This letter is to further educate your readers about the informative article you published last week – highly pathogenic avian influenza identified in dairy operation in Wood County. Since the Ohio Department of Agriculture has not released any further information about the “dairy operation in Wood County,” I tried to connect the dots in their public notice.
ODA said this dairy “received cows from a Texas dairy, which later reported a confirmed detection of HPAI” or highly pathogenic avian influenza. There are two ODA-permitted Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs or factory farms) in Wood County, one of which is located east of Portage and has a permit to house 5,000 cows.
According to the ODA permit, this dairy is owned by someone in Plainview, Texas. The owner’s email address contained the name of the Texas dairy which did, in fact, have an outbreak of avian flu two weeks ago plus their website states they have a partnership with a dairy farm in Northwest Ohio. Disturbingly, a worker at this Texas dairy has already contracted the avian flu.
According to a recent article by Alan Guebert, a highly-respected ag columnist – Another $1 billion to refinance status quo won’t stop avian pandemics – USDA’s preparedness after spending more than $1 billion “doesn’t include changes to today’s industrial poultry and livestock production systems that often stack, stuff, and stash as many birds, hogs, and cattle into disease-fostering confinement systems that can – and do become breeding grounds for chronic ailments affecting both animals and humans.”
Between the suffering of these animals and the devastating impacts of animal manure on Lake Erie and our environment, this is a moral catastrophe we can’t afford to neglect any longer. Despite public outrage at the humanitarian and environmental consequences of factory farming, over 95% of the meat, pork, eggs and milk in the U.S. comes from animal factories.
While this avian flu risk to the general public remains low, let’s not stick our heads in the sand like our former president who said the COVID virus would just disappear “like a miracle.”
An earlier article by Guebert stated that the 2023 Farm Bill would still support “the biggest of the bigs” and he predicted that this “system isn’t sustainable – and neither are we – without change.”
Vickie Askins
Cygnet
