Tech x FAW group discussion 6: Biosecurity for Chickens

[JoePaterJoePaterJoePater]

Pathogens are responsible for lots of chicken suffering. Examples include:

• Avian Influenza: a highly contagious disease spread by wild birds between poultry houses with a high mortality rate. When a flock is infected, it must be culled (known as "mass depopulation"), typically using ventilation shutdown (VSD). The air vents are shut off and the birds die of heat stroke / suffocation over the course of several hours.
• Bacterial Chondronecrosis with Osteomyelitis (BCO): a significant cause of lameness in broilers is BCO, which is caused by a bacterial infection.

Farms are typically very cautious about biosecurity - they limit access to farms, and barns are disinfected between cycles.

There are potentially technological solutions to reducing pathogen prevalence. These could include:

• Better filtering of vents
• Better monitoring of pathogen prevalence
• Ways to keep wild birds away
• Better disinfection of equipment

Discussion date: Sunday 5th July 2026, 10:00 PST / 13:00 EST / 18:00 UTC

RSVP: https://luma.com/r9ytc29a

[rhjiang]

RSVP here!

[JoePaterJoePaterJoePater]

This page has info for farmers with a focus on AI (Avian Influenza):

• It advises to change into clean boots an overalls when entering/leaving the barn, with a clear dirty/clean separation
• AI is most commonly spread from wild bird populations via respiratory secretions or faeces, via infected bedding material, or via movement of people and equipment
• It's important to prevent access from wild birds an rodents (e.g. with wire meshes on barn openings, or spikes on the roof)
• AI can survive in water for 100 days, so eliminate puddles / standing water where possible
• Barn maintenance is important: leaks/poor guttering allow virus ingress, and moss on the roof attracts wild birds which eat the insects underneath
• Bedding hygiene: don't store bails outside, remove bail wrapping outside the barn
• Disinfection: replenish boot disinfectant dips regularly, prevent dilution from rainwater, wash off clumps before disinfecting

[JoePaterJoePaterJoePater]

The University of Minnesota Secure Food Systems group does detailed analysis of the risk of AI transmission during transport.

Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtDKdpoYPIc&list=PLUd0Fonx275jE2S1gYLpwUgSwEw2Us0gk&index=17

• Suggests that egg processors are starting to use UV as an additional layer of disinfection (e.g. within the coolers when eggs come in)
• Some farms are exploring electronic systems to track lines of separation / perimeter buffers and monitor entries and exits
• Project to compare entry systems (Danish entry vs full shower)
• Host suggests that sometimes boot wash baths can exacerbate the problem, might be better ways to disinfect boots

Guidelines for broiler transport to slaughter: https://securepoultrysupply.umn.edu/sites/securepoultrysupply.umn.edu/files/2022-06/2017_05_02_sps_btm.pdf

[nate-springfund]

FYI this is what Claude said on when asked "Are poultry companies incentivized to prevent HPAI? Or are they insured, or otherwise it's so infrequent, that it doesn't have a big financial impact for them?"

This is a great question that gets at the moral-hazard core of HPAI economics. Let me pull current details on the indemnity structure and how it shapes incentives, since USDA policy here has shifted recently.I have the indemnity structure. Let me check what indemnity does not cover (the business-interruption gap) and whether private insurance fills it, since that's where the real incentive question lives.One more angle worth confirming: the perverse price dynamic where surviving egg producers can profit from outbreak-driven price spikes, which cuts against the prevention incentive.Short answer: they're incentivized, but the incentive is real and blunted at the same time, and how blunted depends heavily on which segment you're looking at. Here's the structure of it.

The direct loss is largely socialized. USDA indemnity pays fair market value for every bird that has to be depopulated to control spread, plus separate compensation for disposal, cleaning, and virus elimination. Critically, USDA pays for birds that must be destroyed but does not pay for birds that actually died from HPAI; that design pushes producers to report fast and cull, but it also means the taxpayer absorbs most of the direct flock value. The current outbreak has run to roughly $1.25 billion in indemnity and compensation, with about $227 million going to facilities hit more than once. So in aggregate this is neither rare nor cheap: more than 112 million egg layers have been lost since 2022.

What indemnity does not cover is where the private incentive lives. Indemnity replaces the birds; it does not replace the revenue lost while a barn sits empty through cleanout, downtime, and repopulation, which for layers is many months of biological lead time you cannot rush. Industry itself says indemnity does not fully cover the financial losses and is closer to disaster relief that keeps farms from going under. Private cover exists (livestock mortality, business-interruption policies), but property-loss coverage for depopulated birds does not appear to be widely purchased, and it's unclear that business-interruption coverage even reliably applies. For contract broiler growers the exposure is starker: these losses are typically not covered by normal farm insurance, and for the integrator every dollar a grower loses can translate to up to ten dollars in cost and lost revenue. That uncovered interruption cost is the genuine deterrent.

But for egg layers, a perverse offset partly cancels that deterrent. Because a big outbreak is an industry-wide supply shock, surviving and even partially-hit producers can more than recoup losses through the price spike. Cal-Maine is the clean example: it lost about 4% of its flock, collected roughly $42 million in USDA compensation, and still saw quarterly profit triple to about $508 million, closing FY2025 at $1.22 billion in profit. At the sector level, monthly production never fell more than about 5.6% below the five-year average even as retail prices more than doubled. So a firm still wants to avoid being the one culled, but the money it loses is cushioned both by taxpayers and by the higher prices its remaining output commands.

Policy has explicitly recognized the moral hazard. The reinfection data was the tell: 67 premises were infected two or more times, 18 of them three or more times. USDA's December 2024 interim rule now conditions future indemnity on passing a biosecurity audit before restocking, aimed squarely at producers who might disregard biosecurity on the assumption that APHIS will keep covering the damages. Pair that with the $100 million USDA push toward vaccines, therapeutics, and 75% cost-share on the highest-risk biosecurity fixes, and you can read the whole policy stack as the government trying to manufacture a prevention incentive that the indemnity-plus-price-spike structure otherwise dilutes.

So, netting it out:

• Incentive exists, mainly via uncovered business interruption and rebuild time, strongest for broiler integrators and single-facility operators.
• Incentive is dulled by two subsidies: direct-loss indemnity from taxpayers, and, for eggs, outbreak-driven price windfalls that can exceed a producer's own losses.
• The dilution is real enough that regulators intervened, tying future indemnity to biosecurity performance rather than assuming producers would self-optimize.

The moral-hazard structure is exactly why private demand-pull for biosecurity and vaccine/therapeutic tech has historically been weaker than the aggregate loss numbers would suggest, and why the audit-conditioned indemnity and the $100M program matter as demand shapers.

[JoePaterJoePaterJoePater]

This paper studied the use of lasers to keep wild birds away, and found a 600x reduction in visits from wild birds
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348769606_Efficacy_of_Using_a_Laser_Device_to_Reduce_Wild_WaterBirds_Visits_to_the_Free-range_area_of_a_Layer_Farm_Situated_in_an_Avian_Influenza_Hotspot-region_in_the_Netherlands

[JoePaterJoePaterJoePater]

This podcast suggests that improper vaccine handling for Marek's disease is often the cause of outbreaks (temperature control very important, also important not to dilute)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0lid6nATPU&list=PLUd0Fonx275jE2S1gYLpwUgSwEw2Us0gk&index=7

[JoePaterJoePaterJoePater]

Litter moisture lets bacteria thrive, this podcast focuses on Salmonella but presumably applies to other bacteria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMw1QEfVzI&list=PLUd0Fonx275jE2S1gYLpwUgSwEw2Us0gk&index=31

• Chemicals can be added to the litter to change pH to make it harder for bacteria to survive

[rhjiang]

A discussion piece from a philosophy researcher on using automation to reduce avian influenza risk by getting humans out of barns

[rhjiang]

article raises some interesting complexities.

• We're not sure how avian influenza spreads between farms. Seems possible that it spreads via wind carrying dust/feathers.
• Lots of conflict over vaccines for avian influenza, which have not been approved by the USDA. Vaccines may prevent exports to other countries.
• "While farm-to-farm spread was responsible for 70% of the 2015 outbreaks, only 15% of [2022] cases originated from other farms."
• "At the vast majority of egg farms, he said, infections started with chickens close to air inlets and on upper levels, far from where virus tracked in on shoes and clothes would end up"
• "The government has had a proven poultry vaccine against this strain of the bird flu since July 2023. [...] Trade has been among the biggest barriers to using it."