How Some Small Local Farmers Are Dealing with Bird Flu

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The price of eggs is soaring due to the spread of bird flu. The virus has infected and sometimes killed everything from wild waterfowl and a bald eagle to cattle and zoo animals. Plenty of people who barely interact with birds are nervous. But what is it like for small farmers whose livelihood depends on healthy chickens?

The three local farmers we spoke to displayed a perhaps surprising equanimity in the face of bird flu while still expressing some concern. “It’s not a joke, it’s a serious thing,” says Vanessa Frias of Willowbrook Farms in Cassopolis, Michigan, whose largest portion of business comes from eggs and poultry. But she’s more worried about outbreaks in hatcheries affecting her business than about an outbreak at her own farm.

“If the hatcheries are affected, then that trickles down to us,” she says. Many small farms that raise chickens for meat or eggs buy chicks from hatcheries rather than incubating and raising their own fertile eggs. Doing the latter requires “more time, patience, and some equipment upgrades and additions,” explains Raya Carr of Cabery, Illinois’ Mint Creek Farm in an email. If hatcheries are hit hard by bird flu, that could raise the price of chicks and also introduce delays in receiving them. Frias has heard from other farmers that they probably won’t be able to get chicks or slightly older pullets for laying eggs until 2026 if they didn’t order them by the end of 2024. Such delays could eventually affect prices and availability of both poultry meat and eggs.

“If these hatcheries get [bird flu] in their hatchery, it’s going to affect even Thanksgiving turkeys, it’s going to affect people’s jobs,” Frias says.

Bird flu has caused the loss of 30.1 million egg-laying hens in the first two months of 2025, according to the USDA. (Whole flocks are generally culled – euthanized – if the virus is found in order to limit the spread.) Commercial flocks will likely take a year to 18 months to recover from an outbreak, so the USDA predicts that such losses could cause egg prices to increase by more than 40% this year from an already record average national high of $4.95 per dozen in February.

Bird flu has been around since the 1990s, but the current strain, called H5N1, emerged several years ago and is both particularly contagious and frequently deadly; for those reasons it’s known as highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the risk to humans is currently low, although at least one human who was older than 65 and had underlying medical conditions has been confirmed to have died from it in the United States.

The flu virus is contained in the feces and other secretions of infected birds, and can spread via contact with those. It tends to spike in the winter as wild birds congregate and migrate, allowing the virus to spread through a flock and also via the waste they leave behind as they migrate.

The chickens at Willowbrook, Mint Creek, and Finn’s Ranch in Buchanan, Michigan are all free range and often moved across pasture in a practice known as rotational grazing. The farmers maintain that this keeps their flock healthier and with stronger immune systems than industrial farms in which massive numbers of chickens are all kept together in a tightly enclosed space and never go outside.

“They are all cramped, stepping on their s--t – literally,” says Alex Finn of Finn’s Ranch. “When you have your animals outside, most of the time, in general, they have very good health.”

The claim that pasture-raised birds are less susceptible to bird flu and other pathogens is unproven and disputed. Indeed, a suburban Chicago farm that recently had to cull its flock due to bird flu had free-range chickens. However, losses from bird flu are currently heavily concentrated in caged populations, with 22.2 million caged birds (more than 12 percent of the caged stock) lost in the first two months of the year, as compared to 7.9 million cage-free birds (7.8 percent of the cage-free stock). The numbers for organic chickens are far lower, as is the size of the overall population. Many experts do agree that the huge, confined flocks of industrial operations risk both mutations in the virus and high mortality rates. “If you have a lot of animals, a lot more birds can become infected a lot more quickly,” one expert told Civil Eats. “The bigger the flock, the bigger the concern.”

Whereas industrial flocks that are kept inside might contract the virus via rodents that track feces into their enclosure, free-range birds are susceptible to come into contact with the droppings of infected migrating wild birds. But Frias says that her guard dogs keep away most animals, including flying birds. (Mint Creek and Finn’s Ranch also have guard dogs.)

“Of course, we keep a very vigilant eye on our flock,” says Finn. “But we’re not panicking.”

She also warns customers not to panic or hoard eggs. “People see scarcity at the grocery store, and in America, we’re not used to scarcity. It’s the land of plenty. That creates a panic mode in the customers,” she says. But, “Chickens still lay eggs every day.”

Finn’s Ranch has seen an increase in customers looking for eggs during this season of bird flu, but they are a small farm and can’t quickly increase production to meet demand beyond their regular farm share subscription and farmers market customers – nor would they. “We’ve been through this circus,” Finn says. When supply chains were interrupted during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, customers flocked to small farms like Finn’s Ranch, and again during another surge in bird flu a few years ago.

“When factory farming has issues and there’s not a mass production of products, everybody comes panicking to the little farmer,” Finn says. “And then what happens is, as soon as factory farming goes back to normal and prices go back to normal, then people abandon us.”

Even while commodity eggs sold at the grocery store have seen price increases that have brought their prices in line with those offered by small family operations like Finn’s Ranch, Willowbrook, and Mint Creek, those small family farms have not yet raised their prices. (A group of Democratic lawmakers and a group called Farm Action have separately written letters to the government asking for investigations into whether large egg producers or grocery stores are taking advantage of shortages caused by bird flu and further raising prices to increase profits.) If feed costs or the price of chicks go up any further, they might have to, but that has not happened yet.

“Farmers that are local, they really put their heart and soul in it,” says Frias. “They’re not just cranking out meat; they’re cranking out a quality product that takes time, and it takes longer to raise than some of those factory conventional farmers.”

The increased demand for and attention on eggs has Mint Creek wondering whether now might be the time to realize a long considered goal of beginning to incubate and hatch their own chicks. “Our farm’s eggs are just super popular and a big draw” for the rest of their business, Carr writes. “This was the case even before concerns of bird flu and supply shortages.” But doing so would require some investment up front that would need to be raised through fundraising, even if it would save money (but certainly not time or angst) in the long term.

“When it comes down to it, eggs are at the center of fresh food priorities in so many households’ kitchens,” Carr writes.

And that is where these small farms hope that bird flu can have a silver lining, even if they are not confident that there will be a long-term effect. At least for a moment, some customers are turning towards small local farms for eggs and seeing the potential ways in which our food system can easily be derailed.

“If you support that little farmer, that little farmer is going to support you,” says Finn. “I know it’s not easy because we all live very busy lives, and it’s way easier to go to the supermarket and buy everything in one place.”

But, she adds, “All of the people that have subscriptions, they keep texting me like, ‘I’m so happy we have eggs!’ Because guess what? Their prices didn’t rise.’” At least not yet.

This article has been updated to clarify the intent of a comment made by Alex Finn.