poster for your poster needs (grossly oversimplified but i’m going for broad strokes not intensive academic rigor)
free to use, repost & reproduce, no credit necessary
Prev already talked about this in the tags but it’s important that folks see it in general
It’s not just because of dirty or crowded conditions. When it comes to avian influenza, if one bird in a flock tests positive for it, every bird in the flock MUST be terminally culled (euthanized) by law [and these culled birds – even the ones that may not have been positive for the disease – cannot be used for consumption, so the carcasses must be destroyed]. The entire facility must then be thoroughly deep cleaned and continuously tested for at least 21 days before any new birds can be brought in.
So it’s not just that all of the birds on a farm are contracting the disease because they’re dirty or crowded, it’s that even if other birds in the flock are still healthy, they MUST be euthanized because of just how dangerous and deadly the disease can be. This may sound excessive, but it’s an extremely important step to limiting the spread of the disease (on top of various other extremely strict biosecurity protocols that must be followed for commercial farms).
As prev said, entire farms are being eliminated overnight due to avian flu and the (very important) strict regulations surrounding the disease. This is especially devastating for egg farms.
It takes only 6-8 weeks for a commercial meat chicken (the kind you buy at your grocery store) to reach slaughter weight. If a meat chicken flock tests positive, it’ll take roughly two and a half to three months to have a new flock ready for slaughter.
For eggs, though, it takes commercial layer hens 18-22 weeks to start producing eggs. That’s somewhere between 4 to 5 months just to get a flock producing eggs in the first place – assuming that replacement flock doesn’t test positive for avian flu while they’re still growing. Add the quarantine time onto that, and you end up needing to wait up to half a year just to have a flock producing eggs again.
Add on to that the fact that all of our conventional grocery store eggs are only coming from a comparatively small number of very large farms, so when multiple of these large farms are being hit by this disease, you end up with a massive portion of the supply chain being potentially unable to produce for up to half a year.
Yes, there are problems with conventional/commercial farms – this, in my opinion, is one of them. When so much of our food production is consolidated into a relatively small number of highly compact farms, the moment even just a few of them are affected by an outbreak like this, the more unstable our entire food system becomes. That is why we’re seeing the soaring egg prices right now.
Sanitization is happening already*. Immunization is thankfully on its way. Regulation already exists**, but even if we regulated even more for better conditions on massive farms, this problem wouldn’t be resolved.
This isn’t about conditions on ‘factory farms.’ This is about the fact that we are so reliant on ‘factory farms’ in the first place.
We need more local farms. We need community agriculture. Most importantly, we need the products of our local farms to be affordable for the average consumer while still ensuring the farmers themselves can earn enough of a living.
*Sanitization is currently happening. We’ll see if this current administration continues to require that.
**As with the above, we’ll see if this administration continues to allow for literally any kind of regulation. Regardless, the point still stands. It needs to be made so clear that this is NOT just an issue of conditions on commercial/conventional farms, this is an issue of the supply chain itself.
amhrancas 