Chicken

Chicken is the world's largest and fastest-growing source of meat. Global poultry-meat production runs roughly 140 million tonnes a year, almost all of it broiler chicken, and it overtook pork as the most-produced meat around 2016. The reasons are structural: chicken has the best feed-conversion ratio of any major land animal, roughly 1.7 to 2.0 kilograms of feed per kilogram of liveweight against six or more for cattle, the shortest cycle (a broiler reaches market weight in about six to seven weeks), no major religious prohibitions, and the lowest retail price of any common meat. That makes it the default protein for a growing, urbanizing, price-sensitive world, and it has gained further as consumers traded down from record-priced beef.

The industry is intensely vertically integrated. In the US a handful of companies, Tyson Foods, Pilgrim's Pride (majority-owned by Brazil's JBS), and the Cargill-backed Wayne-Sanderson, own or contract the entire chain from breeding stock and feed mills through hatcheries, grow-out barns, and processing plants; Brazil (BRF, JBS) and China (Wens) run the same model. Because birds are grown on contract and processed in-house, there is no open spot market in live chickens the way there is for hogs or cattle. Price discovery happens at the cut level instead: USDA publishes daily cutout and parts prices, and the private reporter Urner Barry is the reference for wings, boneless breast, tenders, and leg quarters.

There is essentially no liquid chicken futures market. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange once listed an iced-broiler contract, but it never built durable liquidity and was delisted decades ago. The reasons are familiar: the product is perishable, the industry is vertically integrated so the firms that would hedge already control supply, and "chicken" is not one standardized deliverable (a breast, a wing, and a leg quarter are different products). Where integrators hedge, they hedge the margin, the spread between the chicken cutout and feed cost, by trading CBOT corn and soybean meal rather than any chicken contract. Avian influenza has been the defining shock of 2022 to 2025, mostly through the export bans it triggers.

A word on the bird itself. A broiler is a chicken bred specifically for meat, almost always a fast-growing hybrid called the Cornish Cross, and it is a completely different animal from the laying hen bred for eggs. Decades of selection have made it astonishing: a broiler reaches a market weight of roughly six pounds in about six to seven weeks, less than half the time it took a century ago, on a feed that is mostly corn for energy and soybean meal for protein, the two inputs that dominate its cost and tie chicken economics to the grain markets. Both male and female broilers are raised for meat and slaughtered young, before they are really roosters or hens; the roosters that matter sit one level up, in the small breeding flocks whose fertile hatching eggs are incubated to produce the billions of meat birds, a pyramid controlled at the top by a handful of genetics companies.

Avian influenza is very much still a thing. The H5N1 strain that erupted in 2021 became the worst bird-flu panzootic on record, forcing the culling of hundreds of millions of birds, spreading into wild birds and mammals, and jumping into US dairy cattle in 2024, with sporadic human cases keeping it on every health agency's watch list into 2026. It hits laying hens harder than broilers, which is why its most visible effect has been on egg prices rather than chicken meat. That points to how the two markets connect: broilers (meat) and layers (eggs) are separate breeds raised in separate barns, but they are the same species eating the same corn-and-soybean-meal ration and exposed to the same disease, and the broiler chain literally runs on eggs, since every meat bird starts as a fertile hatching egg. So feed shocks and flu outbreaks ripple through both, even as the day-to-day price of a chicken breast and a dozen eggs follow their own separate supply cycles.

The most distinctive thing about chicken pricing is that the parts of one bird sell into different markets, so their prices pull apart. Americans prize white meat, the boneless breast, and pay well above the price of dark meat, the legs and thighs; so the US keeps the breast and exports leg quarters cheaply to countries that prefer dark meat, above all Mexico, along with West Africa and Cuba. The most famous chapter of that trade was Russia: from a 1990 US-Soviet deal, frozen American leg quarters flooded the food-short USSR and were nicknamed nozhki Busha, "Bush legs," after President Bush, a staple across the former Soviet bloc until Russia banned US meat in 2014. Wings are the wild card. Once a near-waste cut, the Buffalo-wing and sports-bar boom turned them into a premium, and demand spikes so hard around the Super Bowl that wings have their own seasonal price rally; a pandemic-era surge roughly doubled wholesale wing prices in 2021. One bird, three cuts, three different markets, which is why a single "chicken price" hides as much as it reveals.