Focused on Biosecurity When Countering Avian Influenza
Georgie Cartanza, an extension agent at the University of Delaware and a poultry farmer.
Take a moment and imagine you own 39,000 square foot houses full of organic broilers. At any given time, you’re housing 148,000 chickens. It’s winter, the peak of the migration season, and today you picked up three times the amount of mortality in your houses. Your concerns grow, leading you to contact your company and swab your flock.
The results come back positive for the rapidly spreading respiratory disease avian influenza.
Avian influenza, also known as the bird flu, is a disease caused by infection with specific influenza A viruses, such as the H5N1 strain. This virus naturally exists in flocks of wild birds, but when exposed to poultry and other animals such as cows and cats from wild bird droppings, saliva, and mucus, it can cause symptoms ranging from mild to severe respiratory illness. This virus can spread to humans as well. Those at highest risk include poultry and farm workers, dairy workers, animal health responders, wildlife handlers, food processing workers and backyard poultry owners.
Georgie Cartanza, an extension agent in Delaware and owner of a flock of organic broilers, experienced this.
“I felt like I was doing everything I could to prevent it,” she said.
From the beginning of January 2025 through the first week of February 2025, nine flocks on the Del Marva Peninsula were affected by avian influenza. During that period, Cartanza experienced avian influenza firsthand. During her daily walkthroughs, she collected 30 birds in one section, indicating a worrisome mortality rate of 20%. She mentally prepared herself for the next morning and the possibility of reaching 130 birds for mortality; if that happened, she would need to contact her company and get the go-ahead to swab the birds.
When that unimaginable scenario happened, the swabs were sent to the lab and came back with a presumptive positive result for avian influenza. The next day, they depopulated all the birds. While only one house showed symptoms and/or mortality, they had to depopulate all the birds because they had all now been exposed, regardless of whether they showed any signs.
Depopulation is the route most poultry farmers must take to effectively eliminate the disease in their flocks. “It’s disheartening because they were being grown to be food for people to eat, and now they’ll be nothing,” Cartanza said.
The flocks had to be depopulated on Jan. 26, four days before they were to be processed. “It is a traumatic thing to go through having to have your flock depopulated, the whole process of cleaning and disinfecting, and then restocking, creating a lot of anxiety and uncertainty,” she said.
Before this event, Cartanza believed she was doing everything she could to prevent the disease in her flocks. She was already implementing biosecurity techniques that consisted of dedicated footwear, “the line of separation,” and foot baths. “The last thing I want to do as a poultry farmer is to have invested my time, my care, and my effort into those chickens and then have them not serve their purpose,” she said. After going through this experience, Cartanza said she second-guessed everything she did. This was traumatizing for her and created anxiety and uncertainty.
She is not the only poultry farmer to have undergone these traumatizing events. Poultry and dairy farmers across America experience this. How can we, the future of agriculture, take control of avian influenza? Cartanza has solutions, and she’s actively been implementing them throughout her experience.
Cartanzas Biosecurity Techniques
Cartanza has heightened her level of biosecurity on many levels. She has created a line of separation in the entries of her houses for her dedicated footwear, chlorine foot baths, slip-on house shoes/outside shoes, and additional tools such as a shoe horn, a chair, and cleaning products. These additional tools make it easier to prevent tracking avian influenza from outside shoes or kill the virus if it has already been tracked in.
Cartanza has also installed equipment boxes on the walls of each of her houses that contain the most frequently needed tools or equipment. This equipment box reduces the number of times going in and out of the houses. Along with dedicated footwear, Cartanza has implemented the use of dedicated buckets for mortality disposal. In a case where a farmer might have two buckets of mortality to load into a front-end loader, they set the buckets down on the ground to dump them, then place them back into the house. This now creates a contact of exposure from the outside to the inside of the house, risking avian influenza. Cartanza notes that most farmers don’t think about this, so by implementing dedicated buckets for mortality disposal, she eliminates another risk of avian influenza.
Looking at the exteriors of the houses, wild birds produce droppings that land on the roofs. When there is moisture, such as snow, rain, or humidity, it flushes all those droppings down the roof and some land in front of the doors of the houses where you step into the house from the outside. Cartanza installed gutters under the roofs of her houses to collect all flushed water and droppings, and dispose of them in an area of no contact within the houses.
Another technique outside the houses involves the large borrow pit that has, over time, moved closer to her houses, now 250 feet from their edges. This borrow pit attracts wildlife, particularly flocks of birds, which may carry strains of avian influenza. To control this, Cartanza has installed a solar-powered bird laser that does not hurt the birds but instead “harasses” them. It shines a green laser across the pond when it detects bird motion, and the birds will perceive it as a predator. This scares off the birds and allows them to relocate themselves. Eventually, the birds will learn not to land at this borrow pit, which eliminates another potential risk of avian influenza.
These techniques that Cartanza has newly implemented are shown in a presentation that Cartanza has made for other growers and to share tools to help prevent this event from happening in other industries. By learning from Cartanza, we can implement these biosecurity techniques and become more aware of them as we work in the ag industry in the future. We can prevent the spread of not only avian influenza, but also many other diseases that affect agriculture as a whole.
