Farmers warned of bird flu

For poultry farmers watching bird flu arrive on New Zealand’s shores, officials have a blunt message: prevention is the priority, not compensation for what happens after.

H5 bird flu was confirmed this week in a single brown skua seabird found at Petone Beach, New Zealand’s first detection of the virus. Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard says the find, while disappointing, wasn’t unexpected, and stressed there has been no detection in poultry so far. “There has been no detection in poultry,” he says, adding that the country’s ongoing surveillance and testing programme is working as intended.

The government’s position is that resources are best spent keeping the virus out of commercial flocks rather than planning for a worst-case outbreak. That’s cold comfort for farmers who know how fast this disease can move once it’s inside a shed. Hoggard says officials will step up work with the egg and poultry sector on biosecurity plans, and that free-range farmers taking precautionary steps, such as temporarily housing their birds, have the government’s support. He’s also been candid that the virus is here to stay. “We will have to learn to live with bird flu,” he says, pointing to overseas experience showing strong on-farm biosecurity measures help contain it.

Farmers have seen this before. In December 2024, an outbreak of the H7N6 strain at an Otago egg farm forced the cull of more than 150,000 chickens across multiple sheds, a process that took four to six weeks from culling through to cleaning and retesting. That outbreak involved a different strain to the one now confirmed in the wild, but it gave the industry a grim rehearsal for what a genuine H5N1 incursion into poultry could look like, at a considerably larger scale, given how much more transmissible this strain is between wild birds.

Under the Biosecurity Act, farmers whose flocks are ordered destroyed by MPI do receive compensation for costs directly tied to that shutdown. But farmers argue that misses the bigger financial picture. A cull is only the start. Sheds sit empty for weeks while they’re cleaned and cleared, production stops, contracts lapse, and staff still need paying. None of that is guaranteed to be covered, and there is no broader insurance safety net in New Zealand for the kind of mass, drawn-out disruption a serious H5N1 outbreak in commercial flocks could cause.

It’s a tension playing out overseas too. In the United Kingdom, farmers who’ve lost tens of thousands of birds to bird flu outbreaks have described existing compensation schemes as inadequate, with some unable to get insurance cover at all. New Zealand’s poultry sector, smaller and more concentrated, would likely feel a serious outbreak just as sharply.

MPI maintains the country is well prepared, pointing to biosecurity plans developed jointly with the Poultry Council over the past year and the absence, so far, of any sign of the virus in a commercial flock. Officials are treating the seabird detection as an isolated event, hoping for the same pattern seen in Australia’s coastal cases, where the virus hasn’t jumped from wild birds into farmed ones.

For now, farmers are left watching the coastline for further detections and hoping containment holds. But the gap between being prepared and being financially protected remains a real one, and right now, it’s farmers being asked to absorb it.