Kenny Torrella
Appearances
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Seven and a half million chickens, to be exact. How many people does it have? 270 people. Wow.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
That's right. You must be some kind of math prodigy. I didn't know that, Sean.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Yeah, and I talked to a few folks in Malcolm. One of them stood out. Her name's Carolyn Bittner.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
She moved to Malcolm in 2008 to become a pastor at two churches. She's now retired. And she told me that she really likes small-town rural life and that neighbors are kind to each other. Except this one neighbor, Fremont Farms of Iowa. That's the farm that has 7.5 million egg-laying chickens.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
And as soon as I got to Malcolm, I understood what Carolyn was saying. There's the smell. The stench of manure hung in the air. And the closer you got to Fremont Farms of Iowa, the stronger and stronger it smelled. It was overwhelming.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Damn. Yeah, livestock farms generate nearly a trillion pounds of manure each year. And fumes from that manure creates terrible air pollution, which is linked to nine times more premature deaths than coal-fired power plants.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Well, there's just simply way too much manure for it to all serve as fertilizer. So often farmers will over apply manure, which one, it smells really bad, but it also leaches into water, contaminates drinking water and other issues.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
On top of that, other research has found that living near a factory farm is positively associated with risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, and people who live near them also report higher rates of headaches, depression, anger, and respiratory symptoms, such as asthma.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Well, Carolyn moved to Malcolm for a job. She didn't know that there were also seven and a half million chickens in town. Huh. And I've heard that from other people, that maybe they moved there and they didn't know, or maybe they've lived there for a lot of their lives and the factory farms started coming in in the 90s and the early 2000s and they had no choice but to just deal with it.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
You know, Carolyn has tried to speak up for years and tell the farm about how terrible it smells. She's also spoken up at permit hearings, too.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
It hasn't gone that well. I mean, nothing has changed. If anything, it's gotten worse because the chicken farm now has more animals than it did when she first moved in 2008. And a lot of this just comes down to public policy. And there's also usually pretty lax rules around how they handle that collective trillion pounds of manure.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
The bird flu is really bad. You know, this outbreak, which has been the worst in U.S. history, it began in early 2022, and it's only getting worse.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
And she told me that while Fremont Farms is doing fine, the town is kind of disappearing.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
It seems so. And, you know, I've talked to a bunch of people in similar circumstances. You know, there are thousands and thousands of these huge factory farms across the country.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
One person I talked to, her name is Sonia in Minnesota. She says that fights over big dairy operations and pig factory farms near her have torn her community apart.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Dang. Yeah. And there's Edith in Worth County, Iowa, who told me that a lot of her neighbors won't speak publicly against the factory farms near them.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Yeah, RFK Jr. over the years has really criticized factory farming. In fact, for 20 years, he was the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is this group that does really great work to combat water pollution from these huge farms. But I have my doubts that he's going to really do much to shake up the agricultural status quo here.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Yeah, that's right. He's in charge of HHS, which includes the US Food and Drug Administration, but it's the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency who are really in charge of regulating farms and all of this pollution.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Maybe. I mean, maybe if we get to a point where we're rationing eggs. Even then it's a maybe? I mean, you know, in 2009, over 10,000 Americans died from swine flu, which originated in pigs. And... Today, pig factory farming looks exactly like it did in 2009. So it's hard to say what, if anything, could push the country to really rethink how we raise animals for food.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
And I'm not even sure a major bird flu pandemic could do it.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
That's true. We've become really accustomed to cheap eggs and other animal products. And I think visiting Iowa and hearing stories from people like Carolyn... you come to realize that there is a cost to these cheap eggs and other products. There is a cost to the environment. There's a cost to people who live in rural America near factory farms.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
There's a cost to the animals who are treated really terribly. So yeah, there's always gonna be this tension and trade-off You know, we can opt to eat fewer eggs. We can eat egg alternative products like plant-based eggs. We can also use this as an opportunity to learn more about the factory farming system and maybe rethink how we produce food.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
I hope that's the one kind of silver lining of this terrible bird flu outbreak is that it gives us time to pause and think about how we might raise food in a more humane and sustainable way.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
This strain known as H5N1, it's a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza or bird flu, which has been highly lethal to birds raised for meat and eggs like chickens and turkeys. You know, more than 20 million egg-laying hens were killed either because they became infected with the virus or they were killed to slow the spread of the virus.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
To put that into perspective, that's 6% of America's egg-laying flock.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
That's really the only reason why eggs are so expensive, aside from food inflation. The bird flu has led to egg shortages across the country. Some stores are even placing limits on how many cartons consumers can buy.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
And the average price for a dozen of eggs is double now what it was before this outbreak began three years ago.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
The high price of eggs, it's not the only problem related to bird flu, because it's increasingly affecting other animals. Scientists detected bird flu in cows for the first time ever in the United States almost a year ago. And since then, it's infected almost 1,000 dairy cow herds. But it's also infecting and killing other mammals like sea lions and seals.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
And it even killed a cheetah and a mountain lion at a zoo in Arizona not too long ago.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Yeah, there's not much to love about the bird flu, especially because it's now hitting humans.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Yeah, almost 70 people in the U.S. have tested positive for bird flu since the spring of 2022. We're not doing mass testing, so it could be higher. But most of them have been people who work with poultry or dairy cows, and most cases have been somewhat mild. But there have been a few cases that have stood out and have concerned experts. For example, last month there was a woman in Louisiana who
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
She had exposure to a backyard chicken flock and also some wild birds. She got the bird flu. She was hospitalized. And tragically, she passed away from the virus. And in November, a 13-year-old Canadian girl who had no known exposure to wild or farmed birds or dairy cows, she developed a really severe infection and was hospitalized for weeks.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
She recovered, but it's still a mystery as to how she got it.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
No, we're not. The most important thing to keep in mind here is that almost all of these cases, again, were connected to people who work directly with animals or were exposed to animals who had the virus. At this point, this virus is not going from person to person, which is one of the key ingredients for a virus going from one that just circulates among animals to the next global pandemic.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
H5N1 may never gain the ability to transmit from human to human, but the more that it circulates among people and animals and large farms, the more opportunities that it has to evolve and develop the capacity to become more severe in humans and be able to transmit from person to person.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
It's gotten off to a rocky start. You know, Doge and the Trump administration fired a number of employees who monitor bird flu, realized they made a mistake, and then hired them back. But in bigger news today, Brooke Rollins announced a big plan in the Wall Street Journal to fight bird flu and try to bring down the price of eggs. I'm sorry, Brooke who? Brooke Rollins.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
She's the new secretary of agriculture who has not much of a background in agriculture, more in conservative think tank policymaking. But she does have a new five point plan to tackle this crisis.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Point one is to put $500 million towards increased biosecurity on farms. That includes things like more protective gear for farm workers, requiring them to shower before entering and leaving the facilities. And this could help. It's worth a shot. But this has also been a main tactic of the Biden administration. So we'll see if it helps. Okay, $500 million for some cold showers.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Increased funding for farmers who have to call or kill their flocks. Again, this is more of the same. This is something the Biden administration has done for the last three years.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Yes and no. I mean, one point of the plan is to import more eggs, which is what the Obama administration did during the 2015 bird flu outbreak. And then there are some other ideas, like trying to roll back cage-free egg laws, which we're seeing some states already trying to do, and vaccines, which is actually welcome news.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Well, thankfully, that's the purview of the USDA. So RFK Jr. has no oversight over whether birds get vaccinated. Of course, I am worried that if this does start to transmit to more humans, he will have oversight over the development and distribution and approval of vaccines for people. But at least right now, It's in the USDA's hands as to whether we start vaccinating egg-laying hens.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
It's unclear. There's not a lot of specifics as to when and how this money will be deployed and how fast they'll act on things like expanding vaccine development. So it's more of a wait and see situation like the last few years have been with bird flu.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
What's cooking in the meantime? So some states are taking matters into their own hands.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
The idea here is that by suspending this cage-free requirement, it'll give grocery stores more flexibility in where and how they source their eggs.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
But it probably won't work. You know, there is one ag economist at the University of Arkansas... who said that suspending these cage-free standards could, quote unquote, very slightly address the egg shortage in Nevada, but it could exacerbate it in other states because the national egg supply is just so limited. So if you shift more to Nevada, you got to take it from another state. Huh.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Yeah, ultimately, a big part of the problem here is factory farming itself. A typical egg factory farm operation will house hundreds of thousands or even millions of genetically similar animals in just a few barns. And in these barns, the animals, they're in their own waste. They're breathing in toxic fumes from their manure. They're overcrowded.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
All of this comes together to stress them out and weaken their immune systems. And one historian who studies animal disease, who I talked to, said that these kinds of conditions create the perfect opportunity for a microbe or a virus like H5N1 to effectively spread through a lot of hosts.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
This doesn't mean that reverting back to the farming that we had a century ago where chickens were raised in small flocks on small farms would fix the problem of the bird flu spread. You know, farmers have always been battling disease outbreaks on farms. But the expansion of factory farms really exacerbate the risk.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
And because these farms are so big and have so many chickens, if the virus affects just a few really big farms, it can send a shock to the egg supply overnight, which is what has been going on for the last several months.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Yeah, and it rarely grabs the country's attention. We don't really talk that much about factory farming. You know, we're only doing this show because of this outbreak and how it's affected egg prices and the egg supply. But there are millions of people in rural America who have been dealing with the public health effects of factory farms for decades.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
And many have been sounding the alarm, but no one's really been listening. So I spent the last several months talking to them for a series for Vox. And you're going to hear from them when we're back on Today Explained. Aww.
Today, Explained
Eggs aren't expensive enough
Malcolm? Yep. In the middle? Yeah, it's actually in the middle of Iowa. I went there in September. It's this tiny, sleepy town about 75 miles east of Des Moines. There's just a couple hundred people. There's a post office, a bar and grill, a lot of cornfields. And on the surface, it's a generally quiet and peaceful small town, except it has millions of chickens.