For Sustainable Animal Agriculture, We Need to De-Intensify

BC’s food system will be more resilient if we scale back intensive animal agriculture

Animal agriculture — raising animals for meat, dairy, and eggs — is one of the most difficult sectors for public policy. Livestock agribusinesses are proud of turning out affordable protein, and don't like the idea of producing less. Consumers enjoy eating wings, steak, bacon and eggs, and don't like the idea of eating less.

But that's what we need to do if we're going to tackle the climate crisis, water pollution, and biodiversity. We'll need to produce and consume smaller numbers of cattle, chickens, and pigs. No consumers will need to become vegetarian or vegan if they don't want to. But we in industrialized countries, who eat animal-source foods every day, will need to move meat to the side of the plate.

Meat threatens climate and water quality

Scientific reports are piling up, showing the necessity of replacing meat with plant-based proteins. Making meat creates far more greenhouse gases than making plant foods. Animal barns emit so much manure that they pollute water in systems like B.C.'s Abbotsford-Sumas aquifer, which for years has suffered with unhealthy levels of nitrates and other contaminants from poultry and dairy. 

Poultry is a growing issue for another reason as well, and that's bird flu.

Case study in food system vulnerability:

Intensive poultry and bird flu

There's growing evidence that high-volume poultry production is not only a victim of avian flu — as big barns get infected and need to slaughter their flocks to slow the spread — but that industrial poultry actually contributes to causing the disease in the first place.

Here's that story:

Bird-flu viruses have been around for at least hundreds of years, mostly in innocuous or low-pathogenic strains. In the past decades, however, they've turned lethal.

The current strain of H5N1 virus, called highly pathogenic avian influenza or HPAI, has been travelling the globe for the past three years, killing birds of many species and recently mammals as well. From eagles and owls to penguins and condors, from foxes and dogs to porpoises and bears, millions of wild creatures have been felled by this disease which is clearly no longer just for the birds. Thankfully, human deaths have been less than 1,000 so far — but new human cases in 2024 in the United States are worrisome.

Poultry are the globe's most numerous victims, with more than half a billion around the world who either succumbed to HPAI or were slaughtered because they were part of infected flocks and it was just a matter of time. In Canada, over 11 million poultry birds have been slaughtered due to avian flu just since 2021, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. And what British Columbia should be concerned about is that more than half of those — 6 million — were in B.C. That's despite the fact that the province produces much less than half of the country's poultry products: about 15% of its chicken and only 12% of its eggs.

What's going on to make B.C. so vulnerable? Industry blames wild birds and the fact that the chicken-dense Fraser Valley is on migratory flyways where ducks and geese shed microbes as they travel. Yet wild birds have historically only carried innocuous strains of flu. Besides, migratory flyways cross agricultural regions all over Canada. So I spent months researching this topic through scientific literature and interviews with industry and federal officials.

The culprit: Density

Turns out density is a major factor in the spread of bird flu.

Birds are raised in high densities.

The average BC commercial poultry barn has more than 50,000 birds crammed inside at any one time. Bred for maximum output of meat or eggs, those birds are also less resilient to disease than normal genetically diverse birds would be. But in that kind of poultry density, B.C. is no different from other provinces like the big producers Ontario or Quebec. So, with a little more digging, I found an additional kind of density.

Barns are densely sited in small geographical areas.

As pointed out to me by Amanda Brittain, an industry spokesperson, the Fraser Valley is hemmed in by mountains and has limited area for large poultry barns, so those tend to be sited close together. While barns on the Prairies might be 10 kms apart, she said, "here in the Fraser Valley, within 10 kilometres, we could have 25 farms." 

Frankly, I was shocked, and double-checked the quote with Ms. Brittain before publishing it. The comment is significant because it affirms that BC’s poultry system is uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of avian flu yet enjoys the blessing of the BC government. 

Density isn't inevitable.

To be fair, no one knew about avian flu back when siting permits were issued. But now we do, and we need to somehow de-intensify Fraser Valley poultry.

To underscore the problem, you can see a CFIA map on its website that shows (in grey) regions in southern B.C. that have been infected and "de-populated" (culled en masse) of poultry. I’ve included a screenshot of this interactive map below, zoomed in on BC’s Fraser Valley. You'll see multiple layers of grey in some areas, each one representing an HPAI infection and mandatory de-population incident! Some regions appear to show as many as five rounds of infection and depopulation. 

Shockingly, the CFIA also told me that, though it compensates barns at full market value for the poultry plus slaughter expenses, this compensation does not require any biosecurity improvements to keep pathogens out. 

Maybe that's why barns keep getting infected and depopulations continue to occur.

On top of that, density has allowed the virus to mutate in the first place.

There's another complication from intensive poultry production, and it's this: Not only do poultry densities make it more probable that the virus will spread, but bird densities also made this virus turn lethal in the first place! Major studies confirm that the denser the poultry operation, the higher the probability of HPAI infections.

International scientists have shown that bird flu viruses mutate from low-pathogenic to high-pathogenic most often in commercial poultry barns. Remember those innocuous viruses that wild birds used to carry? Those wee pathogens turned deadly among poultry.

I found this in numerous scientific reports, and most clearly in a peer-reviewed study by an international group of scientists who examined all the occasions of bird-flu mutation, from innocuous to lethal, over 55 years. They found that in 95% of the cases, those mutations occurred in big bird barns. And most occurred in high-income countries like ours, so this isn't something we can blame on less-developed economies. 

So what can we do?

We can cut poultry numbers. We can de-intensify poultry production. The Netherlands has vowed to do exactly that. A tiny country crowded with more than 100 million livestock animals, the Netherlands is drowning in manure and can't satisfy its European Union targets on nitrogen pollution. So it has pledged to decrease livestock numbers, and has asked farmers whether any of them wanted to be bought out by government. More than 750 livestock farmers volunteered, and the country could soon be on its way to making its livestock sector more sustainable. Though recent national election results (including seats to a party that wants to roll back environmental goals) may temper such ambitious environmental moves, the Netherlands has shown that more sustainable livestock systems can be envisioned.

Resources

• Boyle, E. 2024. “We Need a Re-think of Big Poultry to Stop Avian Flu.” National Observer. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/04/29/opinion/beyond-biosecurity-alternative-solutions-bird-flu. In this article, I show that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is paying millions of dollars to poultry farmers to cull avian-flu-infected birds, without even requiring the companies to improve biosecurity in their barns.
• E. 2024. “Avian flu: Way More Than an Industry Problem. And Factory Farming is Fuelling It.”  https://www.eleanorboyle.com/blog/avian-flu-way-more-than-an-industry-problem--85.
• Dhingra, M. et al. “Geographical and Historical Patterns in the Emergences of Novel Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5 and H7 Viruses in Poultry.” Frontiers in Veterinary Science, June 5, 2018, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2018.00084/full These scientists identified all occasions in which H5 and H7 avian flu viruses made the conversion from low pathogenicity to high pathogenicity globally between 1959 to 2015. They found that 37 out of 39 such genetic conversion events happened in commercial poultry production systems, mostly in high-income countries. See also the World Organization for Animal Health, which says: “Wild birds mostly, wild aquatic birds can be the reservoir for LPAI viruses, and such infections are not associated with disease or mortality in their hosts. Over long periods of time, some of these [low-pathogenicity avian influenza] viruses have moved into domestic birds (notably galliform poultry [NB: including chickens and turkeys]) through direct or indirect exposure followed by adaptation and circulation. Some of those viruses have mutated to become [high pathogenicity avian influenza] causing severe losses.” WOAH (World Organisation for Animal Health), “Avian Influenza: Situation Reports,” accessed February 7, 2024. https://www.woah.org/en/disease/avian-influenza/
• Canadian Food Inspection Agency, 20214: “Estimated Number of Birds in Infected Flocks,” under “Flocks in Canada Where HPAI Has Been Detected” at https://inspection.canada.ca/animal-health/terrestrial-animals/diseases/reportable/avian-influenza/latest-bird-flu-situation/status-of-ongoing-avian-influenza-response/eng/1640207916497/1640207916934