GEORGETOWN – Hundreds of thousands of chickens have been “depopulated” across the Delmarva region as the avian influenza continues to strike area farmers and the food supply.
H5N1, also known as the Bird Flu or Avian Flu, as transmitted by wild waterfowl feces in the region has been identified as the source, according to leading experts in the field, leaving farmers little question as to what must happen next when their flocks are identified as infected.
“We’ve had nine incidents on Delmarva detected and the culprit really is the wild waterfowl,” James Fisher of the Delmarva Chicken Association (DCA) told the Delaware Business Times. “The whole chicken community mobilizes to help when this kind of thing happens.”
Stacey Hofmann of the Delmarva Avian Influenza Joint Information Center told DBT that quick depopulation is always the next step to avoid the spread of disease. The News Journal reported a depopulation of 465,625 birds in Delaware alone so far this year, a small fraction of the 601 million chickens raised in 2022 in Delmarva’s $4.4 billion industry.
“Federal and state officials employ humane depopulation technologies that limit human exposure to the AI virus and better accommodate large-scale eradication efforts. One key to defeating the disease is speed. Quickly eliminating infected birds reduces the amount of virus in the environment and minimizes the risk of the disease spreading to and killing other birds,” Hoffman said in an email.
Once depopulated, farmers can apply for payments from the Animal Health Protection Act through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to recoup some of their lost business funds or revenue due to the epidemic. The fund can also support cleaning costs and other necessary elements to put the farm back in order, she added.
Locally, as a result, customers have seen skyrocketing egg prices, for example, as farmers try to fight off the epidemic with biosecurity measures such as limiting foot traffic on farms and decreasing the amount of food waste around chicken houses to minimize unwanted visitors in the area.
“Now that doesn’t mean those specific farms that have been affected are back in business yet,” he said, citing cleaning and other biosecurity measures that are needed after depopulation.
“There’s a delay in their income for all of them and an interruption in the supply of chicken for the area. It’s not what any of our farmers got into the business to do. It’s very stressful,” Fisher said. “The goal, of course, is to prevent the spread of the flu from farm to farm. We’re all here to help them with that and are on site as soon as possible to make sure the whole process goes according to plan. Everybody is on hand to make sure it goes right so that the USDA can compensate for that lost income.”
The funds offered by the USDA are only available, however, for farmers directly affected by H5N1. Fisher’s organization has been advocating with many others for years to make it so that those payments become available to farmers who have operations near one that may have been affected by the disease, as those farmers also often have to wait for its nearby farm to be cleared of H5N1 before introducing new flocks. While he said the community works together to minimize that time, any amount of time serves as an interruption to the farmers’ bottom lines.
In a press release announcing the newly introduced federal Healthy Poultry Assistance and Indemnification Act (HPAI ACT), Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) said, “As avian flu cases rise in Delaware, it’s vital that we have smart policies in place that protect Delaware’s independent family farmers and poultry growers both medically and financially. As it stands, blind spots in our HPAI compensation program punish growers for culling flu-free flocks.”
If adopted, he stated that the policy would “. . .provide a lifeline to all hardworking farmers. . . by offering them fair and immediate financial relief. . .” following an H5N1 outbreak.
