Prairie Creek Farms CEO advises buying local as egg demand spikes, prices remain steep

KELLYVILLE, OKLA (KTUL) — Shopping for eggs is expensive, and farmers say the high prices may go on for months.

"It's even tough for us to keep up," Nate Beaulac, CEO of Prairie Creek Farms in Kellyville said. He adds they're trying to keep up with the demand for eggs.

The not-so-egg-cellent price of eggs at the grocery store comes down to supply and demand. Beaulac said there are fewer eggs than there were six to eight months ago. The demand hasn't changed so prices went up. The reason: the Bird Flu caused farmers to kill millions of chickens and start over.

"What's happening with Avian Influenza, about 92 million birds have been euthanized over the last 18 months," he said.

Beaulac said it takes baby chicks until they're 20 weeks old to start laying eggs. Then chickens until they're about two years old lay about 5 to 7 eggs a week. Then they eventually lose all their feathers and when they grow back they lay 3 to 4 eggs for the rest of its life. So while we wait for chicken farms to get their chickens ready to lay, he said this may be another year or so until farms are caught up and prices go down.

"The standard protocol for a positive test is these huge egg operators these ones that are managing millions of birds the protocol is to euthanize every bird, clean out your houses, then bring in new birds in," he said.

When heading to the store for eggs, we checked with some egg prices. For a carton of 12 eggs at Walmart, it's about $8.32, Target $5.69, and Reasor's about $7.99.

At Prairie Creek Farms their chickens are pasteurized. Beaulac said the majority of the eggs you buy at the grocery store are in a factory and never see the light of day, which is one of the reasons Bird Flu plagued many farms.

"When you have millions and millions of birds on one location, you're highly acceptable to sickness and disease to a flock. We run our birds outside and so our birds the fact they have access to bugs, seed, grass and weeds that's going to create a healthier egg and therefore it's going to be healthier for you guys to eat," Beaulac said.

Over the past 6 months, Beaulac said they've seen about a 200 percent increase in demand for eggs. They have 2,700 chickens.

"People eat eggs every single day. The grocery stores need the eggs in stock then when they run out people start searching on Facebook and stuff like that trying to find eggs," he said.

Beaulac is encouraging people to buy eggs locally; Whether it's from a farm or a neighbor with chickens in their yard.

"There's not a lot of regulation terms on who you can buy eggs from. There's a lot of people who have backyard chickens which we highly encourage people to get, and you can buy eggs from them. I mean eggs are some of the most nutritious products you can get on the market," he said.

While the price of eggs won't go down anytime soon, Beaulac said the recent tariffs shouldn't raise prices more.

"There's a possibility of downstream impact costs so for farms that do stuff like we're doing our sourcing product like egg cartons egg labels or something like that that are more expensive with the tariffs it could possibly trickle down to the price the customer actually sees, but for right now we don't have any anticipation for price increases for local farms," Beaulac said.

His price of eggs in the farm's store is about $7.