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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Looks like actual prices are trending back to the index. There was a big spike induced by the culling of millions of birds a couple of years back.

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Yes. It is a shame both sides explored this politically in the most superficial manner. Those cullings (there was also a more recent one), for sanitary reasons, should have sparked a higher level debate on food security viz novel epidemic threats.

But, politics in the US are completely dominated by lawyers, everything is about rhetorics and scoring talking points. But problems like that require an engineering mindset.

> It is a shame both sides explored this politically in the most superficial manner.

It was one side. The liberals were trying to have the conversation you mentioned, with extensive discussion about why this wasn’t as severe in other countries due to differences in farming practices or talking about vaccination, but the Republican strategists saw an opportunity in just hammering the idea that Biden had some kind of magic egg price lever in his office. Saying “both sides” is supporting them by reinforcing their framing even though it’s ahistorical.

166 million chickens were culled earlier this year [1]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-26/poultry...

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"Culling" is different than "slaughter for meat"

Layers aren’t viable as a meat crop anyway, you’d spend more trying to engineer some one-off effort like that than you’d make and nobody would want the resulting meat. Your competition is freakish mutant birds that get so big in a few weeks that if you don’t butcher them they’ll soon be unable to walk and start to suffocate under their own bulk, and that taste like the almost nothing that grocery store buyers expect.

I assume egg layers are typically either fed back to the flock (chickens love eating chicken) or turned into e.g. dog food, but I kinda doubt they do even that with a disease-cull.

>I assume egg layers are typically either fed back to the flock (chickens love eating chicken) or turned into e.g. dog food

or mcnuggets, or any sort of processed chicken product where the taste of the chicken is drowned out.

Layers do still make good meat birds, not sure why you're assuming they aren't. I'd usually use a layer for soup, but I wouldn't waste the meat if I had to take the bird for some reason.

Cornish cross birds are likely the "freakish mutant birds" you're talking about. People bred them to grow as fast as possible, seems wrong to call them freakish since we wanted them that way. Its around 8 weeks old when they can't walk, that's the point where they have to be processed.

I wouldn't recommend feeding chickens back to the flock. Chickens will eat other chickens, but you need to be really careful with regards to the cause of death. I recommend anyone raising chickens also raises hogs, if you do lose a bird the hogs will east it and there aren't many illnesses that can cross between those species.

They don't process and sell culled birds. At large scale when culling due to disease, they generally turn off the ventilation system and suffocate the birds en masse.

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