Northey: Rebuilding Iowa’s egg-laying industry will take time

DES MOINES – Iowa's bird flu outbreak wiped out nearly half of the state's 60 million egg-laying chickens and it likely will take months to rebuild flocks with some producers being forced out of business due to substantial financial losses that will be partially reimbursed under a federal indemnification program, officials said Monday.

'This has been a very difficult and unusual thing to deal with,” Gov. Terry Branstad told members of the state's Executive Council, which voted 3-1 Monday to provide up to $1.1 million in state money to assist in cleanup and disposal activities at farms hit by the highly pathogenic avian influenza. 'This has been devastating. It's been close to half of the laying hens in Iowa and a significant amount of turkeys.”

Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey said the outbreak that hit 18 Iowa counties led to the deaths and euthanizing of more than 33 million commercial layers, pullets and turkeys – including about 27 million egg-producing chickens. He said June 16 marked Iowa's last confirmed bird flu case in an outbreak that ranks as the state's worst animal health emergency with costs mostly to the U.S. Department of Agriculture topping $300 million for cleanup, disposal and disinfection operations and a federal indemnification program covering the 'fair market value” of the dead birds for producers.

'Hopefully, we're near the end of it,” said Northey, who noted that attention now turns to finishing the cleanup activities, repopulating affected facilities and taking steps to prevent a return of the deadly flu virus this fall when temperatures cool and migrating birds pass through Iowa posing a new threat to Iowa's commercial flocks.

Northey said state and USDA-contracted workers have depopulated affected chickens and turkeys in Iowa and disposed of most of the birds at landfills or via burial, composting and incineration. Efforts to clean and disinfect facilities are ongoing, he said, and environmental samplings of all sites will take place before restocking.

'We still have awhile before our folks are ready to put birds back in,” said Northey, who noted that Iowa still remains the nation's top egg-producing state with 33 million layers just ahead of Ohio's 30 million. He hoped Iowa could rebuild its flocks to the 60-million population, but added 'I'm sure we will have some operations that won't get back either at all or to their previous level.”

'It's certainly going to take many, many months before we're back there,” he said. 'I think it could take a couple months before we have layers back in facilities and then it will take many months after that to have enough layers to fill facilities and for facilities to rotate in a number of new birds.”

Branstad said he has heard concerns from producers facing financial pressures brought on by a bird flu epidemic that also has caused job losses as the economic impact grows. 'A lot of them are going to go broke and we can't do a thing about it,” he said during Monday's council meeting at the Statehouse.

Iowa Executive Council members agreed to authorize a request from the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management for up to $1.1 million a statewide disaster emergency declaration issued by Gov. Terry Branstad in May and extended again Monday through July 31 to deal with the outbreak and costs associated with the state response. Northey said there will be additional claims brought to the council related to work done by the state's agriculture, natural resources, public health and emergency management agencies.

Mark Schouten, director of the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said 26 hazardous materials workers were deployed in northwest Iowa to deal with the bird flu outbreak, but that number has decreased to 15 as the threat has lessened and he expected to complete the 'draw-down” process by July 8.

He estimated the state cost at $716,000 but he said all but $216,000 of that would be reimbursed by the federal government. He also held out hope a state request for a presidential disaster declaration made by Branstad would be approved that would make available more federal resources to deal with Iowa's bird flu outbreak.

A national meeting is planned in Des Moines during the last week in July to consider issues related to the avian influenza outbreak going forward for the fall months and beyond, state officials noted.

'I just hope we don't have to go through this again,” Branstad said.