Friday, February 07, 2025
The battle for egg farmers is stressful and riddled with uncertainty. They are ‘begging for a new approach.’
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| Egg farmers and their employees suffer when flocks of their hens have to be culled. (Adobe Stock photo) |
When bird flu sweeps through a chicken farm, its aftermath is sadness, stress and death. The extreme losses have some U.S. egg farmers wondering if they will ever recover.
“Greg Herbruck knew 6.5 million of his birds needed to die, and fast,” reports Kate Wells of NPR. “The CEO of Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch wasn’t sure how the third-generation family egg producer (one of the largest in the U.S.) was going to get through this round of avian flu, financially or emotionally.”
As a preventative measure to protect their flocks from avian flu infections, U.S. egg farms have invested “millions of dollars into biosecurity. Employees shower in and shower out, before they start working and after their shifts ends,” Wells explains. “But none of that has been enough to contain the outbreak that started three years ago.”
Unlike the U.S. bird flu outbreak in 2014-2015, this version of bird flu has proven impossible to contain. “It’s so entrenched in the global environment, spilling into mammals such as dairy cows, and affecting 147 million birds in commercial and backyard flocks in the U.S.,” Wells reports. “Egg producers and the American Egg Board are begging for a new approach.”
Herbruck described the “virus as a terrorist,” Wells adds. “Ten months after Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch was hit, the company is still rebuilding its flocks. . . . Still, he and his counterparts in the industry live in fear, watching other farms get hit two, even three times in the last few years.” Herbruck told Wells, “We are in a battle and losing, at the moment.”
Vaccinating birds is a solution being used in China, Egypt and France. Emily Metz, president and CEO of the American Egg Board, told Wells, “All the measures we’re doing are still getting beat by this virus.” Wells reports, “At this point, Metz argued, the industry can’t afford not to try vaccination, which has helped eradicate diseases in poultry before.”
