A bird flu outbreak is ravaging California’s massive poultry industry, forcing businesses to kill more than one million chickens and causing egg prices to soar.
Mike Weber, who owns Sunrise Farms in Sonoma County, learned last month that his chickens had become infected with the highly-contagious virus. Per government rules, he had to slaughter his entire flock of 550,000 egg-laying hens.
“It’s a trauma. We’re all going through grief as a result of it,” Weber told the Associated Press inside an empty hen house. “Petaluma is known as the Egg Basket of the World. It’s devastating to see that egg basket go up in flames.”
The avian flu is wreaking havoc in California a year after the disease caused egg prices to skyrocket to record highs nationwide due to a shortage following an outbreak in the Midwest.
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Officials have declared a state of emergency in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, after nearly a dozen commercial farms have killed more than a million birds to curb the outbreak in the last two months, devastating farmers, workers and their customers.