Bird flu leads to new concerns for poultry sector
The problems for poultry farmers are piling up. The sector has already faced high energy prices and rising food costs, but now bird flu is a source of additional concern.
Chairman of the Dutch Union of Poultry Farmers (NVP) Bart-Jan Oplaat talks about “a perfect storm”. It is still difficult to say how great the damage will be for poultry farmers, but according to Oplaat, entrepreneurs in the free-range sector in particular are having a hard time. Since October 2021 there has been an obligation to keep chickens indoors. According to Oplaat, the poultry farmers lose three cents per free-range egg, which means a loss of three thousand euros per week for an average free-range farm.
This loss is independent of the costs associated with the increase in energy and feed prices. As a result of the war in Ukraine, grain has become expensive and the price of animal feed has risen with it. Kees de Jong, chairman of the Poultry department of the Agricultural and Horticultural Organization of the Netherlands (LTO), sees this too. “We don’t exactly have the wind at our back at the moment, and then I express myself euphemistically.”
According to De Jong, the bird flu situation is worrying. It is still unclear to him how bird flu enters the stables. “Poultry farmers are therefore in a kind of lockdown, they are constantly weighing who can or cannot enter their site, for fear of infections.”
The national government, which keeps track of the number of animals culled, reports on its website that more than 2.2 million chickens, ducks and turkeys have been culled since the beginning of this year. In the last month mainly in the Gelderse valley, in and around Lunteren and Barneveld.
The concerns about this area are very charged, De Jong notes among the LTO members. This is the area where the bird flu wreaked havoc in 2003. In that year, the Dutch poultry sector was hit by the bird flu, forcing 30 million chickens, ducks and turkeys to be culled.