukrainian war started, and we haven't got much relief since then.
Joe: (16:54)
I want to go back, you know, one of the themes that comes up on this podcast from time to time is how we pay the price — during sort of inflationary surges of any sorts — it's often us paying the price for a downturn that happened before, and, you know a washout happens. Farms or other entities come out of the market and then supply is constrained. So prior to the boom, it was actually a very rough couple of years for the industry. Can you talk a little bit about the last few years prior to this surge in egg prices? What was causing it and what was the experience of Covid itself and the pandemic and the effect that that had on egg production?
Glenn: (17:37)
You’ve seen it in a lot of industries. You know, when the price of oil gets ugly, then people stop drilling. And semiconductors too, people stop building new factories and those kind of things. And then demand catches up. And then the same thing happened with egg supplies.
We had a situation where we had very poor, negative returns as an industry for three years running, and that causes constraint of expansion capital and growth. And that's kind of what happened.
And so now, you know, we're probably gonna some growth in our country. We have several states that have mandated cage-free laws. We have several large customers that have adopted cage free as their future. And in most cases, a caged facility doesn't lend itself to an easy remodel to cage-free. And that takes a lot of capital. So I think that we're gonna see some constraints when it comes to expansion be because of not really knowing what the market is gonna demand. And we'll have to kind of play that by ear as as the situation plays out.
Joe: (18:55)
That's interesting. I just wanna go back those three years that you were talking about of bad returns, what was going on [with] that?
Glenn: (19:07)
Well the price of grain started to go up, like I said, about three years ago. And then just lit fire when the Ukrainian war happened. And in context, you guys, a laying hen is kind of... it works out this way that one laying hen will eat one bushel of corn per year year. That one laying hen will also produce enough eggs for one person. And so when the bushel of corn in some areas, our cost went up by two and a half times, then that's gotta be reflected all the way down the rest of the food chain.
We have a policy in this country where, you know, whether you're talking about ethanol or biodiesel, they come from food crops. And, you know, when we as a country, we've made a decision that we're gonna burn part of our food to make ethanol or refine part of our soybeans to make biodiesel, that does also carve into the supply that's available for livestock.
Tracy: (20:18)
So just on the sort of cyclical note, when it comes to, for instance, if you have an outbreak of avian flu and you have to destroy a large chunk of your flock, do you get compensation from the government for doing that, if you're mandated to do it? And also a similar question for the transition to cage-free chicken raising. Do you get grants or something like that for the further capital investment?
Glenn: (20:44)
So since the government does mandate that you have to depopulate your farm, they do pay a bit of a stipend so that it basically pays your cost of depopulation, your cost of cleaning and disinfecting and approximately the value of the birds that were in the barn at the time. It doesn't pay you for the loss of eggs, it doesn't pay you to buy a new chicken to put in the barn. So it really does lack a component of compensation for the disaster that happened.
Joe: (21:38)
Since your company has been around for so long, I feel like you might be uniquely positioned to answer this, but I'm curious, like efficiency gains over time in the egg business or how much human labor is required in 2023 to produce, I don't know, a million eggs versus how much it would've taken 20 years ago, etc. How has it changed over time?
Glenn: (22:12)
Joe, I looked at a study that goes back to 1960 and to kind of give you a ballpark, but if you take it from the production of corn through the production of the eggs, that acre of grain production will produce four times as many eggs as it did in 1960. Almost all of that efficiency has been reflected in the marketplace.
It's a highly competitive marketplace. So as soon as a producer figures out how to cut their costs and they feel like they have a market advantage, they might reflect that in their price to win greater market share. And so I think that's, you know, for the American consumer up until recently, last summer in 2021 we were selling eggs for virtually the same price that we did in 1960. And so all of those efficiencies have accrued basically to society’s benefit.
Tracy: (23:18)
You've mentioned several times that egg farmers are price takers, and I'm wondering, as you see the prices shoot up and we see more and more people apparently talking about this, you know, here in New York, I think it's gone up from like $2 or $3 per dozen eggs to like maybe $7 or $8 recently. And I've seen some people on Twitter joking that the price of a carton of eggs is higher than the minimum wage per hour in certain states. Do you see consumers start to push back as the prices go higher? I guess another way of asking that is, you know, how, how elastic is demand for eggs?
Glenn: (24:00)
Egg demand is very inelastic, Tracy. What you do see at some of these higher levels is a family that might've bought five dozen eggs might go in and decide, I'm only gonna buy a dozen and a half or 18 eggs and see if the prices come down next week. And we have seen that happen.
So there's been some of that, you might say, consumer pullback. Also in the, you know, kind of the industrial uses. You know if a bakery is a commercial bakery might be making a recipe that takes 30 pounds of eggs per a hundred pound batch of whatever they're making, they might be cutting back to 29 or 28 to try to make the egg supply last a little bit longer.
So there's all different kinds of coping. We have retailers across the country, some have reflected the price of eggs and some have not. And so there's all kinds of different strategies that are deployed by retailers and frankly, I can't begin to understand any of them.
Tracy: (25:07)
Just on this note, you know, if I'm a big food producer, say I'm Kraft Heinz or someone like that, and I'm buying an enormous amount of eggs per year, do I buy them on a long-term basis? Do I have like an annual egg contract or am I going out every week and tapping suppliers?
Glenn: (25:25)
I don't want to speak to either of the companies...
Tracy: (25:28)
Sure. Generally, if I’m a big egg consumer...
Joe: (25:28)
Just generally...
Glenn: (25:31)
We have all kinds of different arrangements with our customers. Some of them do, you know, forward purchase, you know, six months or a year in advance, and some prefer to buy basically on the spot market. And we have everything in between. So it's just kind of the strategy that that the customer wants to execute.
Joe: (25:55)
I’m still a little unclear. Okay. When you talk about the spot market for eggs, so let's say a grocery store that you distribute your eggs in, are they like, I'm trying to think about how to frame the question, but is there a defacto competition between you and other egg producers regularly [with] who gets that shelf space? Do they put out a bid? Do they put out a price? How does that actually work in practice, the setting of the wholesale price at a retail outlet?
Glenn: (26:27)
Yeah, generally, you know Joe, we've had relationships with some customers, you know, since the beginning of our company. And we've had other relationships that are annual bids, and sometimes you win the bid and sometimes you don't. And we have everything in between.
So there is a lot of, I guess, strategy that goes into building your universe of customers and balancing. You know, you don't want a customer base that is a hundred percent medium eggs because, you know, chickens don't lay a hundred percent medium eggs. So you have to kind of balance that with what your production is and what your what your desired customer base is.
Tracy: (27:11)
So in the current environment of higher egg prices, what do we see egg producers doing in response? Is it all out expansion to try to take advantage of the price increase or are you still a little bit cautious given the recent history of the past couple of years that you were discussing? What exactly do you do here?
Glenn: (27:30)
Tracy, industry-wide, I think we had a pretty good hole to fill. And so that was what happened with the earnings that, when we started to experience the elevated prices due to avian flu. I can't speak to the industry. As a company, we don't see the demand for eggs warranting a big expansion.
We're not gonna go from our current flock size and add a million birds just because there's a temporary shortage. Those cages that are empty due to avian influenza will be refilled at some point in time. And we're hustling to refill ours, and I'm sure everybody that has been affected is hustling to refill theirs.
Joe: (28:20)
I see. So because you have spare capacity, there's not necessarily need for extra capital investment. It's sort of just the natural process of repopulating the existing space?
Glenn: (28:34)
Well, Joe, you might say a typical layer barn is designed to last 30 years. So there's 3% of the population that needs to be rebuilt or start over every single year. And when you had a period of time where you really had negative returns, you might have some deferrals that you need to catch up on. So there's probably as many answers to that question as there are egg producers.
Tracy: (29:05)
Glenn, I'm looking at your website, which by the way is, is full of chicken and egg puns, so I love that. But here's a little press release on your
“What's Crackin’” blog about you expanding into feed production in 2014. And I'm wondering if that kind of, I guess, vertical integration is the future for farms if they're dealing with the prospect of higher grain prices and things like that. Is that something we're going to see more of? Egg farmers who are also producing their own chicken feed?
Glenn: (29:39)
You know, we are a little bit novel in that we are vertically integrated. We make our own packaging. We grow our own replacement stock. We cook eggs, in terms of hard boiling them. We have a liquid egg plant. What you're reading on there is back then we built a new feed mill that allowed us to bring the entire train — so the Southwest doesn't produce any grain. So we have a train depart Iowa every three weeks, and the entire 110 cars come to come to our farm and we unload. We send it back to get another load. That's everything that we do is to try to gain a little efficiency and try to reduce our cost of production.
Joe: (30:23)
You know, something else interesting on your website, you talk about a re-entry program and having a significant amount of hiring among the formerly incarcerated. Talk to us about what should people know, or what should policymakers know about creating jobs and the opportunity in this area? Because I think it's really interesting, and of course, with the supposedly very tight labor markets, I imagine you have a lot of employers trying to look for pools of potential labor that they perhaps hadn't considered before.
Glenn: (30:55)
Joe, we started our program in 1995. And when we started relocating ex-inmates, and you gotta remember that very few inmates get life sentences. So everybody is going to be released from prison at some point in time. Agriculture sometimes is not seen as the most attractive job out there. So it's always been difficult to get labor to work with animals.
They're dusty, they're smelly, all those kind of things. So we've been an employer of ex-inmates since then. We actually have a full-time manager who, if need be, he'll pick him up on their release date, he'll take him into town, he'll get him an ID, you know, a social security number again, and those kind of things.
And we have 40, what we refer to as transitional housing apartments that we allow them to live there for a stipend for one year. And if they'll leave between nine and 15 months, we give them half their rent back. We want to continue their transition into society, not just, you know, go from one institution to another.
And it's been very, very successful. And we've got a lot of folks who, you know, probably wouldn't have had as many opportunities, they're working for us post-release. We've had inmates working for us for 20 years and raising families and paying taxes.
Tracy: (32:31)
Glenn, very important question, but, you know, we talked about wholesale egg prices starting to turn down. What are you seeing in terms of the trajectory? Are we going to see egg prices go back to where they were a year ago? How quickly is that going to unfold?
Glenn: (32:50)
I'm probably not a very good predictor and probably every investor shares a little bit of this, when things are really, really bad, you can't see the end of it. And when things are really, really good, you can't see the end of it. And so we're in a correction phase right now where that corrects to is anybody's guess. I suspect that we will correct to a level that is probably higher than what we've saw in the previous three years, but less than what we saw in the previous, you know, couple months.
Tracy: (33:23)
Got it.
Joe: (33:24)
I want to leave a couple minutes for advice on Tracy's egg operation, but before we do, you know, you're in Arizona and I'm curious about how big of a deal water is in your business? There's so much development in Arizona both from housing, there's all these semiconductor factories coming in that that need a lot of water to wash the silicon, etc. Can you talk a little bit about the significance of water in your business and how you think about maintaining future secure water supplies so that you can continue with your farm over time?
Glenn: (34:03)
Joe, water has been an issue in Arizona ever since the Hohokam Indians started digging ditches. And so it's going to continue to be an issue. No one wants to admit that there may not be enough. Our desert gets between six to nine inches of rainfall a year, and that doesn't support a lot of people or plants. And so we have to depend on either groundwater or surface water that's delivered from far away. Our farms, we have the luxury drilled wells, we have great aquifers and we own the water rights to continue to produce all the water we need for our operations.
Tracy: (34:50)
So I’ll bite on the backyard chicken education. What chicken breeds do you recommend for the best egg productivity?
Glenn: (35:01)
Tracy, if you're not gonna allow me from dissuading you from becoming an egg farmer, then it just depends. Virtually all the commercial layers are either a White Leghorn or Brown Leghorn — that is the most prolific layer. When we say prolific, what we mean is it lays the most eggs relative the feed consumed.
And so you get some of your smaller breeds that don't eat as much feed, but they don't lay as much eggs. And you get some of the larger breeds like Rhode Island Reds, and some of those that are gonna eat more per dozen eggs. So if you're in egg production then a White Leghorn is your choice. If you're interested in plumage or egg shell color than the sky's a limit.
Joe: (35:57)
Are you interested in plumage and eggshell color?
Tracy: (36:00)
I am almost exclusively interested in those things and also building the world's cutest, most adorable chicken coop. But Glenn, can I just ask why do you want to dissuade me from starting a backyard flock? Why’s it a bad idea?
Joe: (36:13)
Other than that she would be competition...
Glenn: (36:16)
So you guys and everybody in animal agriculture really, really takes our responsibilities very, very carefully. And so when we take an animal, whether you're talking about your dog or a chicken or anything in between, and we take away its ability to forage and fend for itself, then we have a moral obligation to take care of that animal. So, you know, we see a lot of backyard pets and animals and those kind of things that the owners go away for a weekend and maybe they don't get fed, maybe they don't get watered, and those kind of things. So owning an animal, especially, you know, in your backyard is something that you wanna really think carefully about. And that's any animal, Tracy. So I'm just telling you, it might be easier to get a neighbor to watch your kids than it is to watch your chickens over the weekend.
Tracy: (37:17)
Yeah, that is totally fair. And this is actually exactly why I do not yet have chickens. But one day.
Joe: (37:22)
One day, when you're not going back and forth between Connecticut and New York City. Glenn Hickman, president of Hickman's Family Farms, I learned so much about the egg business from chatting with you. Really appreciate you coming on Odd Lots.
Glenn: (37:36)
Happy for the opportunity. You guys can call me anytime.
Joe: (37:53)
So Tracy, you're gonna hold off for a little while.
Tracy: (37:55)
Look. I've been holding off for years now, so I think I can do it a little bit longer, but one day, one day I will have my flock of muppet-looking Silkie chickens.
Joe: (38:04)
You know, it's so interesting thinking about animals as essentially these machines for turning grains into really delicious food. And the math of, okay, one chicken is one bushel of corn a year equals about as much as a human would eat in a year, it's pretty nice. There’s math there.
Tracy: (38:25)
Yeah, and I mean, Glenn kind of touched on it, but the whole efforts of the industry to breed the most efficient chickens possible, not just in terms of egg laying, but also in terms of breast size and things like that.
Joe: (38:37)
And that stat about how an acre of corn results in four times as many eggs as it did in the sixties. You know, again, that's technology there. We don't really think of it as tech, right, but that's ag tech.
Tracy: (38:52)
Yeah, the other thing that was really interesting, I hadn't realized that the past couple of years had been bad ones for the egg industry.
Joe: (38:58)
No, I hadn’t either. But then it makes a lot of sense. Why are we paying so much? It's every Odd Lots ever.
Tracy: (39:03)
I guess yet another combination of lower production and supply kind of being taken out by the avian flu plus rampant demand around the holidays just pushed everything up.
Joe: (39:15)
I’m trying to think of some like egg-related pun on perfect storm.
Tracy: (39:21)
You can't think of any egg puns?
Joe: (39:22)
No.
Tracy: (39:23)
It's so easy, Joe. Or should I say over easy?
Joe: (39:27)
We should leave it there.
You can follow Hickman Family Farms on Twitter at @hickmanseggs.