Keep your expectations low, that’s my advice.
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Newly confirmed U.S. Agriculture Sec. Brooke Rollins is facing an early test as she leads the effort to tamp down on the country’s bird flu outbreak, which has decimated dairy and poultry farmers across the country.
So far it has mostly spared Texas, but farmers in the state are on edge, keeping a close eye out for alerts of outbreaks at nearby farms and taking extraordinary steps to protect their animals, from locking down farms to requiring shoe and clothing changes for anyone going in. The crisis has also driven egg prices to record levels nationwide.
“Most of the time, these diseases will die out over time,” said J.C. Essler, executive vice president of the Texas Poultry Federation in Round Rock. “We haven’t been able to completely eradicate this one.”
At her confirmation hearing last month, Rollins, a native Texan and former president of the America First Policy Institute, said she was “hyper focused” on assembling a team to address the outbreak.
Less than a week after being confirmed, however, her plan to curtail the spread of avian flu remains unclear. The USDA was scrambling this week to rehire employees who had been working on the bird flu response and were fired under the Trump administration’s mass layoff of federal employees, according to media reports.
The agency also approved a conditional license for an bird flu vaccine for chickens, driving speculation that it could soon begin ordering farmers to start vaccinating their chickens. The USDA has not commented on its immediate plans, and it did not respond to a request for comment.
Farmers have so far resisted such a move. Vaccinated chickens would test positive test for bird flu, which could make it impossible to sell poultry products abroad as other countries try to control the spread of infections.
See here for more on the vaccine, which seems to me to be the best strategy though it will have obvious logistical challenges. As far as the export concerns go, it’s hard to say how much that market could be affected, but keep this in mind.
Leaders of the Congressional Chicken Caucus said in a letter to Rollins last week that while the egg industry has lost the most birds, the broiler industry could bear a disproportionate share of the costs of any policy change. According to USDA figures 77.5% of the nearly 159 million commercial birds lost to avian influenza since February 2022 have been layers, or over 123 million. That compares to 13.7 million broilers, or 8.6%, and 18.7 million turkeys, or 11.8%.
Yes, the Congressional Chicken Caucus. The jokes, they write themselves. I guess the question is whether the vaccine priority would be the egg-laying birds, as I’d expect there aren’t many egg exports, and not the food birds. That’s a problem for career pundit and political hack Brooke Rollins and that Crack Staff of Experts she’s sure to hire quickly, as long as Elon Musk hasn’t already fired them. Good luck with all that.
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