Effects of bird flu on Cavan farm will continue into new year

DEVASTATION has visited a farm near Butlersbridge after an outbreak of avian influenza was confirmed in a commercial turkey flock on Monday.

Confirmation of the highly-contagious bird flu came on Monday, December 1, just days before the turkeys at the Cavan farm were due to be slaughtered for the Christmas market.

Instead, the farm now faces into the grim task of euthanising the birds which were raised at the poultry farm over the past year.

It’s believed the farmer had in the region of 6,000 turkeys housed near Butlersbridge.

On top of earning no profit for its work, the farm in question will now also miss the January deadline for re-stocking turkeys for next year’s market as his farm will be the subject of bio-security measures within a surveillance zone placed around the farm by the Department of Agriculture on Monday.

Brendan Soden, Poultry Vice-Chair of the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) estimates it could be three to four months before the farmer will be back in business.

“All poultry works in a cycle,” Mr Soden told the Celt. “Farmers would be due to be filling their sheds in January, but this farm will have to wait until after the premises are disinfected and the Department is satisfied before taking in more birds, so he’ll miss a batch.”

Mr Soden says even with this latest cull and 58 confirmed cases of bird flu in the UK, the price of Christmas turkey in Ireland is not expected to rise and supplies will be normal.

“The cases in the UK have been confirmed in layer flocks, chicken and turkey farms, so the damage has been spread across a few sectors not all in turkey farms,” Brendan Soden explained. “We do not import turkeys to Ireland so the cases in the UK will have no effect on us or the price here.”

The latest figures for the UK confirms there has been 46 bird flu outbreaks in England, seven in Wales, four in Northern Ireland and one in Scotland.

As the image from the Department of Agriculture shows, a protection zone has been placed around the infected Cavan farm to help prevent the spread of the disease.

A 3km area around the farm is known as a protection zone, while the surveillance zone spreads 10km out from the infected farms.

The extra measures imposed to prevent spread of the disease apply for at least 21 days in the protection zone. The area then becomes part of the surveillance zone where measures apply for 30 days after preliminary cleaning and disinfection of infected holdings.

Teagasc Poultry Advisor, Rebecca Tierney based in Ballyhaise told the Celt that farmers have already begun to send their turkeys off-farm to be processed for Christmas.

She described as “devastating” the effect of having to cull your turkey flock possibly only days away from moving them to a factory for slaughter.

Rebecca said: “Unfortunately turkeys are more susceptible to the virus, that’s just their breed.”

She described the mental pressure on poultry farmers during this period of high alert as “hugely stressful”.

“On top of the financial burden, the farmer and staff at the Cavan farm have had the worry every day of opening their houses and not knowing what they will find,” Rebecca Tierney said. “Then there is the stress of the day they found a large number of their birds dead. And now, they have the mental stress of trying to work out how long your farm will be out of business.”