Many articles have indicated that, in addition to millions of birds dying from avian flu, infected flocks have widely been killed en masse in an attempt to contain its spread. The livestock industry euphemistically calls this killing of infected animals “depopulation,” and around 150 million birds have been depopulated since the current crisis began.

I have studied industrial livestock production for many years and have seen its myriad problems flash in and out of the media – such as greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, food-borne illnesses, labour exploitation and animal suffering. But it’s rare for the sector to stay in the media for long.

The unusually heavy media coverage of expensive eggs, depopulated chickens and avian flu has highlighted some of the deep problems and risks of modern poultry production. Unfortunately, however, important context and dynamics have been regularly omitted.

Unpacking key omissions helps to better understand both the nature of these chronic risks of infectious disease and the perilous response of the Trump administration.

The spotlight on avian flu

Multiple strains of avian flu chronically circulate within populations of both wild and domesticated birds. Avian flu is prone to frequent mutations, and occasionally some strains become more virulent and spill over across species.

In addition to the problems with avian flu in poultry production, recent media coverage has also highlighted the virus’s broader dangers. Avian flu is currently ravaging many wild animal species around the world, reaching into extremely remote places and even zoos.

In the United States, avian flu recently spilled over into cattle – causing widespread illness after a mutation enabled intra-species transmission.

Avian flu has also caused a small number of severe human illnesses in the United States (primarily workers in poultry operations). Although no human-to-human transmission is evident – a necessary condition for a pandemic – this potential remains a grave threat.

Key issues underplayed

Although the media coverage of egg prices, depopulated chickens and avian flu has cast a valuable spotlight on many aspects of modern poultry production, it has also tended to leave out some important elements.

Mentions in the media of many millions of chickens being killed to contain the spread of avian flu will surely sound jarring to some. But such figures pale in comparison to the 9.5 billion chickens slaughtered annually in the United States and the 76 billion slaughtered annually worldwide.

Poultry birds now comprise 70% of the total biomass of all birds on Earth. Most are produced in densely packed operations where reproduction, life and death have been greatly accelerated.

Modern chickens have been selectively bred to either put on weight (broilers) or produce eggs (layers) very quickly. Broilers reach slaughter weight in a mere six weeks. Layer hens produce nearly an egg a day for about a year or two before being slaughtered. These short life-cycles are rarely mentioned in coverage of depopulations.

The growing risk of avian flu mutations relate to both enormity of poultry bird populations – by far the biggest habitat for the virus – and the unhealthy conditions of life in large enclosures. According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, more than 97% of layers live in operations with at least 10,000 birds. More than 99% of broilers are grown in operations with annual sales of at least 100,000 birds.

This scale also relates to a question that has, with a few notable exceptions, received scant coverage: since infected populations cannot simply be shipped to the slaughterhouse, how are the birds actually killed?

A leading approach to depopulation is ventilation shutdown. This involves turning off the powerful fans needed to make the ambient conditions in large enclosures bearable and results in agonizing deaths.

Researchers are investigating ways to augment ventilation shutdown as part of a broader research agenda seeking to develop systematic ways to depopulate large operations. This agenda clearly illustrates that the livestock industry is acutely aware of the great risks of infectious-disease evolution within these spaces.

Undermining infectious-disease surveillance

In the 2024 election campaign, Republicans regularly pointed to high egg prices in efforts to highlight rising inflation. In early 2025, the continuing rise of egg prices has cast a glare on U.S. President Donald Trump’s failed promise to immediately solve inflation.

In response to scrutiny, the Trump administration initially tried to blame Biden for the depopulation of chickens. While such deflection might work for a time, Trump and his advisers realize they need a strategy to increase egg supplies.

This emerging strategy must be viewed in relation to Trump’s sweeping assault on state institutions and regulations – which includes undermining crucial capacity for infectious-disease surveillance. Trump made immediate cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and forced it to disengage with the World Health Organization. He has also promised big cuts to the National Institutes of Health.

In this context, it’s unsurprising that Trump is laying out a simple plan to increase the egg supply: rebuilding layer populations, reducing depopulations and trusting the livestock and pharmaceutical industries to find ways of containing avian flu – likely through vaccines and strengthened biosecurity.

It’s profoundly irrational to be weakening infectious-disease surveillance in the midst of the current avian flu crisis (and amid mounting infectious-disease risks more generally). It’s also hard to fathom how further empowering the leading actors in poultry production can be expected to resolve the risks of avian flu that are so bound up in the nature of modern production.

Pursuing this course might temporarily bring egg prices down, but it also inevitably means passing untold risks into the future.

Tony Weis is professor of geography and environment at Western University.

This story was first published by The Conversation. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

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“The whole world has been turned upside down, and there are a lot of new issues in terms of food that have come to the fore,” says Lori Stahlbrand, co-developer of a new four-year Honours Bachelor of Food Studies at George Brown College in Toronto.

“Food is a major contributor to climate change and greenhouse gases,” she says. “It is a major employer and now is going through a massive upheaval.” In March, a United Nations study linked one-third of global greenhouse emissions caused by human activity to the production, processing and packaging of food.

At George Brown, with a long-established chef school, the food-studies degree aims to put eating in context, with sustainability, equity, health and nutrition, and food policy as foundational themes of the farm-to-table enterprise.

“It is really about training the leaders within the food sector for tomorrow,” says Stahlbrand. A recognized food-policy analyst and non-profit leader, she previously led the

implementation of a local, sustainable food-purchasing program at the University of Toronto.
In 2019, George Brown hired her and Caitlin Scott, who holds a PhD in social and ecological sustainability from the University of Waterloo, as professors to design the new program from scratch.

Over four years of study, students will be expected to develop their culinary skills while they learn about the dynamics of local, national and international food systems; analyze social, political and environmental aspects of food theory and practice; incorporate health, equity and sustainability perspectives in their activities; and communicate effectively about food issues with a variety of stakeholders.

Believed to be the first of its kind in Canada, the program makes a “bold statement,” says Sylvain Charlebois, director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab.

“They are not just looking at graduating new students so they can get jobs,” says Charlebois, a professor and researcher in food distribution and policy. “They are looking at changing the world here … I am very impressed with the program’s DNA.”

Toronto chef and restaurant owner Brad Long, known for his local and sustainable food practices, served on a program advisory council for the degree.

“Immediately, you realize that this is something that should have existed long ago,” he says, noting the program’s holistic design. “It is about having people understand at greater depth what they are doing. That is always going to make any process better in a lot of ways.”

This September, George Brown expects to enrol 24 students, growing to a class of 60 in several years. Stahlbrand says the program, directed at high school graduates and older learners with appropriate academic records, will likely eventually include an option for graduates of the college’s two-year culinary program to count those credentials toward completion of the four-year degree.

One member of the initial cohort is Meggie Adamu, 27, who is deeply rooted in her family’s Ethiopian food culture. After graduating in political science and sociology from McMaster University five years ago, she worked in various food-industry-related jobs, but not as a cook.Prior to the pandemic, she organized special events to show off the cuisine of low-traffic restaurants in the Hamilton area. But with COVID-19 shutting down restaurants, she decided to explore ways to develop food products from popular Ethiopian ingredients, such as souff (known as safflower in Canada). While safflower oil is familiar to Canadians, Adamu says Ethiopians “milk” the seed to produce alternatives to dairy products, such as yogurt, during religious fasts.

The new degree “is the perfect program for me,” says Adamu, given her entrepreneurial and culinary ambitions to integrate Western and Ethiopian cooking practices in the kitchen. After graduation, she hopes to work with her aunt, who opened an Ethiopian food truck business in Toronto several years ago.

In preparing for a post-pandemic world, Stahlbrand is eager to rethink the role of food in society.

“Food is no longer just about what we are going to have for dinner, flavour and the best ingredients,” she says. “They are tied into a global food system.”

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Regenerative agriculture springs from a global Indigenous view of agriculture. It’s not tied to a European/Western way of framing the issues, as was inevitably the case with organic agriculture. It does not settle for sustainability; rather it aims for something truly regenerative. “Dream no small dreams,” as Tommy Douglas used to say.

Regenerative agriculture is rooted in leaving the soil as nature intended, and basing food production on crops that can be grown without the violence of plowing, which upturns the earth and undermines the earth’s metabolism and gut.

The beauty of regenerative agriculture is that it can work on many scales. Its methods are appropriate to various scales of food-growing, from backyard gardens (North America has more land in lawns than in food production), green roofs and community gardens to small, medium and large farms – permitting universal access to food and land.

I’m delighted that regenerative agriculture is being supported by both small and big food enterprises, which is important in the successful delivery of viable efforts to improve the environment. It avoids the problem of turning the perfect into the enemy of the very good, which has been the bane of social-change movements for a century. I love the open-endedness of regenerative agriculture, its lack of clear, binding and dogmatic definitions, its openness to what good people can do as they try to accomplish what’s possible. That, of course, creates a vulnerability to greenwashing. But the answer to greenwashing is not dogmatism, but real action on the ground.

Regenerative agriculture also avoids sterile debates around anti-meat climate change policies. Pasture-raised animals can become the basis for both humane agriculture and a protected climate.

Carbon is not the problem; the problem is that the carbon is in the air, not the soil. We seem to have to turn everything into enemies, but nature is made for us to partner with if we just open our eyes.

On the future of food

I would like to see a food future that identifies three streams of food thinking, each a power in its own right:

1. Bringing food from farm to table in as humane and generous a way as possible.

2. Ensuring that the food that makes it to our table matches our love for delicious food as well as our need for nutritious food, and that this can be accessible to all.

3. And finally, what I hope will be my legacy is what I call “people-centred food policy” – thinking about food in terms of how it promotes personal empowerment, how it overcomes loneliness, how it brings people together and how it makes a celebration of joy a part of everyday life. People-centred food policy needs to become as powerful as farm-to-table and nutrition models of food.

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But after a decade of wild swings in weather patterns, crop prices and farm debt levels, some Canadian farmers are starting to look at ways they can do something about the climate while improving their farm business.

On February 11, Agriculture Day, a group of these farmers, backed by the National Farmers Union, Canadian Organic Growers and several food-related environmental groups, announced the formation of Farmers for Climate Solutions.

They own up to the fact that agriculture is a significant cause of global warming. They also insist farming can help solve the problem. “Canada can’t get to net-zero without farmers pitching in,” says Gillian Flies. She co-owns The New Farm in Creemore, Ontario, and represents Canadian Organic Growers on the new climate action group.

“Canada can’t grow enough trees to store enough carbon to get to net-zero by 2050,” Flies says. “We also need farmers who can store carbon in the soil, where it will create healthier crops and more resilience in case of drought or storms.”

As well as rebuilding their soil, some members of the new coalition say they can cut their on-farm fossil fuel use in half by 2050. The combination of energy conservation and carbon storage could make farmers a major contingent in the green business community of 2050.

Though the new coalition is anything but cash-rich, Flies is looking for help from the federal government’s Canadian Agricultural Partnership, which has a $3 billion budget to partner with farmers and communities to boost agricultural competitiveness, prosperity and sustainability.

Supporting Flies’s optimism is none other than the UN’s normally gloomy Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which published a report called Climate Change and Land in August.

Agriculture on its own is commonly held responsible for 13% of all emissions – mostly from methane gas and nitrous oxides from overuse of nitrogen fertilizers and animal manure stored in lagoons by factory farms. On a more upbeat note, the IPCC identifies sustainable land management as a positive force that can lock carbon in plants and soil, not the atmosphere. Farmers can plant more tree crops, reduce their tillage, keep their lands covered instead of bare during the winter, and feed livestock on wild and perennial deeply rooted grasses, the IPCC notes.

If such practices were applied to degraded or eroded soil – about half the food-producing lands on the planet – the IPCC suggests that farmers might store or sequester almost as much carbon in the soil as they release to the atmosphere.

“Canada can’t get to net-zero without farmers pitching in.” 

– Gillian Flies, Farmers for Climate Solutions

The optimism that buoys Flies and Farmers for Climate Solutions also draws on a November 2019 report for the National Farmers Union (NFU) by energy and agriculture expert Darrin Qualman, author of Civilization Critical: Energy, Food, Nature, and the Future.

A Saskatchewan farmboy who’s a former researcher for the NFU, Qualman was asked to present a think piece to the NFU conference in November. The report, Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis, has not been officially adopted by the NFU, traditionally Canada’s scrappiest voice for farmers, but is presented by NFU leaders as “the beginning of a conversation on the links between the farm crisis and the climate crisis,” Qualman says.

He says we shouldn’t blame agriculture for increased emissions; instead, blame what he calls “petro-industrial inputs.”

In the NFU report, Qualman links both crises to the push for farm exports that the federal government has put on steroids since 1990. To gird themselves for mass exports, Canadian farmers upped their intake of fertilizers and loaded up on debt to buy heavy machinery. As inputs went up, emissions went up in lockstep, Qualman argues.

Use of nitrogen fertilizers (made primarily from natural gas) doubled, leading to a major rise in nitrous oxides, some 300 times more powerful in their global warming impact than carbon dioxide. Overall global warming emissions from agriculture went up 20% in that time period. All the while, farm debt load grew, doubling since the turn of the century and reaching $106 billion in 2018.

On the positive side, Qualman also believes that farmers can protect both the climate and their family farms by moving away from high-petrol inputs. By cutting back on inputs, they will dramatically cut down their costs and keep more of the money that people spend on food. At present, farmers keep only five cents of every dollar of food sales. They need to adopt a more-from-less approach – higher margins on less volume.

The NFU report contains a catalogue of “on-farm measures and government policies that can, as a package, reduce GHG emissions from Canadian farms by approximately 30% by 2030 and perhaps by 50% by 2050.” It lays out three ways farmers can cut costs and global warming emissions:

First, farmers can reduce their emissions from energy use through changes such as switching to electric cars and tractors and increasing their use of solar and wind power.

Second, farmers can reduce their use of nitrogen fertilizers by using “green manure” (cover crops rich in nitrogen), rotating perennial crops and implementing other sustainable techniques.

Third, farmers and ranchers can mitigate the global warming impacts of livestock through various methods. They can reduce the absolute number of cattle and dairy cows they raise, although Qualman cautions that there are important carbon-storing benefits to raising cows and steers mainly on pasture and leaving their manure on the land, where it adds soil fertility – particularly in areas that are too rocky to support crops. The global warming impact of ruminant emissions could be offset or countered by solar panels and trees dispersed through the fields and by carbon stored in the soil covered by pasture. Such strategies are commonly called low-input sustainable agriculture.

All three energy conservation strategies are a bold departure for protest groups, which normally protest governments’ failures to take action. Here they are calling for farmers and ranchers to act, and for governments to support and enable that grassroots action.

This is where the story circles back to organic farmer Gillian Flies’s hopes for the Canadian Agricultural Partnership (CAP).

Flies hopes CAP will give a hearing to farmers keen on making their farms more sustainable. She worries that too many of the grants require the farmers to pay 50%, which is often not an option, given that the great majority of farmers are losing money.

Flies also worries that the CAP program is too tied to boosting exports and isn’t looking for the multiple benefits that climate-friendly agriculture can bring. When farmers plant more trees on their land, those trees provide shade for animals, raise nutrients from deep in the ground, protect soil from erosion during heavy rain and strong wind, and also store carbon in their trunks and branches.

All such benefits are public goods that can create as much value for Canadians as the sale of hogs to China. “The government is missing an opportunity to work with us to solve multiple problems,” says Flies.

Whatever the government decides in the near future, University of Toronto geographer Bryan Dale thinks the NFU report and the Farmers for Climate Solutions initiative are “a positive and deliberate provocation to get a new conversation going.”

Dale, who completed his PhD on farming and global warming in Canada in 2019, likes the way both groups talk about all the benefits that good farming can produce, from more nutritious food to safer habitats for pollinators, to cleaner water, to reduction of greenhouse gases. In these “post-political times,” Dale worries, too many discussions zero in on one bad factor, such as carbon, that can lead to a quick technical fix. “We need to open up a broader discussion,” he says, “maybe even talk about a Green New Deal for food and agriculture,” as is being discussed south of the border.

Qualman hopes his report “will start a heck of a conversation. Farmers are paying attention because they know that either they come up with good solutions or someone else will impose solutions on them. If farmers don’t lead, bureaucrats will.”

Wayne Roberts is a Canadian food policy analyst and writer and former manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council.

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