Days after she visited a poultry operation run by Cal-Maine, the country’s largest egg producer, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins revealed a new, five-pronged plan for the USDA to “combat avian flu and reduce egg prices” and said she planned to discuss the situation with President Trump during the administration’s first cabinet meeting.
“We will not solve this issue overnight, but we are confident that our comprehensive strategy will help to stabilize the market in the next three to six months, if not sooner,” she told state agriculture officials at the National Association for State Department of Agriculture’s (NASDA) Winter Policy conference, where she made the announcement.
The plan involves an investment of up to $1 billion. It’s not clear whether that money is in addition to the $800 million investment the agency announced last year. Rollins plans to put the biggest chunk of money, $500 million, into expanding Wildlife Biosecurity Assessments, an approach that Biden’s USDA had successfully piloted at a smaller scale, assigning USDA staff to help farms identify ways to prevent infected wildlife from making contact with farm chickens.
Another $400 million will go toward helping farmers who have had to kill their flocks recover and more quickly bring in a new flock. And $100 million will fund research and strategies for vaccines. In early January, the USDA began building a new stockpile of vaccines, but agriculture groups have been hesitant to deploy them because of impacts on trade.
Rollins’ new plan barely mentions dairy, although the virus has affected nearly 1,000 herds in 17 states and most human cases of the virus have been in dairy workers. The plan also includes temporarily increasing egg imports from Turkey and other countries to bring down prices, and removing “unnecessary regulatory burdens” on poultry farmers. Previous reporting has pointed to a lack of USDA regulatory oversight as one reason the virus has spread so much to date.
NASDA leaders applauded the plan, particularly the push for a vaccine strategy and compensating producers for losses, as did Agriculture Committee Chairs John Boozman (R-Arkansas) and G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania). Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, called it an “important step” but also called on Rollins to make sure staff and funding cuts at USDA don’t disrupt the agency’s response. In a press release, animal rights group Animal Wellness Action criticized the plan for not quickly implementing vaccinations, among other things, and said the “plan is a deep disappointment and won’t allow us to turn around this problem.” (Link to this post.)
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