THE SET-UP: It all kinda happened overnight.
We went from farmers hand-milking cows before dawn and tossing feed to chickens dancing outside the barn … to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) so big and industrialized that we can track the manure they produce from space.
Specifically, scientists are using satellites to measure the noxious plumes of ammonia emanating from mountains of waste relentlessly churned-out by North Carolina’s factory-like hog farms.
“Relentless” is the operative word, too … particularly for chickens.
The US Department of Agriculture currently allows “processing plants” (a.k.a. slaughterhouses) to kill 140 chickens per minute. Think about that for a second … or, for a minute. Some plants have secured a waiver that allows them to ramp up to 175 per minute. And they’d go faster, if not for objections from the Humane Society and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW).
Even with the USDA’s limit, the average line worker in a slaughterhouse can, per the UFCW, “process more than 14,000 chickens each day” and “each worker can process around 35-45 birds per minute – which rounds out to about 2,000 chickens per hour or nearly one chicken every two seconds.”
That level of industrialized slaughter requires industrialized farming … and CAFOs don’t disappoint. Depending on the type of manure processing it uses, a chicken farm becomes a CAFO when it houses a minimum of “30,000 laying hens or broilers, 82,000 laying hens” or “125,000 chickens (other than laying hens).” They are generally stuffed into low, long buildings where they live short, terrible lives waiting for the whirring abattoir. And, as you are about to find out, their sped-up life-cycle may be delivering bitter returns on an abominable investment. - jp
TITLE: The Unnatural History of Bird Flu
https://nautil.us/the-unnatural-history-of-bird-flu-1189930/
EXCERPTS: Each spring millions of birds gather at Lake Chany, a 660-square-mile shallow lake and surrounding wetlands in the steppe of southwestern Siberia. The complex supports an estimated 20,000 waterbird populations—not individual birds, but entire communities—whose migratory routes span much of Africa, Europe, and Asia. To a virologist this is as much a gathering of influenza, which is ancestral to birds and especially waterfowl.
“There was continual influenza virus circulation in waterfowl long before humans even existed,” says Jan Slingenbergh, a now-retired disease ecologist who once worked for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, where he headed a program that helped member countries control emerging animal-borne diseases.
When I ask Slingenbergh about influenza evolution, he starts by describing Lake Chany and how, for one month each year, after the breeding season ends and before autumn migration begins, flu viruses emerge from dormancy and replicate in the far end of the birds’ gastrointestinal tracts. After being defecated into the water the viruses are picked up by other birds, who will soon carry them far and wide. That exquisite timing, what Slingenbergh calls the “finesse and subtlety” by which influenzas merge with the birds’ life history, speaks to millions of years of coevolution. So does the fact that—at least until recently—influenzas caused almost no disease in their avian hosts.
“The virus has evolved beyond requiring damage to the host,” explains Slingenbergh. “It is a dream scenario that would have fascinated Darwin.” The viruses do continue to evolve: As those trillions upon trillions of virus particles replicate in Lake Chany’s waterfowl they accumulate mutations and even swap gene segments. Nevertheless they remain pacific; infections do not damage tissue, and infected birds show few symptoms.
This makes intuitive sense. Viruses that leave birds healthy, moving about and flying halfway around the world, reproduce more than viruses that endanger their hosts and thus limit their own opportunities. If a strain turns deadly or incapacitating, it ultimately harms itself. Survival of the fittest in this case means doing no harm. “This is the starting point. This is where we come from. This is the default host-virus interactivity scenario,” Slingenbergh says.
Scientists call these viruses Low Pathogenic Avian Influenza (LPAI). Should a strain evolve to be extremely harmful in chickens, it’s classified as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI). Those descriptors, it should be stressed, refer to their consequences for chickens; an HPAI that kills a flock in a few hours might cause no problems for a human, and vice versa. LPAIs can be quite dangerous to us, as with an H7N9 strain that emerged in China in 2013, infecting at least 1,568 people and killing 616 of them even as it went undetected in poultry farms.1
With that said, HPAIs are uniquely concerning. They tend to infect birds’ respiratory tracts and become airborne, and the sheer number of viral particles generated by an infection raises the chance of an exposed human catching it, even if the virus is not very contagious to us. Meanwhile, every replication rolls the dice on a virus acquiring a mutation that pushes it closer to human infectiousness. It’s a numbers game. And if an influenza strain infects someone—or a pig, a species routinely described as a mixing vessel for flu—already infected by another strain, the strains might exchange genetic material, producing a new variant that combines the worst of each.
None of this is guaranteed to happen, but it becomes more likely when an LPAI strain evolves into an HPAI—an evolutionary jump documented 39 times between 1959 and 2016. Thirty-six of those jumps were reported in commercial poultry production systems.2 Of the other three, one was detected in wild terns and two in backyard chicken flocks, both of which were located in regions of intensive poultry production—suggesting that the highly pathogenic strains spilled into the backyard flocks rather than originating there.
“This was most frequently happening in commercial settings,” says Marius Gilbert, an epidemiologist at the Free University of Brussels who analyzed the incidents. Although Gilbert acknowledged that detection bias could explain the pattern—it’s easier to dispose of a few dead backyard chickens without attracting notice than to bury several thousand—and HPAIs could conceivably arise unnoticed in small flocks and make their way into large operations, he does not think that happened. In commercial systems, Gilbert says, “you facilitate the Darwinian selection from an LPAI into an HPAI.”
“If we wanted to design how to make great virulence, this would be how.”
In intensive poultry production facilities—factory farms, in everyday language—thousands of birds are packed together, making it easy for pathogens to pass between them. Their immune systems may be suppressed by antibiotics and environmental stresses: toxic air, overcrowding, lack of sunlight, physical deformities induced by breeding for accelerated growth, and their own cacophony. The birds are also genetically similar, meaning that a virus capable of evading one bird’s defenses can probably evade many of them.
The conditions are ripe for a virus to spread—and speed is at a premium. A century ago, chickens were killed for meat at about 16 weeks of age; nowadays that number is closer to six weeks, and sometimes just four. “We’re turning over these birds faster and faster. And there’s an evolutionary argument that the shorter-lived your host is, the more virulent you can afford to be, because you might not kill it by the time it’s died anyway,” says Woolhouse. With so little time available to transmit and replicate, a virus that moves slowly is at a disadvantage.
“The virus responds to those pressures, and the consequence of that is to become more virulent,” Woolhouse says. He and infectious disease modeler Katherine Atkins, also at the University of Edinburgh, studied those dynamics in Marek’s disease, a viral affliction of poultry that has become more virulent in the past several decades. Their findings don’t prove that rapid turnover times drove virulence, he says, but “the data were consistent.”
Gilbert pointed to several studies that complement these observations and proposed mechanisms. In one, researchers conducted a “serial passage”—infecting a chick, taking the resulting virus and infecting another chick with it, and repeating—that mimics what happens in commercial systems. The original flu strain came from wild swans, didn’t infect chickens well, and didn’t harm those it did infect; within a couple dozen generations it had a 100 percent mortality rate. In another study, researchers tracked LPAIs evolving into HPAIs on farms in northern Italy—a process documented in even more granular detail on a single farm in the United Kingdom in 2008.
Now all the pieces are there: the landscape-scale correlations between commercial settings and pathogenicity; mechanisms to explain these correlations; experimental demonstration; and on-the-farm observations. Put them together, says Gilbert, “and you have a full story.”
TITLE: Can suspending a cage-free egg law solve the soaring price problem? Nevada takes a crack at it
https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-bird-flu-inflation-record-high-9fbc5c6b2aff7b8d0a8bd437670773a7
EXCERPTS: Back when egg prices remained securely under $2 a dozen in 2021, Nevada joined several other states concerned about animal welfare in requiring cage-free eggs.
Now four years later, a dozen eggs costs an average of nearly $5 in the U.S. because of the lingering bird flu, so Nevada passed a law the governor signed Thursday that will allow the state to suspend that law temporarily in hopes of getting residents some relief at the checkout counter.
But it is not quite that simple, which is why the other six states with the same laws are so far reticent to follow suit.
By relaxing the rule, Nevada might get access to additional eggs, but the supply of all eggs remains tight because nearly 159 million birds have been slaughtered since the bird flu outbreak began in 2022 to help limit virus spread. The virus prompts the slaughter of entire flocks anytime it is found.
It is not clear dropping cage-free laws will have a significant effect on egg prices that have peaked at an average of $4.95 per dozen because the farmers who collectively invested several billion dollars in making the switch can’t easily go back to raising chickens packed together in massive barns that they already spent the money to convert.
Even if all the cage-free laws went away, big corporations like McDonald’s and Sodexo remain committed to buying only those kind of eggs, ensuring strong demand for cage-free eggs.
University of Arkansas agricultural economist Jada Thompson said opening up Nevada to all kinds of eggs “could ease egg prices in Nevada very slightly,” but that it might make prices worse elsewhere because supplies are so tight.
But Nevada is going to give it a try even if California, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Michigan don’t seem to be considering it. Arizona, Rhode Island and Utah also have cage-free laws on the books, but theirs won’t take effect for at least a couple more years.
Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo approved the legislation Thursday. Nevada Department of Agriculture Director J.J. Goicoechea is expected to authorize the 120-day suspension of the cage-free egg requirements within a day, according to Goicoechea’s spokesperson Ciara Ressel.
“We anticipate 30 days before we can see an impact at the grocery stores,” Ressel said.
The concern with the cage-free requirements is that only about 121 million of the 304 million chickens laying eggs nationwide are raised on cage-free farms, so the supply is limited.
Many of the eggs those hens produce are promised to restaurant chains like McDonald’s and Panera, food service giants like Sodexo and Aramark and grocers under long-term contracts that help keep prices down. But even when they do have to pay a premium, grocers sometimes lose money on eggs by selling them cheaply to try to get shoppers in the door.
The number of cage-free chickens has steadily increased in recent years because of the laws and the pressure from the companies buying eggs, increasing exponentially from just 38 million at the start of 2017. But the United Egg Producers trade group has estimated it would take at least 226 million cage-free hens to meet all the demand for those eggs, and more customers are clamoring for them, so the supply is tight.
TITLE: Eggs Are So Expensive Now—But Why Are Some Cage-Free Ones Actually Cheaper?
https://www.self.com/story/egg-prices-bird-flu-2025
EXCERPTS: Why has the price of organic, cage-free, free-range, and pasture-raised eggs stayed relatively stable as the price of regular eggs has skyrocketed? It’s actually pretty straightforward: Chickens used to lay those kinds of eggs haven’t been hit as hard as those responsible for the regular type, according to Tom Tabler, PhD, a professor of animal science at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture. It’s not that higher-end layers are less susceptible—in fact, chickens that have access to the outdoors (like free-range and pasture-raised flocks) are actually more likely to come into contact with potential disease vectors like wildlife, Dr. Tabler says. “There’s more disease risk outside than there is inside the chicken house,” he explains.
Rather, it’s a ruthless numbers game that comes down to a difference in scale. Farming operations that produce regular eggs are often a whole lot larger than those that produce varieties like organic, cage-free, free-range, and pasture-raised—they’re “huge,” in Dr. Tabler’s words. “And by ‘huge,’” he says, “I mean there may be three million, four million, five million head of chickens laying eggs all on one site in multiple barns.”
Because federal guidelines mandate culling an entire flock if even a single bird tests positive for bird flu, an outbreak among regular layers therefore means far more birds have to be euthanized—“depopulated,” to use USDA terminology—so the impact on egg production is proportionally much greater. “It’s not so much that the high-end eggs have come down in price,” Dr. Tabler explains. “It’s that regular eggs have increased dramatically in price.”
And unfortunately, the spike doesn’t seem likely to ease anytime soon, according to Scott Roberts, MD, an infectious diseases expert and assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine. In fact, he says, things are only worsening month-to-month—and accordingly, egg prices will probably continue to increase for the foreseeable future. Dr. Tabler is similarly pessimistic. “Before the avian influenza outbreak started, eggs cost $1.79 a dozen in December 2021,” he says. “I was in California helping USDA dispose of avian influenza-infected flocks in late December 2024, and eggs were $8.97 a dozen.” Even the USDA predicts that prices will rise an additional 20.3% in 2025.
What’s more, Dr. Roberts is concerned that the recent federal shift in power—and the “really scaling back a lot of public health funding” that came with it—could exacerbate the problem. And science communication, which is obviously especially vital in times of outbreak, could take a hit, too: In an unprecedented move, federal public health communications were recently paused, stalling the release of several bird flu studies, as reported by CBS. Ultimately, “we don’t know where this is going to end,” Dr. Roberts says.