The U.S. Department of Agriculture's new "Transparency in Poultry Growing Contracts and Tournaments" rule is granting North Carolina farmers more bargaining power.

The rule, introduced by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack under the Packers and Stockyards Act, aims to address the power imbalance in the poultry industry.

Aaron Johnson, senior program manager with Rural Advancement Foundation International, said one significant improvement is the requirement for poultry companies to share essential information such as the number of flocks and the guaranteed minimum flock stocking density each year. He added these measures are crucial in combating unfairness and market power abuse.

"Contract poultry growers don't own the chickens that are on their farm, they don't own the feed that is fed to those chickens or the medicine that's used to keep them healthy. All of that is provided by the integrator," he explained. "And so, if your integrator is potentially upset with you, they can provide you with really poor inputs and cause your income to tank."

Johnson said growers now receive information on the income ranges of current farmers in their region, and added this helps create a more competitive and transparent environment, enabling them to compare the quality of the inputs they receive.

While this rule represents a significant step forward, Johnson emphasizes the need for further progress. He stressed that despite having access to essential information, farmers still lack sufficient protection against deceptive claims and safeguards to address concerns openly and freely.

"We work with so many growers at RAFI who either are former growers or current growers who have experienced retaliation in various forms from their integrator, especially for speaking out in any public way about unfair practices they've observed," he explained.

He said the proposed Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity rule aims to address these issues. Moving forward, he says RAFI will continue to push for a USDA rule that ensures growers are fairly compensated based on their production.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

On February 26, Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released a five-pronged strategy and investment of $1 billion to combat avian flu and reduce rising egg prices. The new measures focus largely on fixing on-farm biosecurity gaps as well as push for a new poultry vaccine. The proposed plan marks a pivot away from current methods of handling infected birds, which rely mostly on “stamping out” — where poultry farmers “depopulate” or wipe out their entire flocks. Sentient spoke with a number of experts who were skeptical about moving away from the USDA’s longstanding depopulation strategy, especially given the virus’ high capability for mutation. These experts say they are encouraged to see more attention and investment paid to the ongoing outbreaks, at the same time they note the plan’s lack of concrete details.

Meghan Davis, associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says that it’s encouraging to see large-scale investment going towards research and biosecurity measures, but that she would like to see more clarity on what the strategies actually are, if they are going to replace depopulation. “These stamping out policies have been in place for quite some time. There’s a reason it exists and one of them is animal welfare issues –– these birds get really sick… and [rarely] recover,” Davis tells Sentient. We really need to think thoroughly about ways to limit further amplification of an outbreak and monitor whether or not new strategies are working, she says.

The move comes at a chaotic time for avian flu response. Thanks to Elon Musk’s federal spending crackdown, several key avian flu workers were fired by USDA, and the Department is now struggling to rehire them.

Mass firings of researchers and communication freezes across various scientific disciplines has instilled little confidence in experts who fear the U.S. is already lagging in its avian flu response. In the past 30 days alone, and as of March 3, the virus has infected 107 flocks, affecting 12.7 million birds, according to the USDA. So far, 70 people have been infected, and one person has died from avian flu in the U.S. Given the unpredictable nature of the virus and its spread into cats, pigs and cows, there is concern of a pandemic if human-to-human transmission occurs.

‘Gold-standard’ Biosecurity Measures

The bulk of the $1 billion investment goes towards reinforcing existing biosecurity measures — such as ramping up protocols to guard against disease spillover from wildlife — at no cost to farmers. These aspects of the plan may prove challenging given that the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the agency who carries out on-farm inspections, has lost roughly 400 workers amidst Musk’s federal firings.

The boost in biosecurity measures focuses on risk from waterfowl and other wild birds that can shed the virus through their droppings or direct contact with farm animals. Spread between wildlife and farm animals is a key aspect of why avian flu spread is so hard to control, along with research that shows spread by wind.

The Rollins plan is light on concrete details as to what exactly the new biosecurity strategies are, but typical protocols would be vehicle wash stations and protective gear for workers, who are currently the most vulnerable population to avian flu spread.

When asked for more details about the new plan, a spokesperson for the USDA cited principles from a set of biosecurity protocols established in 2016 as part of the National Poultry Improvement Plan, and says measures will focus on biosecurity gaps: “This includes both structural biosecurity (measures used in the construction and maintenance of coops, pens, poultry houses and other facilities) and operational biosecurity (practices, procedures and policies that farm owners and workers follow consistently).”

In her Wall Street Journal commentary, Rollins notes that of the 150 sites that followed recommended biosecurity protocols, only one was subsequently affected by avian flu. Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett says he is preparing a “smart perimeter” plan, along with Rollins, to avoid depopulation.

Smart perimeters is essentially a fancy term for monitoring risk in the area around the farm, in this case geared towards wild bird migration. Picture a farm as a bullseye and then draw a 10 kilometer radius around it — that’s about the size of an avian flu risk perimeter.

“That’s a pretty crude way of assessing risk,” Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor and expert in poultry disease modeling at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, tells Sentient. Plopping 10 kilometer circles everywhere there’s an outbreak does little to account for bird movements in the region.

What works better, according to Pitesky: accurately tracking bird movement and holistically assessing different factors — such as wind or temperature — that might drive birds into this radius. Pitesky has developed a technology that can track where waterfowl are relative to commercial poultry, which, he says, is highly scalable to help identify farms historically under the highest burden. For now, however, it doesn’t appear the USDA is incorporating this into their smart perimeter work, he says.

Even as, broadly speaking, strengthening biosecurity is key to combat spread, it alone might not be the saving grace everyone hopes. “I think there is a lot of wishful thinking that this is going to be a game changer and that the farmers won’t have to euthanize non sick birds … that could be a bad thing [because] if you are not aggressive with depopulating, you have the potential to create reservoirs of virus that can potentially cause further spread,” Pitesky tells Sentient.

Vaccination Instead of Depopulation?

The USDA has given conditional approval to a Zoetis vaccine H5N2 for chickens, but has yet to give the go ahead for vaccinating commercial poultry flocks against avian flu. Some may be surprised to hear Rollins has committed to invest $100 million in research and development of such vaccines, given the anti-vax sentiments from Trump appointees like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Industry groups have chimed in their support, applauding the new USDA plan and expressing enthusiasm for vaccination. However, the reason the USDA has been hesitant to implement vaccination remains: many countries won’t accept vaccinated chickens. The U.S. is the second-largest exporter of poultry and should a vaccine be rolled out, the federal government would have to negotiate agreements with its trading partners.

“Before making a determination, USDA will solicit feedback from governors, state ag commissioners, veterinarians, farmers and the American public. In fact, USDA will immediately begin holding biweekly meetings to provide updates and hear your input,” a spokesperson for the USDA tells Sentient.

Rollins also suggested loosening “unnecessary regulatory burdens” on egg standards. One such law mentioned is California’s Proposition 12, which established minimum space requirements for egg-laying hens, and which Rollins says contributes to the state’s high egg prices. Prop 12 expanded the tightest confinement standards for some farm animals by mandating specific space requirements for products like pork and eggs sold in and to California, with a few exceptions. Nevada has just moved to allow suspension of its cage-free standards in an effort to increase egg supply, though many experts say the approach is largely flawed. Increasing more backyard chickens for eggs was also a suggestion — however, these chickens are also at risk of interacting with infectious waterfowl, as 51 backyard flocks have gotten avian flu in the past 30 days.

Watching and Waiting

Both Pitesky and Davis would like to see a wider range of experts deployed in order to curb the spread long-term — including animal behavior experts to make farms less attractive to wild birds, and environmental public health experts.

We already lag behind other countries who have “One Health” collaborative teams of experts to holistically assess outbreaks, says Davis. It’s unclear whether the USDA $1 billion accounts for this kind of avian flu analysis but it might be a tall ask, given the current administration’s erasure of non-essential research costs.

“Patchwork investment” won’t make up for the huge federal workforce losses of key researchers in this area and siloing scientific agencies with the communications ban, Davis says. “I have major concerns moving forward that we will not have good eyes on this virus and that heaven forbid, start to develop a human-to-human transmission chain, and that’s a huge step down that path towards a pandemic. I would hate to look back in five or 10 years at this moment and think, ‘wow, what we could have done right now could have prevented so much.’”


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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Advocates for small independent farmers are sounding the alarm about the effects of corporate agriculture on farmers and local communities. Four mega-corporations now control the majority of livestock production in the U.S. American companies Tyson and Cargill, Brazilian-owned JBS, and Chinese-owned WH Group Limited.

Justin Perkins, publisher of Barn Raiser, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering rural America, said their influence is far reaching.

"These corporate monopolies are structured across all across the agriculture industry, and this has made the livelihood of small- and even medium-sized farmers nearly untenable," he explained.

The big agricultural firms argue that they have made the food system more efficient and profitable, while keeping consumer prices low. But advocates argue that waste from huge hog, cattle and dairy farms known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, pollute communities' air and water.

Sonja Trom Eayrs, along with her family, has been farming in Minnesota for generations - and fighting CAFOS for decades, wrote a book called Dodge County, Incorporated. In it, she describes the corporate system as a pyramid with big ag at the top, with integrators in the middle who own the supply chain and provide feed and veterinary services to farmers called contract growers at the base.

"The multinationals reorganized the marketplace, created a closed system where all the profits flow to the top of this pyramid, and they can control the pricing that flows all the way down to the contract farmer and that contract grower down at the bottom," she explains.

Joe Maxwell, cofounder of the nonprofit Farm Action, said this vertical integration has created regional monopolies among meat packers - and has driven tens of thousands of independent hog farmers out of business over the past few decades.

"These meat packers, they own the system. They own the baby pig. They own the feed. They price gouge the consumer at the grocery store," Maxwell said. "They pollute the land, to destroy the natural resources. They are extracting the wealth from rural America."

Maxwell encouraged people to take a stand with their local, state and federal elected representatives - in order to counter the influence of lobbyists for big agriculture.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Sometime in the 2010s, chicken surpassed pork to become the most widely produced meat in the world. As of 2022, tens of billions of chickens are killed every year to feed humanity’s growing appetite for bird meat. With the rise of avian flu, the number of chickens dying of illness — and being killed en masse preventatively — is even higher.

Ever since late 2021, when the ongoing bird flu outbreak began, chicken farmers around the world have been killing off entire flocks in an attempt to prevent the virus from spreading. But while this strategy has been effective at combatting zoonotic disease in the past, it’s been strikingly ineffective this time around, Maurice Pitesky, a faculty member and researcher at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, tells Sentient.

“Historically, that’s been a very effective way to get rid of disease,” Pitesky says of these mass euthanizations. “But for some reason, for this outbreak, it doesn’t seem to be working.” (We’ll get into why that is in a bit.)

One thing is clear: Whether it’s to feed our appetite for meat, eradicate bird flu or simply maximize profits, poultry producers have become extremely efficient at killing chickens in very large numbers.

How Many Chickens Are Slaughtered for Food Every Year?

The average person eats almost twice as much meat now as they did in the mid-20th century, and this is almost entirely due to a steep rise in global chicken consumption: Between 1961 and 2021, annual per-capita chicken consumption skyrocketed from 2.86 kg to 16.96 kg — an increase of nearly 500 percent.

Every year, 75 billion chickens around the world are slaughtered for meat by the poultry industry, including 9.5 billion chickens in the U.S. alone. This comes out to around 206 million chickens every 24 hours.

An additional six billion male chicks at egg-laying facilities around the world are killed every year due to their lack of profitability, a practice known as chick culling. Chickens who’ve been bred to lay eggs don’t produce very high-quality meat, so the male chickens of these breeds have little value to poultry producers. As a result, it’s cheaper for said producers to kill newborn male chicks en masse right after they’re born than it is to house, feed, slaughter and sell them as meat.

When taking chick culling into account, the total number of chickens who are slaughtered every year rises to 81 billion, or around 222 million chickens every 24 hours. And that’s when there isn’t a years-long bird flu pandemic, with no end in sight.

How Has Bird Flu Affected Chicken Slaughter?

Avian flu itself is nothing new, having first been documented as far back as 1878. But the current outbreak is unusual, as it’s both the deadliest and longest in history. It was first detected in the U.S. in 2022, and since then, it’s spread to several non-avian species, including humans.

Avian flu’s death toll, at least insofar as birds are concerned, stretches far beyond the number of animals directly infected with the virus. That’s because it’s standard practice for farmers to euthanize an entire flock if even one chicken is found to be infected, in order to prevent the disease from spreading. In fact, as a disease prevention strategy, the federal government actually pays farmers to cull their flocks in such situations.

This makes it extremely difficult to determine, when looking at overall bird flu deaths, how many chickens died because they were actually infected with the virus, and how many died simply because they were part of an infected flock and were then culled. But we do have some rough estimates.

How Many Birds Have Died As a Result of Avian Flu?

At the end of 2024, the United Nations announced that avian flu had “caused the deaths” of over 300 million birds worldwide. This encompasses more birds than just chickens, however, and it’s unclear whether this number includes birds who were culled as a precautionary measure, or only those who died directly from the virus itself. Sentient has reached out to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for clarification, but received no answer.

According to the USDA, almost 163 million birds in the U.S. have been affected by avian flu since the outbreak began in 2022; in this context, “affected by” means that the birds were part of a flock, or lived in a facility, in which the virus was detected. CBS News reports that 148 million birds have been ordered euthanized due to avian flu over the same period.

Why Isn’t Culling Stopping Bird Flu’s Spread?

While it might seem excessive and cruel to kill an entire flock of birds just because one of their flockmates was infected, Pitesky says that this is a standard and necessary practice when it comes to disease prevention.

“We would do that for any highly infectious viral or bacterial disease,” Pitesky says. “If you have a flock of 10,000 birds that are being housed together, they’re sharing feed and water, and all these other things.” In a typical industrial operation, thousands of birds are packed together in a relatively small space. “The idea that you’re going to just euthanize birds that are showing clinical signs and isolate the others…it would be logistically impossible,” says Pitesky.

Even if these mass cullings have helped slow the spread of avian flu, they certainly haven’t ended it. The various biosecurity measures that poultry farms have implemented since the pandemic have also not been sufficient to quell this current outbreak.

What Are Other Potential Solutions for Bird Flu’s Spread?
Habitat Shifting

Scientists still don’t know why this strain of bird flu has been so resilient to mass chicken culling, and Pitesky says that additional approaches may be required. His research is focused on a practice that he refers to as “habitat shifting,” which aims to prevent avian flu from reaching commercial poultry farms in the first place by assessing, managing and potentially relocating the natural reservoirs in which avian flu incubates.

In practice, this means taking a close look at where wild waterfowl habitats are distributed relative to commercial chicken farms, and either modifying these habits to make them less conducive to disease transmission, creating new habitats that are further away from the farms in question, or both.

“We can do that, and we kind of already do that in California,” Pitesky says. “California has lost 95 percent of our national wetlands, so there has been some efforts recently by the state to reflood some habitat. But it hasn’t been strategic, in the sense that it hasn’t integrated and considered the location of farms where we raise animals relative to those habitats.”

Eating Less Poultry and Eggs

The animal death toll from avian flu highlights the sheer number of chickens and eggs humans eat on a regular basis. The American diet is highly dependent on chickens as a protein source.

“Poultry is the most consumed animal protein on the planet,” Pitesky says. “If we have another one-and-a-half to two billion mouths to feed in the next few decades, poultry is probably going to be part of that solution at some level, unless we can’t get a hold on this, and keep on having these kinds of outbreaks.”

Unfortunately, we probably will keep having outbreaks. Avian flu is a highly contagious virus that develops naturally among wild bird populations, some of which are migratory, making it extremely difficult to track and contain. Factory farms are perfect places for disease to spread. Avian flu is constantly mutating; most recently, health officials have been alarmed to learn that the virus has not only developed the ability to infect mammals, but has reinfected the same dairy herds twice, raising the possibility that it might continue to circulate animal farms indefinitely. On top of this, backyard chickens are also vulnerable to avian flu.

Despite the egg shortages, there has been little discussion of intentionally cutting back. But it may end up happening organically, as some farmers and grocery stores have limited how many eggs consumers can buy.

How Are Chickens Culled?

The overwhelming majority of domestic chickens live and die on factory farms. Because chickens are exempt from The Humane Slaughter Act — the standard for poultry slaughter is “good commercial practices” rather than specifying “humane” — these deaths can be grizzly and painful.

Once they reach the slaughterhouse, chickens are first shackled upside-down, a process that often breaks their legs, before being passed through an electrocuted water bath. This is meant to stun them, so that they don’t feel anything when their throats are slit several moments later. Finally, the birds are placed in scalding-hot water to help remove their feathers.

It’s worth noting, however, that some birds aren’t sufficiently stunned by the electrocution bath, and don’t bleed out entirely from the throat-slitting, meaning that they’re fully conscious while they’re being boiled.

When newborn male chicks at egg-laying facilities are culled, the method of killing is different: they’re most commonly either shredded alive or gassed to death.

As for the euthanization of flocks in which avian flu has been detected, the most popular technique is something called ventilation shutdown plus heat (VSD+). This gruesome process involves shutting down the ventilation in the buildings that house the chickens, turning up the heat, and waiting for them to die from heat stroke.

According to an analysis by the Animal Welfare Institute, over three-quarters of birds that were euthanized due to bird flu between February 2022 and November 2024 were killed using VSD+. The process can take several hours to kill all of the chickens in question, but it’s popular because it’s inexpensive and only requires a few basic materials to carry out.

Putting Unfathomably Large Numbers in Perspective

For one disease to kill 300 million chickens — or any animal, really — over the course of three years is staggering. And yet it pales in comparison to the 81 billion chickens we kill annually, as a matter of course, simply as a function of our food systems. Even in the U.S. alone, the 9.5 billion chickens slaughtered every year dwarfs the number of birds killed by this wave of avian flu.

To put it differently: The massive number of chickens who’ve died from this wave of bird flu, either directly or through culling, is still significantly less than the number of chickens who are slaughtered for meat every 48 hours. In other words, 300 million may sound large, but it’s actually only a blip for an industry that has long been remarkably productive and profitable.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.