Editorial: 5 million dead chickens, again

Avian flu claimed another 5 million laying hens, and Rembrandt Foods is shut down in the wake. It’s a replay of 2015, when the same thing happened despite heightened biosecurity since. Seven years ago, 32 million turkeys and chickens were destroyed in Iowa. The flu has yet to run its course. It is a massive loss mainly covered by federal indemnity funds. Is this just a cost of doing business? Pencil in a pandemic every five to seven years?

It disrupts workers and their families. It disrupts supplies of liquid eggs, raising prices. It disrupts Rembrandt’s bottom line. The same with Tyson, where hundreds of barns in the region with open slats taking in a spring breeze are supposed to feed the Storm Lake slaughter facility. How does biosecurity stop a goose from landing long enough to leave its signature just below the awning?

It raises fundamental questions for us all.

The rapid increase in world population and growth/consolidation in livestock production gave rise to flu and other pandemics starting in the mid-1990s. Before, production was dispersed in open air with more diverse genetics. Outbreaks were not as cataclysmic because of scale. Grandma’s henhouse and Grandpa’s pig lot seemed more resilient to disease.

Creeping human contact with wild species introduces us to new viral infections. All sorts of new animal and human infections make the jump from bats to birds to people or pigs — Covid and African swine flu — that, combined with concentration, eases transmissions into pandemics.

Because of swine flu, China needs our pork. Half of Iowa’s production is bound for Asia. It also needs our poultry as populations swelled and demanded more protein in their diets. Production is increasing in Iowa of pork, poultry and beef, and concentrating the critters around the slaughter locations is bound to heighten risk of pandemics. Risk further increases by locating production right in the middle of the Mississippi and Missouri flyways, with Storm Lake hosting tens of thousands of migrating snow geese right now. It’s a perfect combination for the flu.

Veterinary experts tell us that raising livestock in a confined setting with strict biosecurity should better protect animals from disease. Rembrandt put in the strictest of protocols but got infected. Clearly, you cannot build a cell secure enough. Rembrandt relies on temporary help in its pullet barns with high turnover. It is nearly impossible to control all those boots coming and going. Vaccines are available but are out of the question for the poultry export trade. Instead, the USDA offers the packers indemnity payments.

Our rivers are choked with nitrate and phosphorous from over-application of commercial and manure fertilizer. We are wracked with disease. At some point we have to ask if we have hit our limits.

We don’t have enough water in this pocket of the Dakota Aquifer for all the livestock, ethanol and food processing.

Texas is on fire. Kansas is running out of water for the huge cattle feedlots. Storm Lake is awfully dry heading into spring planting. Increased livestock and feed grain production is a major driver in this long-term drought and those wildfires.

Iowa bought into consolidation to feed the world whole-hog.

No less than Norman Borlaug, whose likeness represents Iowa in the Hall of Statues, thought the industrial revolution in agriculture could only sustain itself for a generation or two. With world population ballooning, the great crop breeder said, production would have to show far greater yields. Those upper limits are being challenged by climate, soil degradation and water availability. Herbicides are losing efficacy against mutating weeds. Fertilizer is in short supply. And now, pandemic disease.

Buena Vista County is fully vested in the system of fewer farms with intense concentrations of livestock — the densest in North America — where the flu rampages like a December derecho through Aurelia. The last avian flu crisis ended in June with warmer temperatures. Actually, it never really ended at all, as we are discovering. Congress basically ignored and froze research funding into animal disease. We don’t actually know why we are seeing this increase in global disease pandemics. We should know more about the threat avian flu could pose to human health if left to spread as it will. We should breed more diversity into confined animals. We should question whether this system we created since 1980 has been good for Iowa, and whether we can keep it up. Nature is giving us scary signals that we cannot. Forced change is the most difficult