Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has promised to push federal officials to provide greater support to farmers affected by bird flu. The governor spoke alongside state Agriculture Director Brian Baldridge Thursday as well as the state veterinarian and poultry industry representatives.
State impacts
Highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, commonly known as bird flu, has been spreading throughout the country since the beginning of 2022, but a recent a recent spike has hit Ohio farmers particularly hard. According to the latest USDA data, Ohio has culled nearly 14.5 million birds since the beginning of this year alone. That’s more than double any other state over that timeframe.
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“And to put it in perspective,” Baldridge said, “as far as the layer facilities, about over 30% of our layer birds here in Ohio have been depopulated. Those are the ones that are laying the eggs each and every day.”
He noted that one facility raising ducks and a few raising turkeys have been impacted as well.
DeWine explained that once farmers detect a case there’s little they can do besides cull the flock.
“The doctor tells me the fatality rate is very, very, very high, right?” he said, looking to State Veterinarian Dennis Summers. “You could be as high as 90, 95, even 100%, so those birds are going to basically die anyway. The point, the point is you’re trying to either slow this thing down or, obviously the main goal is to stop it.”
To that end, Summers noted, “One thing that we definitely want to make sure that we’re keeping an eye on is an effective way to use a vaccination strategy for poultry for HPAI. So that’s one thing that we’re going to be continuing to watch, and hopefully we have that as a tool in the toolbox here for Ohio.”
Jim Chakeres, who heads up the Ohio Poultry Association, has made the same point with state lawmakers, but the idea of vaccinating flocks faces competing interests within the industry.
Farmers who focus on meat production — known as broilers — could see their export business dry up following vaccination because buyers in other countries worry birds coming in could carry the virus and infect their domestic flocks.
In a recently announced $1 billion response effort, USDA officials earmarked $100 million to research vaccines or other treatment, and the agency has awarded a conditional license to develop a bird flu vaccine. Despite that funding though, a vaccination program would be a significant step. The agency has stockpiled vaccines in the past without actually using them.
What DeWine wants
The governor said he would be an advocate for the state and its farmers but “one of the things that is clear, is the federal government is really going to have to accelerate the research that is being done in regard to bird flu.”
The potential impacts extend beyond hot spots like poultry farms in Western Ohio, DeWine said — not explicitly referencing the risk of human infection but noting “obviously bigger ramifications in regard to bird flu.”
Ohio reported its first case of human infection last month — one of 70 tallied so far. Although one person in the U.S. has died, there has been no indication of the virus spreading from person to person.
DeWine said he’d convey the message to speed up research when he speaks to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins Friday.
The governor added that he’d push for the secretary to extend the extra financial support she announced recently to farmers who have already been impacted.
“One of the things that the federal government has done is up the amount of compensation,” DeWine said. “One of the things I’ll take up with the secretary is to see whether or not that could be backdated, basically retroactive, because some of these farmers’ (losses) obviously occurred before the date when it went into effect.”
But even with greater support, Chakeres warned that egg prices wouldn’t come down right away.
“Our farmers are working every day to get those barns cleaned and disinfected so they can repopulate and start producing eggs again,” he said. “That takes time. It takes that chick 21 days to hatch. It takes 18 weeks before that hen is going to start laying eggs again. So it just takes time to repopulate the facilities.”
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