Thank you for Telling the USDA to Step It Up in the Fight Against Bird Flu
Industrial scale animal agriculture is amplifying a terrible new public health crisis - highly pathogenic avian influenza or bird flu for short. The disease is devastating both wild and domestic birds globally and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is tasked with keeping it out of U.S. poultry flocks, but is failing.
Bird flu, like human flu, circulates in wild birds. In the past, it has not caused significant illness in these birds, but in 2022 it infected birds in giant chicken and turkey raising facilities where it spread quickly and became much more dangerous. From there it has spread back out to wild birds that can carry and infect even more birds around the globe.
Since 2022, a specific strain of bird flu made its way from wild birds into commercial poultry flocks and has had devastating impacts on the poultry industry - affecting over 150 million birds, 10 million birds alone in February 2025. This specific strain has not only adapted to become virulent (very harmful) and transmissible (easy to spread) in birds, but it has also spread to mammal species like foxes and mountain lions, and also dairy cows, pigs and people. Every time the disease spreads to new hosts it can adapt and the likelihood that it will gain the ability to easily spread between humans increases. As of now, the strain has killed one person in the U.S., and though it can easily spread among birds, it isn’t spreading person-to-person. However, the longer the outbreak goes on without being controlled, the more likely that it will adapt to spread from person to person, potentially triggering a global pandemic.
Because of the devastating impacts of bird flu on commercial poultry, USDA rules require that all birds in flocks that have confirmed cases of the disease must be killed to prevent further spread. When this happens, the flock’s owners are compensated for the birds that are killed. This is referred to as indemnity. We are calling on the USDA to require more accountability from the giant poultry raising operations so that they actively avoid getting their flocks infected, rather than rely on the USDA to bail them out when they do. In the current outbreak numerous poultry raising operations have been infected multiple times. Since the USDA is paying for these birds to be killed, the agency should also require the flock’s owners to kill them in the most humane way possible and to make sure they dispose of the birds in a way that does not lead to the flu being spread to wild animals.
Additionally, the USDA needs to adjust the indemnity payment values. The current system for paying the owners of the flock for killed birds is completely unfair to farms raising birds on pasture. Pasture-raised chickens and turkeys along with their eggs are worth many times what conventional chickens raised in giant confinement barns are worth. Yet, the USDA places the same monetary value on the birds regardless of whether they are raised in a humane, pasture-based setting or in a giant confinement operation. The USDA uses a standard indemnification table to determine the value of birds. The current table has three broad categories: conventional, organic, and small-scale non-commercial production. This leaves out small-scale pasture-based commercial producers. Small scale non-commercial covers flocks that have less than 500 birds. For these flocks, the amount paid is based on the cost of the purchased chicks or poults and feed, not the fair market value of these birds since USDA does not consider these as being raised for sale. A small-scale commercial producer is treated by the USDA exactly like a large facility owned by Tyson Foods or Cal-Maine when it comes to the value of their culled birds.
The USDA recently added new requirements that large chicken and turkey operations must follow if they are to be reimbursed when they have to kill their flocks due to bird flu. They were accepting comments on the new rules (which recently closed) and we used the opportunity to urge the USDA to implement stronger protections for public health and fair compensation for farmers. We asked that the USDA adopt the following key recommendations:
Make sure large farms take adequate steps to avoid getting reinfected.
Only pay for birds that are killed using humane methods and require the safe disposal of carcasses so that wildlife are not exposed to the flu.
Adjust the indemnification payment structure to reflect the true market value of pasture-based farmers’ birds. The fair market value of pasture raised poultry is many times higher than that of conventional large scale poultry and the compensation paid to farmers for culled birds should reflect this. The current compensation table does not even recognize the existence of commercial pasture-raised poultry and requires farms to appeal their payment if they want fair value for culled birds.
The action alert is now closed, but thank you for those who sent a message to USDA to help protect our farmers, animals and communities from bird flu.