Bigger Birds Hardly Satisfy Growing Appetite for Wings

At America's sports bars, chicken wings are as essential to March Madness as man-to-man defense and the three-point shot.

But as this year's NCAA Basketball Tournament rolls ahead, the cruel economics of the chicken wing are squeezing restaurant chains and putting upward pressure on prices for customers.

With breeding advances, the size of America's chickens — and their wings — is relentlessly rising. As CEO Sally Smith of Buffalo Wild Wings recently explained to stock analysts: "Five wings yield more ounces of chicken than six used to."

Sounds like good news for wing joints, right? No clucking way. Chains like Buffalo Wild Wings sell by the unit but buy by the pound. Take one wing away, even if the rest are meatier, and customers might not be happy.

The average chicken carcass nowadays is almost 50 percent bigger than it was 30 years ago. But, as agribusiness consultant Len Steiner put it, an 8-pound bruiser of a bird "still has only two wings."

Wholesale wing prices soared 76 percent on average in 2012 over 2011, hitting highs not seen in at least 20 years, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Other factors are also pressuring prices, particularly last year's drought. It drove up the price of corn, the main component of chicken feed. Chicken farmers cut back on flocks, tightening wing supply.

"Chicken wings have gotten into so many restaurant concepts that it's put a real strain on (supply)," said Steiner, who co-writes the Daily Livestock Report for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The advance of chicken technology is on display at the barn near Rice, Minn., where David Schumann raises birds for the Upper Midwest's largest producer, GNP Co.

Schumann is one of about 400 farmers, mostly in Minnesota, who raise chickens for St. Cloud, Minn.-based GNP. Like most GNP farmers, he has only one barn and also raises cattle.

He and his wife, Tracy Scapanski-Schumann, run the chicken barn with a computer's aid. Water rations, feed flow and air temperature are all automated.

Their 37,440-square-foot barn houses 53,000 birds who turned 17 days old Friday. By about April 26, they'll be ready for shipment to one of GNP's two processing plants, and a new flock will arrive soon after. Nowadays, it takes about 42 days to grow a 5-pound bird, compared with about 60 days three decades ago, said Bill Lanners, GNP's director of live strategies.

Along with fresh chicken breasts, GNP sells wings by the pack. A tray pack of four breasts requires two chickens, but a pack of 18 wings requires nine chickens.