COLUMBUS, Ohio – Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), supply chain issues and inflation are causing record-high turkey prices.
According to the American Farm Bureau, boneless, skinless turkey breast costs a record $6.70 per pound in September – 112% more expensive than the year before.
"One of the challenges that has really plagued the poultry industry this year, not just turkeys. Although, that's kind of top of mind for all of us right now, but also certainly in the egg industry and the broiler industry as well is the highly pathogenic avian influenza – (a) viral disease of birds we've talked about before that has really hampered a lot of the flocks around the country," agriculture expert Andy Vance said.
Vance also said production challenges may be to blame.
"We've also, of course, been looking at pretty thin margins for producers and a lot of commodities because high feed costs. As corn and soybean prices do, in part because of the conflict overseas in Ukraine and Russia, have also contributed to farmers not being able to make as much money, so maybe they're not expanding because cost of everything has gone up. That's led considerably to those cost increases we're talking about, most notably right now for turkey," he said.
Vance said it's not only turkey, but almost everything on your table is expected cost more this year.
"Food price inflation is part of the overall basket of of products that are dealing with inflation," he said.