The average cost of cleaning and disinfecting an egg farm hit by highly pathogenic avian influenza during the 2014-15 epidemic was $8 million, according to three researchers who examined the $879 million the government spent to combat the disease.
Hotel rates surged 45 percent in bird flu areas due to the influx of emergency workers, says the article in Choices, a journal of agricultural economics.
Nearly 50 million birds, mostly laying hens and turkeys, died during the epidemic, the largest animal health disaster in the country. In Choices, economists Kamina Johnson of the USDA, Thomas Marsh of Washington State U and graduate student Riley Seeger say an initial assessment of the local impact of bird flu shows there were fewer jobs, lower production and smaller tax receipts. Iowa and Minnesota were the hardest hit.
The $879 million amounted to nearly 2 percent of the the annual value of U.S. poultry production. The largest outlays were $200 million in indemnity payments to growers and $610 million for quarantining farms, culling flocks, disposal of carcasses, and clean-up of barns.
In explaining why the cost of cleaning and disinfecting egg farms was, at $8 million, so much higher than the $170,000 it cost for the average turkey grow-out farm, Choices said: “This cost difference is attributed to infrastructure and production characteristics of layer farms having more barns and birds, as well as cleaning and disinfecting layer cages is more labor intensive in comparison to farms raising birds on the floor.”
The average cost per bird for culling, disposal, cleaning and disinfection was $14.47 in Iowa for a state total of $463 million, and $4.63 in Minnesota for a total of $42 million. Iowa farms lost 32 million birds, almost all of them chickens, and Minnesota lost 9 million birds, mostly turkeys.