MONEY

Poultry producers frustrated with bird flu response

Donnelle Eller
deller@dmreg.com
U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst and U.S. Rep. Steve King meet with chicken and turkey producers in Sioux Center to hear their concerns about the response to the avian influenza outbreak Saturday.

SIBLEY, Ia. – Merlin DeGroot is stuck. He's had thousands of dead chickens sitting on his egg farm for weeks, attracting flies and smelling worse each day.

"I don't know if you guys know what a Dumpster full of birds stinks like after four weeks," said DeGroot, who fields complaints daily from his neighbors.

And it's just one of dozens of problems the Sheldon area farmer is trying to unravel after his egg-laying farm with about 100,000 chickens was hit with avian influenza in April.

A slew of federal and state agencies has made that process even harder, DeGroot told congressional and state leaders Saturday, during one of three town hall meetings in northwest Iowa, an area hammered by H5N2 over the past month.

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"They just couldn't coordinate anything together. This one had a plan, and this one had a plan," he said. "Meanwhile, here we sit."

DeGroot wasn't alone. A half-dozen chicken and turkey producers expressed frustration at meetings in Sibley, Rock Rapids and Sioux Center. Among concerns: stalled efforts to dispose of the birds, uncertainty about federal payments and slow-moving crews to depopulate infected flocks and decontaminate operations.

An estimated 25 million chickens, turkeys and ducks have been killed or destroyed in Iowa to contain the deadly, fast-moving virus that's hit 63 commercial and backyard flocks.

The meetings were organized by U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, who was only able to attend the Sioux Center meeting because of overnight votes at the nation's capital. Leading discussions were U.S. Rep. Steve King, Bill Northey, Iowa's secretary of agriculture, state Sen. David Johnson and Rep. John Wills. Altogether, about 120 attended.

King called the outbreak in Iowa and 14 other states a national disaster. The disease has stricken an estimated 40.7 million birds in the U.S., although most of the facilities have been located in Iowa and Minnesota.

"It's not only a financial calamity but a huge logistics problem that we've never faced before," King told Iowa poultry producers and residents. "Nobody anticipated a disaster of this magnitude."

Northey said he understood the past five weeks has been frustrating for producers. The size of the outbreak has been unprecedented, he said. "Everyone is trying to come up with solutions."

One of the biggest questions producers face, they said, is determining when facilities can again be filled with birds. And whether they will be able to protect birds once businesses are again operating.

Brad Parker, a turkey producer in Cherokee, told leaders in Sioux Center he and other producers hit by the virus have banded together to compost birds, unwilling to wait for crews under contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But he's unsure whether the government will pay him and others for their work.

The agency has about $413 million earmarked to pay producers for their lost birds and pay for euthanizing and disposing of the birds, cleaning and disinfecting operations.

Parker said he didn't want to put his family and neighbors through the smell, flies and other pests that would surely come with dead birds.

Howard Vlieger, who grows non-genetically modified corn that's fed to area chickens, said the flies were so thick at the home of one of his clients, whose flock was infected, they "couldn't walk outside with their mouths open."

Parker said he's unsure whether he and his neighbors will be reimbursed.

"There are a lot of questions," he said.

The state has struggled to dispose of the millions of birds killed by the disease. Landfills have been reluctant to accept the birds, given concerns about nearby farms being contaminated in addition to environmental and liability concerns. The birds also can be composted and buried on site as well as incinerated.

The backlog of dead birds should end soon, Northey said. A landfill in northwest Iowa and one in southwest Iowa have agreed to accept the birds. A large incinerator is being moved into the northwest part of the state.

DeGroot said he's been told 21 large containers at his farm will begin getting incinerated, and possibly landfilled, this weekend. But he's skeptical.

"I've been told that five, six or seven times," he told leaders.

Northey said getting answers, in particular how the state's farms were infected, will be critical this fall as the state faces the return of migrating waterfowl such as ducks and geese. The wild birds are believed to carry the disease, contaminating farms through their droppings.

Officials also believe the disease could be spread on workers' shoes or clothes, or even carried by the wind on feathers or dirt.

"There will be a lot of sit-down conversations — all the agencies, the poultry producers, everybody — to determine if we're ready to respond," he said.

This fall could be worse than the spring, Northey said, since the birds could be carrying a different virus and operations in more states could get infected.

"We need to be aggressive in figuring out what we're doing," he said