As many of you probably know, egg prices have skyrocketed. The "official" reason is avian flu. But, more and more small time farmers are saying that's not the case, because their chickens just weren't laying eggs, for months. Many have also said that once they switched feeds, their chickens began laying eggs again.
Somewhere around 2012-2014, Land-O-Lakes and Cal-Maine Foods entered into a joint venture with Eggland's Best, and purchased Delta Egg Farm, the largest producers of chicken eggs in the U.S. Land-O-Lakes owns Purina, which in addition to making lots of pet food, also makes lots of chicken feed. Lots of farmers have narrowed down the feed problems to Purina, DuMOR, and Producer's Pride. DuMOR and Producer's Pride are also made by Purina. It's assumed that Purina is intentionally sabotaging the chicken feed for smaller chicken farmers so they can make bank via their own large scale chicken farms, resulting in less competition, less supply, and higher prices. Funnily enough, on Purina's website, I found a page dedicated to why chickens aren't laying eggs, and they blame everything but the feed. There's no date on the page, but through some internet sleuthing, I figured out that it was published on November 7th, 2017. If that's any indication, they've apparently been planning this for a while.
Here's a rather terse article that contains some social media posts from farmers confirming this (the only one I could find), and here's a video from Off Grid With Doug & Stacy, some homesteaders, about the subject. The video contains some interesting anecdotal evidence for why the avian flu story is probably bullshit, and contains another video within it of a small time farmer (starts at 7:58), where she explains the connections to all the companies, confirms the feed problem, and even contacted Purina about their feed, and got an interesting response.
On the Tractor Supply website, I also found numerous recent reviews for Purina, Producer's Pride, and DuMOR chicken feed, from people stating that their chickens stopped laying eggs.
So, if you aren't already, please avoid Cal-Maine foods, Land-O-Lakes, Purina, Producer's Pride, and DuMOR. They're not good people.
Everyone forgot the mass chicken cullings that occurred back during 2020 and 2021. both U.S. and China.
I've seen a lot of farmers switch to goat feed to fix the problem. Glad your sister was able to fix it.
To be fair, every farmer using those feeds isn't experiencing the problem. Perhaps the situations are different. However, lots of people, who are experienced with chickens, have suddenly been experiencing problems with egg laying, and everyone that's cured the problem has said it was after they switched feeds. This can't be blamed purely on inexperience.