Actually, there were two farms in Iowa that had more than five million chickens each. Were. Iowa, the largest egg producer in the US, obviously is interested in quantity rather than quality. Now they have 10.3 million fewer chickens because of just two mega-farms, all in the space of one month.
Factory farms are justifiably notorious for the use of battery cages for chickens, that are too small for the chickens to even turn around. Disease will spread throughout an entire population of birds in no time due to the overcrowded conditions. But the Iowa Secretary of Agriculture thinks he has found the true culprits in this story–wild birds.
The theory is that asymptomatic migratory birds transmit bird flu to chickens that are locked up tight from both reporters and wild birds. As imaginative as I usually am, I am at a loss to see how this transmission occurs, short of crows with crowbars. Even sabotage by the Animal Liberation Front sounds more plausible (ALF has the most unintentionally humorous website on this planet).
Anyway, the numbers, via the Iowa Capital Dispatch—
March 17–5.3 million chickens to be culled from one farm
March 31–5 million chickens to be culled from another farm
I foresee more to come. Those pesky wild birds are everywhere.
Southern Fusion Cooking 