Egg prices to ease following record prices

The highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreak appears to have slowed in recent weeks, but U.S. egg inventories in the final week of December were 29% percent lower than at the beginning of the year due to the virus. At the end of December, more than 43 million egg-laying hens had been lost to the disease itself or to depopulation since the outbreak began in February 2022. According to the USDA, losses were spread across two waves: from February to June (30.7 million hens) and from September to December (12.6 million hens). Read more