[Diggers350] James Rebanks: Why we’re running out of eggs The global farming system lies in ruins

[Tony Gosling]

Why we’re running out of eggs The global farming system lies in ruins

The chickens are coming home to roost.

James Rebanks March 15, 2025

https://unherd.com/2025/03/why-were-running-out-of-eggs/

I was lying with my mouth open, staring up at a 
poster of a palm tree, when my dentist started 
complaining about the price of eggs. She’d just 
spent £37 on a small bag of basic groceries. But 
it was the price of eggs that was really freaking 
her out. I look fairly agricultural even in my 
town clothes, so she asked me: “Why is food 
becoming so expensive?” Half my mouth was numb by 
this point, and full of metal implements, but I tried my best to answer.

The price of eggs in the UK has risen almost 20% 
since the start of the year; in Morrisons, a 
six-pack rose from £1.90 to £2.25 in just over a 
month. This is bad news for British egg-lovers, 
who rely on them as a cheap source of protein and 
nutrition in an otherwise obesogenic food 
environment. Last year, the UK consumed about 13 
billion eggs — that’s around 200 for each and 
every one of us. And the poorer you are, the more 
of your income is spent on groceries, and so the 
skyrocketing cost of eggs hits even harder.

Emacs!


It’s a relatively new problem. For decades, cheap 
groceries were taken for granted; eggs became 
cheaper and cheaper over the past century, until 
in 2020 they were a third of their 1920 price. 
Yet food prices are once again becoming a hot 
political issue, in both Britain and the United 
States. During the most recent US election, nine 
out of 10 voters polled said they were concerned 
about food inflation. JD Vance visited a 
supermarket and lamented that eggs were $4 per 
dozen because the Democrats couldn’t manage the 
economy. The store sign behind him actually 
priced the eggs at $2.99, but, as ever with 
populists, the facts didn’t matter much, because 
Vance was tapping into a real public concern — 
one that urban liberals tend to ignore because 
farming is outside their zone of interest.

President Trump promised voters he would bring 
food prices down. But the cost of eggs has risen 
sharply since then. An American friend of mine 
recently paid $9 a dozen in her local store — 
and, in California especially, that’s no longer 
unusual. Some American supermarkets, including 
Walmart, are now rationing the number of eggs a 
person can buy per day. And last week, America’s 
agricultural secretary, Brooke Rollins, told 
Americans that if they wanted a reliable supply 
of eggs, they should keep chickens in their backyards.

So what is going on with eggs? The short answer 
is the HPAI bird flu virus, which has wreaked 
chaos globally. If you’ve been to the seaside in 
the past year or two, you may have seen dead 
seabirds washing up and down on the tide or lying 
crumpled on the sand. The virus is ever-present 
in wild bird populations, and creates havoc when 
it infects domesticated poultry, as it increasingly does.

We all like the idea of hens running around in a 
yard or field for a few hours each day, but when 
this happens, they often come into contact with 
wild birds, or with their faeces or carcasses, 
and catch the flu. Given the compact nature of 
industrial farming, the infection will then 
spread quickly among other hens. The solution up 
until now has been to slaughter the affected 
flocks: more than 160 million American hens have 
been taken out so far, and 47 million since the 
start of December. In the UK, 1.8 million farmed 
birds have been killed on 33 farms since 
December, including more than one million on one 
Shropshire farm. One reason why we’re seeing the 
cost of eggs rise is simply that fewer are being laid.

Yet avian flu is by no means the full story, 
because lots of other food items are also getting 
more expensive. The more complicated explanation 
is that the era of ever-cheaper food is over. We 
are reaching the limit of our ability to cheapen food staples.

All around the world, populations are growing and 
becoming more affluent, and when people get 
richer, they want more and better food. Demand is 
therefore rising, but as the old saying goes, 
“they aren’t making any more land”. And clearing 
more forest or wilderness for farming is deeply 
unfashionable for sensible environmental reasons. 
So supply is not magically rising as it once did.

The challenge for farmers, then, is to produce 
more food from the same amount of land. For the 
past century or more, we have done this over and 
over again, thanks to innovations such as the 
Haber-Bosch process, which takes nitrogen from 
the air and makes it into little white globules 
that are plant food. We bred faster growing pigs, 
hens that lay more eggs, milkier cows, beefier 
steers, heavier yielding crops, and developed 
remarkably productive industrialised systems. 
Farming in the UK is 30% more productive overall than in 1990.

But it’s not clear that we can continue on this 
path of optimisation, as our methods in some 
farming sectors are swiftly becoming less 
effective. The Haber-Bosch process, for one 
thing, is a time-limited magic trick that is now 
wearing off, as the synthetic ammonia it 
produces, which is used to make industrial 
fertiliser, is degrading the soil. This makes 
growing grain less efficient, and therefore 
costlier. And when the price of chicken feed goes 
up, so does the price of eggs.

Not only are productivity gains much harder to 
come by now, but we actually have less land 
devoted to food production than in the past. And 
with this we must feed many millions more people. 
Today, we need land for heaps of different 
things, from building a million new homes in the 
UK, to solar farms to rewilding projects to 
producing biofuels. All this drives up buyer 
competition for land, raising its value, and 
indirectly increasing the cost of food.

As a result, Britain’s farmland is vanishing. The 
Council for the Protection of Rural England 
estimates that, since 2010, 14,500 hectares of 
farmland that could grow 250,000 tonnes of 
vegetables a year has been lost to development. 
Nearly 300,000 homes have been built on 8,000 
acres of prime farmland. And the government is 
waging a culture war on “nimbies” and “blockers” who want to stop them.

Can Britain afford to make such a sacrifice? The 
Office of National Statistics estimates that the 
number of people in the UK will rise to 78 
million by 2050, and so the demand for food will 
naturally soar. But how can we feed all of these 
people without protecting farmland? We certainly 
can’t rely on foreign imports — as the developing 
world grows more affluent, it is grabbing the 
food Britain would once have relied upon, 
originally from our empire, and later from our 
membership of the EU. The old liberal global 
order, which we depend upon for our global food 
supply, is falling apart, and Britain has 
isolated itself from all the major geopolitical 
trading blocks. Trump made matters worse last 
week when he announced that American farmers 
should start producing more food for the US 
market, rather than for export, ahead of looming tariffs in April.

The British egg crisis is therefore part of a 
much larger agricultural catastrophe. We 
discovered a way to produce the cheapest eggs in 
history, through giant industrial farms, but in 
doing so made our food supply highly vulnerable 
to disease. This leads to volatility in supply, 
and inflated prices when it goes wrong. And it’s 
all part of a global just-in-time, super-cheap 
food system that relies on massive farms and 
processing facilities that are just too big to fail.

When we destroyed the old system based on 
thousands of small farms and allowed a handful of 
corporations to manage whole sectors of farming, 
as we’ve done in the egg industry, we laid 
ourselves open to exploitation, to 
anti-competitive cartels and monopolies. Indeed, 
there is a growing suspicion in the US that by 
manipulating bottlenecks in the supply chain, 
such as the number of chicks produced for laying 
hen farms, some companies may be “price gouging” 
— a fancy word for manufacturing scarcity to drive up prices and profits.

It doesn’t help that the British government 
treats agriculture with contempt and pays little 
regard to the problem of food security. It signs 
trade deals that allow foreign producers with 
lower agricultural standards to out-compete 
British farmers on the supermarket shelves. And 
it has created a greater tax liability on land, 
hitting elderly farmers who have failed to hand 
the farm on. It’s no wonder the average farm now 
struggles to make enough to pay the farmer the national average wage.

Then there’s the question of subsidies. The last 
Tory government dismantled production subsidies, 
and Labour has failed to replace them equitably 
with a much talked about “green transition”. This 
has had serious consequences — especially for 
farms like ours, which used to operate on the 
principle that we were feeding the nation; even 
if we lost money on the farming, we were always 
bailed out at the end of the year by the support 
payment. But now that support has been taken 
away, we simply have to make a profit. Which is 
fine for us but has a massive implication for the 
food system. If a food product doesn’t pay now, 
then we either produce less of it or charge more 
for it. And that’s why there are far wilder 
swings in food pricing than in the past.

This brings us back to eggs again. Although eggs 
were not part of the last subsidy system, egg 
farmers benefited from the cheap grain it 
resulted in. Now, when the price of grain and 
thus chicken feed rises too high, egg farmers can 
simply pause their operations until the price 
drops again. This signals a dramatic break from 
the old subsidy days: today, when farmers aren’t 
making a profit, they’ll just stop farming — 
which spells disaster for Britain’s food security.

As it stands, the major British parties are 
failing to deal with food, farming, and 
land-based issues effectively. This is worsening 
an already difficult cost-of-living crisis. 
Inflation in the UK rose to 3% in January, and, 
according to the BBC, food price inflation is a 
key driver of that. Unless the Government can 
find the money to either subsidise inflated food 
prices or else put more money in people’s 
pockets, they’ll struggle to sell Net Zero, or 
many other expensive, progressive programmes to 
the public. Rural America has already fled into 
the arms of the populists — and rural Britain may not be far behind.

This might, then, be a good moment for Britain to 
rethink its attitude to agriculture. We have to 
get real about the costs and risks of producing 
food. We also need to reward smaller farms, which 
tend to be more resilient and robust than 
industrial ones. If we had protected smaller 
farms in the past and paid a little more for 
their eggs, we would not be so dependent now upon 
industrial-scale operations that create vast 
price spikes when things go wrong. Cheapening 
food beyond a certain point is an illusion: at 
some point we’ll have to face up to the real cost 
of food, and that real cost is likely to rise.

The big question is how to ensure people can 
afford food at its true price — a problem solved 
in places like Norway by the redistribution of 
wealth. We currently rely on cheap food to mask 
the prevalence of poverty in Britain, but that 
trick relies on subsidised farming and 
technological breakthroughs that are now slowing. 
The thing to do now is to create far more jobs 
that pay decently, so that people can still 
afford their weekly supermarket shops.

For too long, we’ve acted like agriculture is not 
our problem: it’s a yokel issue, that’s nothing 
to do with us. But now we have no eggs for 
breakfast. We have neglected to think clearly 
about farming and food, and now it seems the 
chickens are coming home to roost — or not, because they are sick.

James Rebanks is a fell farmer and the 
best-selling author of The Shepherd’s Life. His 
latest book is The Place of Tides.
herdyshepherd1  
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