Bird flu is all over the news these days. Whether it is egg prices, dairy herds testing positive, or the staggering number of poultry lost, it’s hard to miss the talk about avian influenza. We are incredibly grateful that we’ve been largely spared from the worst, but it remains a nearly constant worry and one that’s created disruption at a moment’s notice.

Fact is, bird flu isn’t a new worry for poultry farmers. It’s been on our minds in some way for nearly a decade, when highly-pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) first showed up in the US. Farmers like to think they can solve most problems, but this is a virus in nature without any know prevention or cure. We used to say that our geography served us well, away from heavily concentrated poultry farming and outside the primary migration path for ducks and geese. Now, that narrative has shifted a bit. Cases seem to pop like popcorn: big farms, small backyard flocks, across the entire country, and now in dairy cows. We’ve compounded the seasonal worry about ducks flying overhead with year-round potential risk of the neighbor that milks cows.

Beyond knowing plenty of fellow turkey farmers that have endured the virus, we’ve experienced it first-hand in two ways. First, we walked beside a partner farmer as her flock tested positive and the domino stumbled from there. We also had turkeys in a mandated quarantine zone, when a farm in the region tested positive. I can tell you that both were miserable experiences and we are glad to be through them.

Here on the front lines, we have biosecurity plans that we follow to protect our flocks (you can’t believe all the times we change boots!). We test our birds and work closely with our veterinarian to stay up-to-speed on the latest. Believe it or not, while writing this note on a frigid February afternoon, I received an official text notification of a newly-confirmed flock in Northern Minnesota. Keeping pace with disease prevention and compliance could be a full-time job.

Through it all, one bright spot for us has been the signs of support from our customers. Asking how our flocks are doing and how we’re doing. Thankfully, the answer remains that we’re doing well, both the turkeys and the people. We don’t take that for granted, particularly in these days of too much bird flu in the news.