Egg laying company hit with avian influenza recounts the emotional and physical challenges of euthanizing birds
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Thousands of dead chickens packed into metal containers is a disturbing image, but there was often no other choice for producers caught in the maelstrom of an avian influenza outbreak.
Mark Van Oort, complex manager for Center Fresh Farm Eggs in Sioux Center, Iowa and its sister operation, Sioux County Egg Farm, recently talked about how the company handled a deadly outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza a year ago.
“Everything was hard. It was emotionally tiring, it was physically tiring. Everything was very hard,” he said during the National Institute for Animal Agriculture’s annual meeting in Kansas City.
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The egg laying company eventually lost 7.3 million birds and will not be fully operational until the end of this year.
“As we grow our farms and everything gets bigger and better, we have to grow our crisis management strategies with that,” he said.
The operation included layer barns and pullet raising facilities. There are 120 employees at Center Fresh Farm Eggs and another 40 at the Sioux County farm. All had advanced bird care and biosecurity training.
In fact, the operation scored 100 percent on a U.S. Department of Agriculture biosecurity audit two months before the disease hit.
The company knew the disease was on the move and tried to be proactive when it hit the state April 15, 2015.
It attempted to shut down a county road and reroute traffic, but the county sheriff would not allow it.
“We did not do a good enough job convincing our neighbours how bad this was going to be,” he said.
“We tried to prepare ourselves, but we didn’t prepare our townships and our counties.”
The disease hit the first farm April 25 and the other one, 10 kilometres away, was hit April 27. The sister companies worked together, used the same feed and moved eggs around.
Five of their pullet growing sites turned up positive over the next two weeks.
They had emergency management meetings daily and tried to keep everyone’s spirits up as they went through the grim task of removing or euthanizing 7.3 million birds. No one lost their job, but many asked if the company would survive.
The logistics were a nightmare.
Iowa’s agriculture department officially quarantined the farms, but by then they had already shut themselves down.
They received a six page document from the government on how to isolate birds and products and create lines of separation and management of vehicle movement.
The USDA and the state constantly monitored vehicle movements in and out of the premises.
“We knew how bad this was for us,” he said. “We couldn’t see the state fall apart, so we continued down that path.”
The farms didn’t have enough people to do the work.
Volunteers from the community and local church groups helped with depopulation and provided meals. There was a prayer vigil from a local church.
About 500 contract labourers were brought in, but many had never seen a chicken before and needed training as they worked in overheated barns in biohazards suits.
The birds became very sick, very quickly. Those that did not die right away had to be humanely euthan-ized.
Foam was not an option, and carbon dioxide was not always available. Gas supply companies did not work weekends, and work had to slow down if they ran out of carbon dioxide.
The birds were supposed to be destroyed within 24 hours. The farms averaged 266,666 per day over 21 days.
The birds were stored in big containers resembling a metal dumpster with a rubber lining and plastic bag. The containers could hold 10,000 birds each, and the farms eventually filled 225 containers with dead chickens, which had already started to decompose.
Other birds were piled up in manure bunkers.
Carcass disposal was a challenge.
Rendering was not an option, landfills did not want them and incineration units could not handle large numbers of birds.
Burial was also not an option because of environmental contamination concerns, and the farm would have needed 125 acres for burial trenches. In the end, they decided on composting.
The first step was to open the containers, which had been sitting for two weeks in 40 C weather. The odour was overwhelming.
They needed plenty of space and had to find enough material to start the process using 10,000 tonnes of birds.
They started composting April 30 and had early success using 55 percent birds, 30 percent carbon and 15 percent litter or manure. There were 39 kilometres of composted chicken piles.
Once the barns were empty, they had to find an effective clean out method. It took 150,000 man hours to clean the Center Fresh facility with a dry clean system and heat disinfectant to eliminate the virus.
