An Australian farmer forced to destroy hundreds of thousands of chickens says it took months to get things up and running again. File photo. Photo: Morgane Perraud / Unsplash
An Australian egg producer whose chickens were infected with bird flu has warned New Zealand farmers that it is likely to take months to get birds back on the farm and laying.
An Otago farm - managed by Mainland Poultry - has tested positive for a highly contagious and severe strain of avian influenza, H7N6.
It is the first time this strain has been found in New Zealand and it has likely spread from birds such as swans or ducks and mutated from there. It is not linked to the recent outbreaks in Australia
The culling of 80,000 chickens at the Otago farm starts tomorrow and the property has a 10 kilometre buffer zone around it, with restrictions preventing the movement of animals, equipment or feed.
Across the Tasman, Australia has destroyed more than two million chickens on more than a dozen farms since its latest outbreak of avian flu in May this year.
Australian egg farmer Bradley McAuliffe had bird flu on two of his properties and was forced to destroy hundreds of thousands of chickens.
He told Checkpoint it had been six months since the first positive tests, and they were only just starting to replace the hens.
"We had a full lockdown with a 10km radius around all our farms and all our sites, and then it went into a permit system, so we had to apply for permits to do anything. We've just come out of restrictions in the last 6-8 weeks and we're just starting to place commercial hens now.
"It was a long process getting the farms clean and making sure our neighbouring properties were all clean, the government ran a quite strict quarantine period to get us back to where we needed to be."
McAuliffe said after the farms were cleared, there was another stand-down period of 35 days prior to placing birds.
"We then place a test bird - or central bird as they call them - and they are in for another 35-odd days, and they tested them weekly for any disease and once they clear positive, they remove the quarantine notice."
He said the next step was replacing the birds, which could be very difficult, especially when other affected farms also needed new stocks.
"I think New Zealand is in the same position as Australia, where it is very hard to source a high volume of day-old chickens into a commercial market. Obviously with so many birds being affected in Australia, everyone was chasing those day old chickens that the parent hens couldn't make quick enough, so it's quite a struggle and it's going to take us another six or eight months to get back to our previous numbers."
McAuliffe said it was distressing to see an outbreak in New Zealand.
"Knowing that is across the ditch and still relevant everywhere is concerning for the whole poultry industry, both in Australia and in New Zealand.
"It is very, very hard for us producers, we take that bird from a day old and we put all that care and love into it to get it to the point of laying eggs, and to see them get ripped apart by such a ferocious disease is heartbreaking for all of us."
He said the influenza spread across the eight sheds on his properties in about three days, "and then in our region it spread from farm to farm, so it was a good four to five weeks before we got on top of it".
McAuliffe sympathised with his Kiwi counterparts, and had one piece of advice for them:
"You've just got to try and think positively and move forward and get through it as quickly as possible."
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