Do you remember when you could buy a dozen eggs for 99 cents? It seems like it was only yesterday, but unfortunately those days are now gone for good. Thanks to a variety of factors, egg prices have risen to levels that we have never seen before, and in some areas of the country significant shortages are being reported. In fact, things are so bad that Whole Foods is apparently “now limiting egg carton purchases to two per person”. This is extremely alarming, because millions of U.S. households have traditionally relied on eggs as a cheap source of protein. Unfortunately, it appears that eggs will not be “cheap” for the foreseeable future. According to an article that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the average price of a dozen eggs in California actually reached $7.37 this week…
Egg cases were bare across Los Angeles County this week, from Trader Joe’s in Long Beach to Amazon Fresh in Inglewood, Target in MidCity to Ralphs in Glendale. Those such as Hodges who found cartons were shocked by the sudden spike in price.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Anna Sanchez, 32, who scoured the half-empty shelves at a Smart & Final in University Park looking for a dozen eggs for less than $10. “The cheaper ones just aren’t there.”
The average retail price for a dozen large eggs jumped to $7.37 in California this week, up from $4.83 at the beginning of December and just $2.35 at this time last year, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show.
Can you imagine paying 7 dollars for a carton of eggs?
I certainly cannot.
Thankfully, prices are not quite as high elsewhere in the nation. One of the reasons why egg prices in California are so absurd is because of a new law that went into effect last January…
Since the law went into effect last January, all eggs sold in California have to be produced in cage-free settings. But cage-free production takes much more space than conventional egg production, and California producers aren’t able to keep up with demand.
“They’re selling everything they can possibly grow,” Mattos said.
Of course egg prices have also been skyrocketing in states that do not have such laws.
All over the nation, people are now paying 4 or 5 dollars for a dozen eggs, and many believe that our ongoing bird flu pandemic is the primary factor that is causing prices to go completely nuts…
But egg prices are up significantly more than other foods — even more than chicken or turkey — because egg farmers were hit harder by the bird flu. More than 43 million of the 58 million birds slaughtered over the past year to control the virus have been egg-laying chickens, including some farms with more than a million birds apiece in major egg-producing states like Iowa.
More than 50 million chickens and turkeys have also been wiped out in Europe.
So when you combine the two totals, so far well over 100 million chickens and turkeys have been killed in just the United States and Europe.
And there is no end to the bird flu pandemic in sight.
This is a major crisis, but up to this point the mainstream media has not been focusing on it very much.
On top of everything else, egg farmers have had to deal with rapidly rising costs in recent months.
In fact, there are some in the industry that insist that the huge cost increases that egg farmers have been hit with over the past year are even a bigger factor than the bird flu…
But the president and CEO of the American Egg Board trade group, Emily Metz, said she believes all the cost increases farmers have faced in the past year were a bigger factor in the price increases than bird flu.
“When you’re looking at fuel costs go up, and you’re looking at feed costs go up as much as 60%, labor costs, packaging costs — all of that … those are much much bigger factors than bird flu for sure,” Metz said.
Many anticipate that these costs will only go higher in 2023.
And that will mean even higher prices for the rest of us.
I really feel badly for small bakeries. They use lots and lots of eggs, and if egg prices continue to go up many small bakeries could soon be forced to close…
“Small businesses especially, you live and die by what your food costs are,” said Tracy Ann Devore, owner of KnowRealityPie in Eagle Rock, who recently let go a dishwasher to stem rising costs. “If this keeps up for another three to six months, it could be a tipping point for some bakeries to close.”
For Devore and many others, the new egg crisis, combined with uncertainty about when it could ebb, has been more unsettling than the gradual price creep of dairy products, flour and produce.
“At some point, you can’t raise the price anymore,” Devore said. “There’s been points where I’ve cried recently, because I thought, ‘How are we going to keep going with this?’”
Our food industry was stable for so many years, but now we are witnessing a dramatic shift.
Costs are going through the roof, and supply problems just keep popping up.
Just like we have witnessed at other times, empty shelves are starting to be reported at certain supermarkets around the nation…
Social media is brimming with reports of missing food items at Kroger supermarket locations across the country.
A repeat of early 2020 when toilet paper and other essentials ran bare, the start of 2023 is seeing “a lot of empty shelves” at Kroger, according to numerous reports, some containing video evidence of lingering supply chain problems.
We are getting dangerously close to the days that I have been warning about.
As we are hit by one crisis after another throughout 2023, I expect our supply chain problems to continue to intensify.
So I would encourage you to stock up while you still can.
Yes, prices may seem ridiculously high now, but the truth is that they aren’t going to be getting any lower than they are at this moment.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending copies as gifts to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
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Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
America has finally elected the “Anti-Christ” as president and he is bringing down this republic as planned. When the U.S. finally collapses the living will envy the dead.