Bird flu: Fix factory farming to prevent the next pandemic
Cases of bird flu continue to rise. The disease has now been shown to have made the worrying jump from birds to humans, raising red flags among public health experts. We need to do everything we can to prevent this disease from worsening. Part of that effort means seriously examining how our food system is turning this dangerous disease into something akin to a ticking time bomb.
The intensive raising of animals, especially poultry like chickens, that we've come to rely on for our food, acts as an accelerator for the disease, giving it more opportunities to spread, adapt, and ultimately threaten our health.
To understand why and how, let's take a brief tour of the American poultry industry. When we think about animal farming, the images that come to mind might be of a smiling, multi-generational farming family, lovingly caring for their flock. But in today's chicken industry, to the extent this image was ever accurate, it is rapidly vanishing.
Chicken replaced beef as the country's favorite meat in 1993, and we now eat an average of 127 lbs of chicken each year.1
At the same time, while the average farm size has grown, the number of farms has shrunk dramatically. Since 1981, we've lost half a million farms.2
Farming has become much more concentrated. For example, U.S. producers sell about 9.1 billion meat chickens a year, according to the latest U.S. agriculture census. But just 7,406 of the largest operations were responsible for selling 7.1 billion of those birds. In Georgia, the top meat bird-producing state, about 1,000 mega-farms account for 86% of the state's 1.3 billion birds sold.3
More animals raised by fewer farmers on a shrinking number of giant farms
Why does this matter? From a public health perspective, we need to understand that these operations raise so many chickens by packing them together in intensive, indoor facilities optimized for one thing: producing as many birds as cheaply and quickly as possible.
These facilities create the perfect conditions for spreading bird flu. Birds are packed so closely together that, once introduced, the disease rips through the flock at speed.
Less obviously, in order to grow birds as fast as possible to slaughter weight, we rely on selectively bred birds optimized to grow fast. This results in far less genetic diversity among the birds than there would be in nature, which means that diseases don't need to adapt very much at all to quickly infect the entire flock.
The ability of the disease to quickly infect many birds encourages it to become more deadly. This is because, in less dense populations like those in the wild, a disease that kills its host quickly runs the risk of not finding new hosts to infect, and therefore, very deadly diseases are less likely to be successful. But in the tight confines of these mega-farms, there is no risk of failing to find another host. This, in effect, removes a natural safeguard against especially dangerous diseases.4
We've already seen the consequences of this system play out. Recent bird flu outbreaks have led to the culling of millions of chickens and turkeys, disrupting the food supply and raising prices for consumers. More alarmingly, we've seen the disease now jump between species.5
To protect public health and create a more resilient food system, we need to fundamentally rethink our approach to animal agriculture.
We can, and should, move away from the mega-factory farming model and towards smaller operations that prioritize animal welfare and environmental sustainability. In addition to providing short-term support to people on the front lines dealing with the current outbreak, policymakers need to think about how we can reverse the trend toward the dominance of these mega-farms and support a more diverse and safer food system.
But we also need to be realistic: our current levels of meat consumption cannot be sustained without putting our health and the planet at risk. We have to look at alternatives, whether that means cultivated meat or, more simply, more plant-based food.
If we want to build a food system fit for the future, we must recognize that phenomena like bird flu aren't just happening to our food system; they're also being driven by it.