Re: Eggman/ James..
It has been almost six months since the first detection at one of our facilities. Out of 45 locations we ended up finding it at eight resulting in depopulation of almost 7.5 million layers and 1.2 million pullets(birds less than 18 weeks old not laying eggs yet).
All of the pullet sites have now been cleared, are stocked, and we put the first birds in a laying operation this week. It will be 15 more months until we are back to pre-outbreak capacity.
We had moderate success working with our customers who were buying product under contract in getting financial assistance to cross the bridge, and due to the terrible industry losses the pricing for our product at non-infected facilities provided significant returns to help offset losses at the infected properties. Our owners made a decision to not do any layoffs and I'm very proud to say that we kept the vast majority of our team paid and insured. We elected to contract with the FedGov ourselves to do the cleanup rather than turn it over to contractors.
As far as our industry interaction with the government and specifically USDA to work through the quarantine, depop, cleanup, and restocking there were some hits and misses. Generally USDA used contractors to provide the work and the contractors were hugely successful in fleecing the taxpayer. I suspect that my father and I will end up in front of a congressional committee at some point offering testimony on our experience. You know the old saw about "how could the government spend $800 on a hammer"? Well, I found out. The process is simply mind blowing.
I think we(our company and owners) learned some incredible lessons and are spending a metric crap ton on bio-security improvements. Frankly, when this got out of hand in Minnesota there were failures at the company, state, and federal level in the response. We were simply not prepared for the virulence and persistence of this virus. It got out of hand and the amount of virus pushed out into the environment was mind boggling. The only thing that stopped it was temperature outside. As soon as it got hot enough the virus lost it's ability to exist for any time away from a host. Terrifying. The next time we have to react much faster and isolate sites. I will offer up my own experience as an example. At our first detection it took days to get everything lined up to euthanize quickly and we had entire flocks dead before we could get to them. With our last detection, I killed a flock with an unconventional technique within hours. I even bypassed federal indemnity on this flock because I acted on clinical signs rather than waiting for official lab results. But I was able to save three other complexes of birds within a mile of that infection.
I am thankful for my family. My wife was incredibly supportive. My health took a terrible toll. I stopped exercising, had trouble sleeping with many truly sleepless nights. I gained 25 lbs and was probably drinking too much. I ended up in the ER with strep throat in the middle of this mess and found my diastolic was up 10 points. I quit flying because I knew my mind wasn't in the right place.
I'm now back on the treadmill, the doc is less unhappy, the wife is happy, quit the booze(mostly
), am eating clean, and am back in the air.
I knew the night of the first detection that my life would never be the same. That sound like hyperbole, but in this case it isn't.
Happy to answer any questions.
Eggman
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