The bird flu is quickly becoming a crisis here and across the country.
Millions of birds have died, thousands of cows are getting sick. Dozens of people have even been infected and there are no eggs on grocery store shelves. And, scientists are increasingly warning that the fast-spreading virus is getting dangerously close to spreading to humans.
Here in Arizona, the state’s largest egg producer says he has lost more than a million birds due to the bird flu. And he’s concerned the virus will continue to wreak havoc on the industry and potentially on humans — unless he is able to vaccinate his flocks.
Glenn Hickman, president of Hickman’s Family Farms based in Buckeye, welcomed news late last week that the USDA conditionally approved a vaccine against the bird flu for poultry. But they're still awaiting the OK from the Trump administration before they can join other major countries around the world and use it.
Hickman said it’s a dangerous waiting game, and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
GLENN HICKMAN: Our family operates four farms here in Arizona. One farm was infected in November and reaffected again in January after we started to refill it, so we've lost about a 1.1 million birds out of our flock.
LAUREN GILGER: Wow, OK, and I, I don't want to get too graphic for people, but that's a lot of animals. How do you do this?
HICKMAN: Well, it takes a large crew, you know, we cycle through flocks anyway, but we've never had to put a whole farm down at one time. So this was, this was quite a massive undertaking. We had about 100 people that removed birds or and unfortunately carcasses from the farm and had to dispose of them.
GILGER: Yeah, and, and was it clear like how did you detect bird flu among that particular farm?
HICKMAN: This particular variant of bird flu is very, very virulent with a high level of mortality. So from the time we saw the first bird starting to exhibit some symptoms to the time that, you know, virtually the entire farm had perished was about seven days.
GILGER: Wow, so fast.
HICKMAN: Very fast.
GILGER: OK. Does this take an emotional toll on workers on the operation itself?
HICKMAN: Everyone in our company has been affected to some degree whether you work with the animals in the processing plant, heck even customer service because we have customers want to know where their eggs are, you know, when the truck's gonna get there and you have people that used to work at a farm that the farm is completely empty. So I, you know, I think it's, it's challenged every single person on, you know, that works with us.
GILGER: OK. So there must be a slew of precautions that you're taking now to keep workers safe, to keep your flock safe, to keep the product safe, right? Tell us a little bit about the extent of that.
HICKMAN: You know it's, it's like operating a very, very large hospital because we're trying our dangness just to keep the disease, you know, at the fence line so you know on the first order of defense, if you, if your vehicle penetrates the fence line, it's gonna get washed at least once in some cases twice and then washed and disinfected.
Then if you go into the barns, you're gonna take a full shower, put on company clothes, go do your work, and then do the same thing on the way back out. So we don't want you to bring a disease in and we don't want you to take a disease out potentially. We try to keep everything picked up, you know, if a pound of feed is spilled, we try to sweep that up so that no wild birds are attracted. It's just an ongoing full-time job.
GILGER: Is there any way to completely quarantine them?
HICKMAN: All of our flocks live indoors, both the caged and the cage free. They don't have outdoor access, but this virus is airborne. It rides on dust particles and so you know what we know now is that we have pressure from existing wild bird populations around our Maricopa farms.
So we've had some recently, even though there's no laying hens down there, we've been trapping wild birds and such, and we've been testing them and, and they're positive for avian influenza.
GILGER: Wow. So it's just spreading incredibly fast.
HICKMAN: It's faster than we can keep on top of it.
GILGER: OK, so let's talk about the consumer end of this, right? The side the rest of us are all experiencing the price of eggs has just, you know, shot up because of this epidemic and because farms are having to do what you're doing all over the country. Is this in any way a financial boon to you? Is it the opposite? Are you taking major losses because you lost an entire operation?
HICKMAN: It's both. So yes, the farm that got depopulated, the federal government makes you get rid of the entire flock, which we were gonna have to do anyway. They virtually all died. Then you clean it up and disinfect it and the government reimburses you for the loss of the flock and the cleanup process. The government doesn't reimburse you for the eggs that aren't getting produced.
GILGER: So it will take a while, I'm guessing for your business to get back up to where it was.
HICKMAN: Well, the industry takes a while to recover because we don't have the capabilities to just grow a whole bunch of extra birds at one time. We're pretty well matched. The system is geared up to replace older birds when they retire, and that's what we have. We don't have the ability to just double that up.
GILGER: Right, right. Is there added pressure right now because of the consumer demand for eggs and because of the, you know, sometimes complete scarcity of them on the grocery store shelves to get eggs out quickly?
HICKMAN: Eggs are in about 99% of all refrigerators and so the demand is very inelastic. People want eggs and they don't really decide whether to buy eggs or not based on price. So even though the price has gone up, the demand is still there.
GILGER: That's interesting. So you're not seeing people. Give up on it and say it's too much money. I'll just not have eggs this week.
HICKMAN: I'm sure there's a little bit more cereal being eaten, but the demand has been pretty rock solid. Got some good news just over the weekend where the government approved a vaccine. What they haven't approved yet is that we can use it, but we think that'll be forthcoming.
The frustration that we've had in our industry is that in Europe the birds are, you know, several companies are vaccinating their poultry and when we talk about poultry we're talking about commercial ducks, turkeys, meat hens and layers. They vaccinated them all. What's been very frustrating is that the vaccine was actually being manufactured here in the United States, but we couldn't use it.
GILGER: So how long has that been available in European countries?
HICKMAN: I think they've been vaccinated for over a year now.
GILGER: OK. What's been the delay here? Why can't you get your hands on this vaccine yet?
HICKMAN: You know, I think a lot of it is based on the fact that, you know, while the laying hen industry needs it, the meat bird industry has been largely unaffected. They have a very young bird that they harvest at say six weeks old. This disease doesn't seem to affect the youngest birds. Maybe there's some internal antibodies there, that kind of thing. So they have a whole different set of circumstances.
GILGER: So what are your concerns going forward? I mean, if you can at some point vaccinate your flocks because the USDA has finally agreed to allow this vaccine to go through and then you get the subsequent approval you're waiting for from the federal government, what do you think this might look like?
HICKMAN: Well, it's gonna take about two years to get the birds fully vaccinated because the lifespan of our birds about two years. They have to be vaccinated in the growing stage and from what we understand it's a vaccination at five weeks and at 12 weeks and then they move into the layer barns at about 18 weeks. So it'll take a while to get everything vaccinated, but it is a step in the right direction.
GILGER: So what's your prediction on how long it might take the industry and the egg shelves, the egg supply in general, to catch up?
HICKMAN: Well, our industry is fully supplied when we have about 330 million layers. And so right now we think we're around 275 million layers so you can see there's a huge gap there. That gap can get addressed by taking eggs, frozen eggs or dried eggs out of storage. We also, the government just approved a large import of 800 containers of eggs from Turkey, so those eggs can go. They're broken, pasteurized and dried, and that can go to industrial uses. So that'll relieve some of the pressure of the supply issue.
GILGER: OK. Are you concerned about this virus continuing to spread or not getting a vaccine soon enough, it continues to mutate it passes to humans, things like that.
HICKMAN: Lauren, everyone should be concerned about that right now it's a disease that's impacting the cost of eggs. If we don't stop the spread, if we continue to let it mutate, then we could have it mutate to the point that we do have human to human spreading, and then we will wish we had vaccinated the animals a lot sooner.
GILGER: Yeah, and you, it sounds like have been outspoken about this saying we need to vaccinate now.
HICKMAN: I keep telling everybody we need to vaccinate the animals so we don't have to vaccinate the people.
