H5N1, a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza known as bird flu, continues to wreak havoc on the nation’s egg farms. In just the last month, more than 21.2 million egg-laying hens — about 7 percent of the national flock — have fallen prey to the virus or been brutally killed by egg producers in an effort to slow its spread. It’s led to egg shortages and a spike in egg prices, which reached $5 per dozen on average in January, up from under $2 in 2021, before the current bird flu outbreak began.
Last week, in an effort to boost egg supply, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo signed into law a bill that allows government officials to temporarily suspend the state’s cage-free egg standards, which requires eggs sold in the state to come from hens raised in cage-free barns rather than in the tiny, cramped cages that are predominant in the egg industry. It also allows for the temporary retail sale of Grade B eggs, which are safe to eat but may come with minor imperfections.
Lombardo has said he wants to repeal Nevada’s cage-free standards altogether.
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Last month, state lawmakers in Michigan and Colorado introduced bills to do just that in their states. Colorado’s bill is dead, while Michigan’s bill is still in committee.
These bills are part of a much larger, longer-term trend attempting to dismantle what little progress has been made on farm animal welfare in the US. For years, livestock industry-friendly members of Congress have pushed for the EATS Act, which would ban states from setting their own standards for livestock products imported from other states, thereby nullifying some of the most important farm animal welfare laws in the country.
It’s unlikely that efforts to repeal and suspend cage-free egg laws will lower egg prices, because there’s already little slack in the national egg supply. The whole country is facing egg shortages, so there’s not exactly a surplus of eggs lying around to fill the gap in Nevada, Michigan, and other cage-free states. University of Arkansas agricultural economist Jada Thompson recently told the Associated Press that Nevada’s suspension could “very slightly” ease egg prices in the state, but could also raise prices in other states by diverting some of the national egg supply to Nevada.
Colorado’s agriculture commissioner recently said the state’s cage-free law is not a significant factor in the shortages or price spikes. The head of the trade group Colorado Egg Producers told local media that the repeal bill “would actually harm our farmers here in the State of Colorado, and it would jeopardize the investments they’ve already made” in cage-free egg farming.
It’s an issue that both egg farmers and animal welfare advocates agree on: “Repealing state bans on cages won’t stop the spread of bird flu,” said Hannah Truxell, senior policy counsel of the animal protection group the Humane League, in a statement to Vox. “It would, however, reverse years of critical food industry progress.”
That progress is the rapid transition the egg industry has undertaken since the early 2000s, when virtually all egg-laying hens were confined in tiny cages that restricted them from even flapping their wings, let alone moving around. Today, 40 percent of the egg industry’s 304 million hens are cage-free, due to laws in 11 US states and commitments from major food corporations, including McDonald’s and Nestlé, to use only cage-free eggs. The shift has reduced suffering for around 100 million hens annually.
To be sure, cage-free doesn’t mean the animals have good lives — they’re still raised in massive, overcrowded, unsanitary barns, and investigations into cage-free farms have revealed horrid conditions. But they’re certainly better than conventional cage farms.
Repealing the few laws that ban cages will do nothing to address the core food system vulnerability driving egg shortages — dependence on factory farms. Because these egg farms are so enormous, each housing hundreds of thousands or even millions of animals, a virus infecting just a couple operations can send a shock to the food supply overnight. Tearing up cage-free laws to compensate for that vulnerability will only further punish animals in the relentless pursuit of cheap food — a pursuit that is to blame for much of this mess, as poultry factory farms have supercharged the bird flu virus.
As experts increasingly worry that bird flu could boil over to create the next global pandemic, now ought to be a time for sober reflection on the risks factory farming poses, rather than a time to double down on it.
Bird flu is largely a problem of the factory farm industry’s own making
Over the last century, the US pioneered the development of factory farming, which has since spread around the globe. It has made meat, milk, and eggs more abundant and affordable, but it has also come with a number of environmental, animal welfare, and public health problems, including accelerating the spread and virulence of H5N1.
The vast majority of America’s more than 9 billion turkeys, chickens, and egg-laying hens are raised on factory farms, where the genetically similar animals are overcrowded and live among their own waste, all of which can compromise their immune systems.
Factory farms present a “huge opportunity” for a virus or microbe to effectively spread, Claas Kirchhelle, a medical historian at the University College Dublin, told me.
Influenzas have long circulated among migratory water birds, but these have historically been “low-pathogenic” strains, inflicting little to no damage to the wild birds who contract and spread it. But the virus can mutate from a low-pathogenic strain to a high-pathogenic one — which causes fatal infections in poultry birds and more effectively spreads to humans. These high-pathogenicity conversion events have occurred 42 times between 1959 and today — and almost all were first detected on poultry factory farms.
Experts believe that H5N1, first detected in China in 1996, converted from low to high-pathogenicity after entering a commercial poultry farm. By the early 2000s, the virus had spread across the globe. The current US outbreak, now going on three years, has mutated to cause severe illness and death in hundreds of bird species, mammals such as seals and sea lions, and, in the US, dairy cows. More than 70 pet cats, many of them living on dairy farms, have fallen ill from bird flu, and some died. In December, a cheetah and a mountain lion at the Arizona zoo died from the bird flu.
Nearly 70 Americans have contracted the virus since 2022. Most of them have been dairy or poultry farmworkers, and most cases have been mild. But in January, a Louisiana resident died after exposure to backyard chickens and wild birds. And this winter, a 13-year-old Canadian girl caught a severe bird flu infection and was hospitalized for weeks; it’s unknown how she got it.
Last week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that three dairy veterinarians tested positive for H5N1 despite showing no symptoms, suggesting the virus could be more prevalent in humans than we think. Days later, a Wyoming resident with a flock of backyard chickens was hospitalized after testing positive for avian influenza.
Through it all, the US poultry and dairy industries have had little incentive to change their disease-promoting business models.
Policy incentives give them no reason to: When bird flu strikes a US poultry farm, the US Department of Agriculture covers the cost of the mass killing of the birds — which is often done by shutting off ventilation and using heaters so that the birds slowly, painfully die of heatstroke — along with the costs of carcass disposal and the market value of the birds. Since 2022, the USDA had doled out more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to egg producers affected by the virus. Dairy producers with bird flu outbreaks are also paid for their losses.
These bailouts — along with the current attempts to nullify cage-free laws — send a message to the industry that policymakers won’t question the foundational risks of the factory farm system, and will instead continually accommodate for those risks. Temporarily suspending state cage-free egg laws may bring very slight, short-term relief on egg prices, but without pairing it with longer-term solutions, we are bound to end up here again, or worse. Influenza experts are increasingly concerned that the evolution and spread of the virus over the last few years — aided by dairy farmers unwilling to take the bird flu threat seriously and a deferential USDA — could help to trigger the next global pandemic.
In a recent story for Nautilus, journalist Brandon Keim wrote that scientists he spoke with “used phrases like ‘red lights flashing,’ ‘totally novel ballgame,’ ‘no hope of containing,’ and ‘under attack.’”
Reforming America’s livestock-dependent policy regime
There are a number of short- and long-term steps policymakers could take to lower the threat of bird flu.
In December, the USDA said that some producers may be “inclined to disregard biosecurity because they believe that [the USDA] will continue to cover the costs associated with damages related to an HPAI outbreak.” The agency has proposed a rule to require that producers pass a biosecurity audit before they’re eligible for indemnity payments.
But Congress could go further by requiring producers to cover their own costs for mass killing and disposing of animals in the wake of disease outbreaks — a policy that Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) proposed over two years ago in the Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act.
“Our federal agricultural policy is designed in such a way that the factory farm model gets all the benefits and none of the blame,” Jake Davis, a Missouri-based agricultural policy expert and small farmer who advised on the bill, told Vox in 2022. “We have not asked the industry to embed the risk to our food system that they create.”
As egg prices soar, there’s been increased appetite for such alternatives in the US.
Requiring the vaccination of egg-laying hens would help, but parts of the poultry industry are concerned it would disrupt trade, while the USDA — at the tail end of the Biden administration — expressed concerns about the effectiveness of available vaccines. A Trump economic adviser recently said the new administration is looking into “medication” — presumably meaning vaccines — as part of its plan to stamp out the virus, and last week gave conditional approval to an H5N1 vaccine. But it’s unclear when, or if, it’ll be deployed. The Trump administration has also fired 25 percent of the staff from a network of nearly 60 laboratories that monitor the bird flu and other viruses, some of whom it’s now trying to hire back.
Longer term, policymakers could invest in diversifying America’s protein sources — currently, two-thirds of our protein intake comes from animal products. Fewer animals and fewer factory farms would give avian influenza and other viruses fewer opportunities to mutate and spread, while also benefitting the environment and the animals themselves.
Congress, the USDA and FDA, and state governments helped to build — and still help to expand — the factory farm system. But policymakers could choose to shift the food system in a more plant-based direction. Forward-thinking countries like Denmark and the Netherlands are already doing so through programs to pay farmers to raise fewer animals or grow more plant-based crops and to support startups producing plant-based meat, milk, and egg alternatives.
As egg prices soar, there’s been increased appetite for such alternatives in the US. Josh Tetrick, the CEO of Eat Just — the maker of a plant-based liquid egg product called Just Egg, which is made with mung bean protein — told me over email that the product has been growing five times faster over the past month than in the past year. And one of the largest US retailers, Tetrick said, increased its orders of the product by 30 percent over the last three weeks.
Just Egg is pricey, costing about triple that of liquid eggs from a caged hen, but it’s not because mung beans are expensive; it’s because it’s made by a startup that hasn’t achieved economies of scale, nor benefited from taxpayer bailouts or decades of government support like the conventional egg industry. If commercial egg farming does contribute to sparking the global pandemic, investing in plant-based alternatives will look smart in hindsight.
As Eat Just put it in a full-page New York Times advertisement in 2023: “Plants don’t get the flu.”
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