The highly lethal form of bird flu circulating around the world since 2021 has killed tens of millions of birds, forced poultry farmers in the United States to cull entire flocks and caused a brief but alarming spike in the price of eggs.
More recently, it has infected dairy cows in several states and at least one person in Texas who had close contact with the animals, officials said this week.
The outbreak, as it turns out, is proving especially costly for American taxpayers.
Last year, the Department of Agriculture paid poultry producers more than half a billion dollars for the turkeys, chickens and hens they were forced to kill after the H5N1 strain of flu was found on their farms.
Officials say the compensation program is intended to encourage farms to report outbreaks quickly. This is because the government pays for birds that are killed through culling, not those that die from disease. Early reporting, the agency says, helps limit the spread of the virus to nearby farms.
The slaughters are often done by turning up the heat in barns housing thousands of birds, a method that causes heatstroke and that many veterinarians and animal welfare groups say leads to unnecessary suffering.
Among the largest recipients of bird flu compensation from 2022 to this year were Jennie-O Turkey Store, which received more than $88 million, and Tyson Foods, which was paid nearly $30 million. Despite their losses, the two companies reported billions of dollars in profits last year.
Overall, the vast majority of government payments went to the nation’s largest food companies—not surprising given the dominance of American corporate meat and egg production.
As of February 2022, more than 82 million farmed birds have been killed, according to the organization’s website. For context, the American poultry industry produces more than nine billion chickens and turkeys each year.
The compensation tally was obtained by Our Honor, an animal welfare advocacy group, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the USDA. Advocacy organization Farm Forward collaborated to further analyze the data.
A breakdown of the compensation has not been made public, but agency officials have confirmed the figures are accurate.
For critics of large-scale commercial farming, the payments highlight a deeply flawed system of corporate subsidies that last year included more than $30 billion in taxpayer money going to the farm sector, much of it for crop insurance, price support goods and disaster relief.
But they say bird flu-related payouts are troubling for another reason: By compensating commercial farmers for their losses, the federal government encourages poultry farmers to continue the same practices that increase the risk of transmission, increasing the need for future slaughters and reparations.
“These payments are crazy and dangerous,” said Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward. “Not only are we wasting taxpayers’ money on for-profit companies on a problem they created, but we’re giving them no incentive to make changes.”
Ashley Peterson, senior vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs at the National Chicken Council, a trade association, disputed the suggestion that government payments bolstered problematic farming practices.
“There is compensation to help the farmer control and eradicate the virus – regardless of how the affected birds are raised,” he said in an email. The criticisms, he added, were the work of “vegan extremist groups who latch onto an issue to try to advance their agenda.”
The USDA defended the program, saying, “Early reporting allows us to more quickly stop the spread of the virus to nearby farms,” according to a statement.
Although modern farming practices have made animal protein much more affordable, leading to a near doubling of meat consumption over the past century, the industry’s reliance on so-called concentrated animal feeding operations has drawbacks. The giant sheds that produce nearly 99 percent of the nation’s eggs and meat spew vast amounts of animal waste that can degrade the environment, researchers say.
And infectious pathogens spread more easily within crowded structures.
“If you want to create the ideal environment to promote pathogen mutation, factory farms would be almost the perfect setup,” said Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a scientist at the Animal Welfare Institute who focuses on meat production.
Modern chicken, genetically homogenous and engineered for rapid growth, amplifies these risks. Selective breeding has greatly reduced the time it takes to raise a table-ready barrel-breasted broiler, but the birds are more susceptible to infection and death, researchers say. This may explain why more than 90 percent of chickens infected with H5N1 die within 48 hours.
Frank Reese, a fourth-generation turkey farmer in Kansas, said the modern broad-breasted white turkey is ready for slaughter in half the time of heritage breeds. But the rapid growth comes at a cost: The birds are prone to heart problems, high blood pressure and arthritic joints, among other health problems, he said.
“They have weaker immune systems, because bless that fat little turkey’s heart, they’re morbidly obese,” said Mr Rees, 75, who breeds rare heritage breeds. “It’s the equivalent of an 11-year-old child weighing 400 kilograms.”
Highly pathogenic avian influenza has been around since 1996, but the virus had evolved to become even more deadly when it emerged in North America in late 2021. It killed nearly 60 million farmed birds in the United States and killed countless wild and lots of mammals, from skunks to sea lions. Last week, federal authorities first detected the virus in dairy cows in Kansas, Texas, Michigan, New Mexico and Idaho. The pathogen has also been implicated in a small number of human infections and deaths, mostly among those who work with live poultry, and officials say the risk to humans remains low.
The virus is highly contagious between birds and is spread through nasal secretions, saliva and faeces, making it difficult to contain. Migratory waterfowl are the single largest source of infection — even if many mallards show no signs of illness. The virus can find its way into barns through dust particles or on the sole of a farmer’s boot.
While infestations in North America have ebbed and flowed over the past three years, the overall number has declined since 2022, according to the U.S. Animal and Plant Inspection Service.
On Tuesday, the nation’s largest egg producer, Cal-Maine Foods, announced it had halted production at its Texas facility and culled more than 1.6 million birds after bird flu was detected.
Federal officials have debated whether to vaccinate commercial flocks, but the initiative is dividing the industry, in part because it could trigger trade restrictions detrimental to the nation’s $6 billion poultry export sector.
Many scientists, fearing that the next pandemic could result from a human-adapted version of bird flu, are urging the White House to embrace a vaccination campaign.
The agency’s livestock compensation program, part of a farm bill passed by Congress in 2018, pays farmers 75 percent of the value of livestock lost to disease or natural disaster. As of 2022, the program has distributed more than $1 billion to affected farmers.
Critics say the program also promotes animal cruelty by allowing farmers to euthanize their herds by shutting off a barn’s ventilation system and pumping in hot air, a method that can take hours. Chickens and turkeys that survive are often dispatched with a twist of the neck.
Crystal Heath, a veterinarian and co-founder of Our Honor, said the American Veterinary Medical Association, in cooperation with the department of agriculture, has recommended that ventilation be used only under “limited circumstances.” He added that the vast majority of farms relied on it because the process was cheap and easy to perform.
“All you need is duct tape, tarps and some rental heaters,” Dr. Heath said. “But shutting down ventilation plus is particularly dire because it can take three to five hours for the birds to die.”
Thousands of vets have signed a petition calling on the association to reclassify ventilation closures as “not recommended” and say other methods using carbon dioxide or nitrogen are far more humane, even if more expensive. From the start of the outbreak through December 2023, ventilation shutdowns were used to kill 66 million chickens and turkeys, or about 80 percent of all deaths, according to an analysis of federal data by the Animal Welfare Institute, which obtained the data through Freedom. of the Information Act request.
Last summer, the institute filed a petition asking the agriculture department to require farms to come up with more humane deforestation plans as a condition of receiving compensation. The agency has yet to respond to the report.
Tyson and Jennie-O, the top recipients of federal compensation, have both used ventilator termination, according to an analysis of federal data. Tyson declined to comment for this article, and Hormel, which owns the Jennie-O brand, did not respond to requests for comment.
Some animal welfare advocates, pointing to recent outbreaks that have been allowed to run their course, question whether killing every bird on an affected farm is still the right approach. When H5N1 hit the Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary in California in February 2023, killing three birds, farm operators prepared for a state-mandated cull. Instead, California agriculture officials, citing a newly created exemption for farms that do not produce food, said they would spare the birds if strict quarantine measures were put in place for 120 days.
Over the next few weeks, the virus infected 26 of the farm’s 160 chickens, ducks and turkeys, but the others survived, even those that had appeared visibly ill, according to Christine Morrissey, the shelter’s executive director.
He said experience suggests mass killings may be unnecessary. “More research and effort is needed to find other ways to deal with this virus,” Ms Morrissey said, “because defoliation is scary and doesn’t solve the problem.”
With the northward migration in full swing, birders like Caleb Barron are holding their breath. Mr Barron, an organic farmer in California, said there was only so much he could do to protect the animals at Fogline Farm, given the birds spent most of their lives outdoors.
So far, the birds remain unharmed. Maybe it’s because Mr. Barron raises a hardier breed of chicken, or maybe it’s because his birds have a relatively good life, which includes high-quality food and low stress.
“Or maybe,” he said, “it’s just luck.”
