BC chicken farmers struggling to restock after avian influenza culls

Chicken breasts are still at the meat counter. Eggs are still snug in their cardboard cartons next to the milk. Unlike the United States, avian influenza doesn’t appear to have wreaked much havoc on Canadian grocery store shelves.

But inside the industry, it’s a different story.

Farmers who have lost flocks are having a hard time restocking their farms with chickens. And farms that raise chicken for meat are facing the most challenges to replace what they’ve lost.

In British Columbia, many different kinds of farms are involved in the process of getting poultry into grocery stores. Hatcheries import eggs from the United States and incubate them. When the chicks from those eggs hatch, they are moved to broiler-breeder farms, which raise the bird from chicks to pullets, then to laying hens and roosters. The fertilized eggs that come from those farms are sent back to the hatcheries, and eventually end up at broiler farms to become packaged meat. (A broiler is a chicken bred for its meat.)

When bird flu hit Fraser Valley farms last fall, it hit egg-laying hens hardest.

The detection of one bird with the flu requires the euthanization of an entire flock. That requires farmers to start refilling their barns with new birds. Barns must be scrubbed clean to eliminate any trace of the flu and the entire process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.

Farmers have had to get creative to replace their dead birds once avian influenza goes through the barn, said Abbotsford poultry farmer James Krahn, who was among the producers to lose a flock to the virus last fall.

The majority of pullets—essentially teenaged chickens—are sourced locally, but Krahn said it’s not necessarily easy to get them. “We’ve had to look all over the place,” James Krahn said.

(The Current previously interviewed the brothers for our story on how BC is managing ongoing avian influenza outbreaks.)

Canada's poultry sector is "supply-managed," which means the government sets quotas for the number of birds any one farm can have. While the system has received criticism for driving up prices for consumers, Canada's poultry industry has argued supply management increases certainty for farmers, allows for the survival of smaller operations, and is the reason Canada didn’t have egg cartons selling for $11 earlier this year.

BC Poultry Association spokesperson Shawn Hall said the system has also fostered co-operation between farmers across the country.

“Supply management provides a number of tools that provide both pricing and supply stability,” Hall said. “We were able to tap into farmers and supply from other provinces that weren’t as affected by avian flu” to get replacement birds onto farms and eggs into grocery stores.

That system however, hasn’t been able to alleviate all of the struggles on BC’s broiler farms. That’s because of issues across the border and decades-old trade rules that require Canadian farmers to source a certain amount of hatching eggs from the United States.

Around four-fifths of all hatching eggs in Canada come from Canadian chickens, but the remaining 20% are imported from the United States. Those ratios were set during the NAFTA agreement in the 1990s, and reconfirmed again in 2020 when the Canada-United-States-Mexico Agreement was signed.

Driessen and his parents operate three broiler-breeder farms in Abbotsford, raising chickens with American grandparents for their fertilized eggs. (Driessen is also a director on the BC Hatching Egg Commission, which helps orchestrate the movement of eggs, chicks, and pullets from farm to farm.)

Despite the avian influenza sweeping American farms, US companies like Aviagen have fertilized eggs that Canadian producers can buy, Driessen said. (“They have what the market needs, plus they have a little extra,” Driessen said, echoing what he heard at a recent poultry conference.)

The real supply challenge comes further down the system, when Canadian farmers start trying to acquire their required share of US eggs.

“Our Canadian hatcheries are having a tough time even getting the 20% they’re supposed to get in from the US,” Driessen said. “Even if you can get them, they’re very, very expensive.”

(Canada imports some grocery-store eggs from the United States—634 million individual eggs in 2024. However, it does not export any table eggs to the US. Canada does export some egg products to the US. Those include quail eggs, duck eggs, hatching eggs, and egg-based products.)

Across the country, imported hatching egg numbers dropped substantially from 2023. In total, 24.7 million fewer hatching eggs came into Canada last year than came in 2023—a decrease of 15%.

Fewer American hatching eggs mean farmers’ barns don’t have their typical US-bred contingent.

“Such circumstances have led to uncertainty surrounding the supplies of Canadian [hatching eggs] and chicken,” the Canadian Hatching Egg Producers 2024 annual report said. “The repercussions of these challenges are expected to persist into 2025.”

That confirms what Driessen is seeing on the ground in Abbotsford—although he is hopeful that consumers won’t notice the challenges.

Driessen said it can take hatching egg producers a whole year to recover from an avian influenza outbreak. Five broiler-breeder farms in the Fraser Valley were hit with avian influenza last fall, and may not be able to replace their entire flock until the next fall—potentially putting them right back in bird flu season again.

Avian influenza is “pretty devastating for some of our farmers, because there has been the odd one who’s had it twice in a row,” he said. For the industry, it means more uncertainty in getting enough fertilized eggs into hatcheries—especially if avian flu outbreaks keep occurring on large American farms.

So far, Driessen said the Canadian industry has been able to move chickens around, so that incoming chicks don’t go to farms that had just been affected by avian influenza. That means production isn’t delayed any more than it absolutely needs to be.

While fewer eggs could potentially mean fewer chicken breasts, legs, and thighs on grocery store shelves, Driessen is hopeful that consumers won’t notice the challenges, and that the poultry system’s flexibility will help BC avoid chicken and egg shortages.

“The only way the consumer is going to see [the industry chaos] is if we run short on product,” he said. “But just anecdotally, I haven’t noticed … store shelves empty. Even through the 2022 year, where we had massive losses in broiler breeders.”

But because an egg does not immediately become a chicken, the full impact of American hatching egg shortages won’t be known for a while.

“We’re definitely short again for hatching chicks this year,” he said. “How that actually plays out to the end consumer has yet to be seen.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the American company that provides imported eggs and chicks. The correct name of the company is Aviagen.