Montana farmers have testified before a panel of state lawmakers asking them to protect agricultural data that is collected by precision farming technology - and stored electronically, "in the cloud."
They're looking for changes in how that information is accessed.
At a recent state Economic Affairs Committee meeting, Montana Farmer's Union President Walter Schweitzer said with the increased use of precision ag tools and a huge uptick in data collected and stored remotely, farmers' information needs greater protections.
"We read every day that there's data being hacked," said Schweitzer. "The military has gotten hacked. Banks have been hacked. Hospitals are being hacked."
Schweitzer argued that hackers could use the information to affect prices or direct-market products to farmers based on the information they collect about crops and ag operations.
He said based on farmers' input, the Economic Affairs Committee will work with lawmakers to consider changes during next year's legislative session.
Rather than tighten access, Schweitzer said he thinks ag data should be made more transparent and publicly available.
He explained that this would help avoid the potential for market manipulation by commodities brokers or large countries, such as China, that purchase the crops.
"Let's say the wheat crop, during harvest, it looks like it's going to be lower yields than average or anticipated," said Schweitzer. "So then, China would come in, purchase all the wheat they needed before the USDA announces that, and the price goes up."
Schweitzer said 10% of a farmer's data, which is uploaded in real time during harvest and stored in the cloud, is all it takes for hackers to know a producer's entire harvest.
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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.
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Knowing weather patterns is part of farmers' skillset, helping them protect their land and profits.
But a North Dakota producer worries about the future of those tools as the Trump administration cuts staff at the National Weather Service.
Reports surfaced late last week that hundreds of probationary employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were let go as the Trump administration re-shapes the federal workforce through massive layoffs.
Additional layoffs are excepted. The National Weather Service is a component of NOAA, and North Dakota Farmer Tyler Stafslien said it's a tremendous asset.
"If you're considering planting in the spring, and you go to the NWS website and you see that there's gonna be a ton of moisture in ten days or seven days from now," said Stafslien, "you might go a little harder to try to get the crop in, knowing that likely you're going to have to shut down when that moisture gets there."
Stafslien added that long-range weather outlooks help avoid planting too much fertilizer.
He said there are other weather sources he pays for, but the free National Weather Service forecasts tend to be more accurate.
It's unclear how the layoffs will impact operations, but observers say even small disruptions to data collection for forecast models could hinder accuracy.
The administration says massive layoffs are needed to cut waste.
Beyond the Weather Service cuts, Stafslien said he worries about another trade war taking shape under a new Trump administration. This week, tariffs involving Canada and Mexico could go into effect.
Stafslien said he felt the impact of similar moves during Trump's first term. He eventually got emergency relief, but stressed that's not something farmers want to plan for.
"We'd rather not have to wonder," said Stafslien, "whether or not there will be some ad-hoc disaster program that's keep us from going into bankruptcy, frankly."
Advocates for independent farmers say they want policymakers to instead help find other global markets to send their products to.
Stafslien, a North Dakota Farmers Union board member, said he also worries about U.S. Department of Agriculture layoffs hurting farmers in need of technical assistance for loan applications or navigating conservation programs.
He said he's still waiting on full payment for sustainability efforts.
The agency is trying to rehire some staff that had been focused on bird-flu mitigation.
Disclosure: North Dakota Farmers Union contributes to our fund for reporting on Rural/Farming. If you would like to help support news in the public interest,
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