Rising egg prices in North Texas good for some businesses, troubling for others
BRIDGEPORT — Michael Jimenez has started playing Beethoven for his hens, hoping the animals will start laying more eggs. The 23-year-old said he puts a wireless speaker outside and lets it play until the battery runs down.
A cold snap the week of Feb. 17 set egg production behind at JMZ Farms in Bridgeport. Jimenez estimates he's got a 347-dozen egg backlog.
The young farmer is trying to keep up with the demand for organic eggs. A first-generation farmer, Jimenez said his love for animals skyrocketed when he got a chick at church on Easter Sunday when he was 12.
"I had no idea how to take care of a chicken, but I had a passion for animals," he said. "And I was like, I'm willing to take it in and figure it out. Of course, I had to convince my mom."
Jimenez is a Dallas native who is one of four children. He's a mix of his Mexican father and his Salvadoran mother, who doesn't mind the grind of work. Becoming a chicken farmer was a self-taught, self-motivated journey from watching famous American farmer Joel Salatin.
"I was raising that one chicken and really understanding, well, what do you need to do to raise a chicken? How, what do you feed it?" he said. "And it started producing an egg."
Jimenez initially gave the eggs away. He stepped away, got a business plan, and started building a chicken farm. One chick has now become 500.
"What we're eating from commercial farms isn't good for us," he said. "We need to support local farms. But we also need more farmers because we're running out of farms."
Jimenez's customer base is growing even with higher grocery prices.
"I sell my eggs for a premium. They're $12.50 a dozen. That's higher than what an average grocery store has to offer," he said.
The JMZ Farms model is subscription-based. For a four-dozen minimum, he delivers the eggs to your doorstep. His premium pricing has more tiers but hasn't chased customers away. Jimenez said he grew by 85 customers this month.
"This is the worst. Nothing this severe before," Chuck Cole said.
Cole's Corner Market on Dallas' Greenville Avenue has been in business for 20 years. He is not connected to Jimenez's farm. Cole has 12 hens, but not enough to hold up his egg-heavy deli, cafe, and bakery.
"They produce a better egg because they roam the yard and have a better diet," Cole said. "But as far as the restaurant, you know, at the most I would get would be a dozen, dozen a day on a best day. So that didn't go very far."
He buys wholesale. Cole needs about 90 dozen eggs weekly. One of his suppliers mentioned limiting the number of eggs he could buy.
"We've been able to get eggs as many as we want up till now," Cole said. "You know what they're saying is that might not be the case next week."
Cole said he won't do an egg surcharge. He's hoping to ride this out.
"I plan to grow everything and anything that I can organically and naturally here in Texas and be able to deliver it to the customers," Jimenez said.
Expansion, he hopes, is in the future of JMZ Farms. He has no desire to be in stores. The farmer wants to go directly to customers.
"It's a big interest whenever they see, oh, he's the owner of the farm, he runs the farm, and he's Latino," he said. "Because you tend to see my kind of people working the farms, not owning them. So, we're changing things around here."
