In China, with the record high number of egg-laying chickens and a severe market oversupply, egg prices have plunged, leading to “comprehensive losses” for chicken farmers. The stories of four young chicken farmers with different scales and models of operation in China depict the true picture of the industry’s intense competition with “price inversion” and “supply side contraction”.
Currently, egg prices on the mainland continue to decline due to a severe imbalance in supply and demand in the chicken market, as verified by official monitoring data and frontline market feedback.
A recent article by financial influencer “流蘇晚晴” pointed out that the egg market is experiencing a rare situation of “comprehensive losses”. The regional prices have dropped to 2.87 yuan per catty, a year-on-year plummet of over 38%. However, the current breeding cost is around 3.43 yuan per catty, meaning that chicken farmers incur a loss of about 0.5 yuan for every catty of eggs sold. This price inversion phenomenon continues to worsen, leading to the accelerated elimination of old chickens even by small-scale farmers, and even large-scale farms are proactively controlling production capacity.
Official monitoring data shows that the wholesale price of eggs nationwide in October was 7.63 yuan per kilogram, a decrease of 5.22% month-on-month and 26.56% year-on-year. In the first week of November, egg prices continued to decline, with a weekly decrease of around 4%.
Zhu Ning, an associate researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, stated that the national stock of laying hens is mainly stable, making it difficult to reverse the high supply trend in the short term. Beijing’s Xinfadi market merchant Li Zhenheng bluntly stated to the media, “The stock volume is too high, and the oversupply is too obvious, resulting in the lowest prices in recent years.”
In the macro environment where supply exceeds demand in the chicken market, financial data shows that the mindset of chicken farmers to “tough it out” is changing. The sales volume of chicks decreased month-on-month in July, and the output of old hens in major breeding areas such as Hebei and Shandong increased by over 15% in October, indicating that the supply side contraction has begun.
The significant drop in egg prices has severely impacted all chicken farmers.
Ms. Yao, a professional egg chicken farmer in Hubei, expressed on November 12 to Epoch Times, “The risk is immense. Every day, we have to monitor the price fluctuations in the egg market, it’s like opening a blind box every day… Never raise egg chickens.” She raised thirty thousand chickens, but is “getting poorer the more she raises.”
With 7 years of chicken farming experience and managing a 30,000-chicken farm, Ms. Yao is a representative of professional farming, but her high production capacity has been completely engulfed by the market tide.
She mentioned that she invested around 3 million yuan in building the factory for the chicken farm, with over 2 million yuan in loans just for the chicken coops. She estimated that she has already incurred losses of 300,000 yuan. She pointed out, “I can’t afford this!” The money earned last year has all been “pumped in” this year.
She also noted that almost all the peers around her are operating under debt.
Mr. Wang, a retired soldier operating a large chicken farm in Hebei with thousands of chickens, admitted that despite his over a decade in the chicken farming industry, he is now in deep trouble due to the current market conditions.
He recently told Epoch Times that the current egg prices have already dropped below the breakeven line of 3.5 yuan per catty, putting him in a loss-making situation. He is expected to lose over 200,000 yuan this year alone, affecting even his basic livelihood.
He said, “No matter how hard I work, I can’t make money. I can’t even afford to add meat to my noodles now.” Despite facing huge losses and loan pressure, the chicken farm still employs two workers to collect eggs, with a monthly salary of 2,100 yuan. He has a protruding lumbar disc issue due to his military service, making it difficult to endure the pain of bending to gather eggs in the chicken farm, yet he still needs to personally manage the farm’s operations, exhausting himself physically. He observed, “The cheaper the eggs, the harder they are to sell.”
He also mentioned that previously, his entire family helped out in the chicken farm and they were all exhausted. His father suffered a sudden cerebral hemorrhage last year, and his wife is pregnant, rendering them unable to help anymore.
Mr. Wang stated, “The farmers raising pigs and chickens in China are all in a very tough situation now.”
A 23-year-old college graduate named Xiao Mei from Jiangsu, running a small free-range chicken farm with over a thousand chickens, revealed in an interview with Epoch Times that although she has avoided the issue of massive overcapacity in the market, she has to invest extreme manpower to ensure quality and service.
She said that due to the pressure of loans, she had to stay up all night monitoring the chicks when she first started, “I basically didn’t sleep at night, I had to watch over them.” She described chicken farming as earning “hard money” and in order to reduce operating costs, her 72-year-old grandfather needs to help with feeding the chickens every day.
She manually slaughters the chickens, plucks feathers, drains blood, and also sells eggs with a refined postal service model in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region. This labor-intensive service is her only means of establishing a customer base and surviving in the tough competition at low prices.
Mr. Zhang, who returned to his hometown in Fujian to start a business, revealed to Epoch Times that he specifically raises meat chickens (local breed), not selling eggs, thus avoiding the crisis of stock volume in the current egg market. He mainly raises small hens and roosters and prices them according to the growth cycle: selling at 25 yuan per catty after six months and 40 yuan per catty for those over a year.
He uses a direct slaughter-delivery method, taking the chickens to customers or to the security room in residential areas, typically using a “kill and deliver” approach to ensure freshness and quality.
Having raised chickens for 7 years and pigs for 9 years, he frankly stated, “The road to starting a business in my hometown has been bitter.” He believes that without a certain economic foundation or technical knowledge, entering the industry with loans rashly might lead to many being forced to end their businesses within a year.
In the early stages of his business, he had to wake up at least three times a night to refill the water and feed for the chickens, from midnight to the early hours of 5 a.m. “By running around the chicken coop more, you can see changes in the chickens.” He said that raising chickens is harder than raising children; it takes prolonged contact and observation to discern the health status of the chickens at a glance.
He revealed that acquaintances who provide conservation services at various farms told him that the chicken or duck farms they have seen, “none have lasted more than three years.”