bird flu

During a recent Senate Ag committee hearing where bird flu took center stage, USDA Under Secretary of Agriculture Jenny Moffitt told lawmakers the Department is acting very quickly to address any and all outbreaks, regardless of where they occur across the country...

Authorities say there is a very low risk to humans

A group of Senators is urging the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to take swift action to address the ongoing avian influenza outbreak.  The lawmakers recently asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to quickly use funds provided by Congress in the Fiscal Year 2023 Agriculture Appropriations bill.   Led by...

A U.S. farm group is asking the Federal Trade Commission to look into the high prices of eggs and possible price gouging.  Farm Action is a farmer-led advocacy organization that sent a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan to share their concerns over “apparent price gouging.”  They point o...

According to USDA, wholesale egg prices are coming down a bit, but U.S. egg production continues to run below a year ago.  USDA livestock analyst Shayle Shagam looked back on last month’s numbers.   “During December we produced about 652 million dozen which was about 6.6% below a year ago," Shag...

Eggs are more expensive than they were last year.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of a dozen Grade A eggs jumped from $1.82 last year to almost $3.60 in 2022.  While part of the increase is due to the rising price of chicken feed, the real culprit is highly pathogenic avian influenza.  HPAI ha...

The 2015 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza outbreak was spread primarily by people and machines carrying the virus from one location to another.    But in this current outbreak.  “The vast majority of our introductions into domestic poultry are from interaction with a wild bird of some type,” which Dr. Rosemary Sifford with the USDA’s Ve...

The Washington State Department of Agriculture has confirmed a case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in a large commercial flock.  The Franklin County operation first reported a high number of sudden deaths of chickens to the WSDA last week.  Investi...

In January when a certain type of avian influenza virus, that had caused problems in Europe, was discovered in some wild ducks in the Carolinas USDA experts alerted the nation's poultry producers that trouble was coming.  Dr. Rosemary Sifford with USDA's Veterinary Services says instead of just dying out over the summer, which is what happened during the 2015 outbreak, the new variant has lead to

Last week, the Oregon Department of Agriculture announced the confirmation of the state’s first detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza in a non-commercial flock.  According to USDA, the flock was discovered November 29th in Columbia County, and included roughly 20 chickens.     ...