How bird flu has devastated one American farm
Stray feathers litter the ground inside the empty coop at Kakadoodle Farm. A few beige eggshells crunch underfoot. No hens were left alive.
This is what bird flu looks like.
The coop is empty and cavernous, the air still heavy with the stench of chicken waste.
On the floor, wood chip bedding has soaked up most of the blood from the birds slaughtered to prevent further spread of infection.
Stray feathers litter the ground. A few remnants of beige eggshells crunch underfoot.
There used to be 3,000 hens on Kakadoodle Farm — scratching, pecking, following the farmworkers around. Creating a din so loud you could barely hear someone yell from the other end of the coop.
Now there are none.
It’s a scene that keeps repeating itself, again and again, on poultry farms large and small across America.
The biggest avian influenza outbreak in U.S. history is taking a brutal toll. Birds are dying off — or they’re slaughtered — by the thousands. Farms are suffering massive financial losses, compounded in some cases by federal funding cuts and freezes. The outbreak has driven retail egg prices to a record high last month of $5.90 a dozen on average, nearly double what they were a year earlier. They have reached $12 a dozen in some places.
No one else, human or animal, has come down with bird flu at Kakadoodle since the virus hit.
But a large part of the farm — “the dirty zone” — is now under quarantine. And it will be for months to come.
At first, they thought it was the cold.
It was early January, and temperatures in southern Illinois were plunging into the single digits; the water lines running to the farm’s three coops kept freezing over.
So when the workers told Kakadoodle Farm owner Marty Thomas about the birds, he first thought they must have frozen to death. About 30 were scattered across the floors of two coops.
At the time, Marty didn’t think too much of it. “Let’s make sure we keep an eye on the water — make sure it’s flowing,” he told them.
The next day, as he headed down to the coops, he saw one of his farmworkers walking out with her arms full of dead chickens.
“Oh, my God,” he said, rushing toward her.
A hundred more had died overnight.
They began piling the bodies outside in the snow. Most lay dead on the coop floor. A few had died inside the red nesting boxes with their heads sticking out. Some were still alive, but just barely — they were listless, stirring only when they were picked up, too weak to stand or walk.
Marty was mystified about what was ailing his birds. But he knew what he had to do with the ones that weren’t going to make it.
He picked up an ax from the shed and asked his wife to come out back to help.
Kakadoodle Farm sits on the edge of a busy road about 45 minutes from the southern end of Chicago. It has been a working farm for nearly 200 years, but Marty and MariKate took it over just recently, in late 2023, to grow the burgeoning egg business they’d been running out of their small, 5-acre homestead.
They inherited two existing coops and built a third, adding chickens and giving their birds access to grassy pasture and a non-genetically modified feed. Kakadoodle eggs are a specialty product; most commercial eggs come from large-scale producers, and most of the national flock isn’t pasture-raised. Their goal: To produce healthier chickens and more nutritious, better-tasting eggs that crack open to reveal happy, bright orange yolks. They also launched an online farmers market to deliver local produce, meat and grocery items directly to customers.
It was a small, fledging business, with just seven part-time employees. But the couple were already drawing up plans to create new grazing areas for sheep and livestock in the fallow fields that stretched toward the train tracks.
They didn’t have any experience with farming; he was a software entrepreneur, and she was an ER nurse. It was a wild dream they’d chased after Marty survived Stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
He’d gone through months of chemotherapy, lost his hair, prayed — and was declared cancer-free by the end of 2018.
But Marty couldn’t stop wondering how he’d gotten sick in the first place and kept coming back to the chemicals in the food he ate, the pesticides sprayed over the land. He stared at the raw eggs that he cracked into a bowl for the kids every morning and realized he’d never given a thought to where they’d come from or why they were so cheap.
They started with eight birds.
Pretty soon the chickens started laying more eggs than their four kids could eat. Marty created a website where you could arrange for home delivery, inviting local friends and relatives to place orders.
They bought more chickens. Which meant more eggs. Which started overflowing in the kitchen sink, where they were washing all of them by hand.
Then, driving toward the interstate, they saw it: a sprawling 74-acre property for sale, just a short distance from their home.
Their dream could grow far bigger.
In January 2022, the first wild birds in the United States tested positive for a highly contagious and deadly strain of bird flu. The next month, it had spread to a turkey farm in Indiana. By April, the country’s first human case was found in Colorado.
The outbreak picked up steam last year, jumping to dairy cattle for the first time in history while continuing to rip through poultry farms across the United States — both small, pasture-raised producers like Kakadoodle and massive operations that pack thousands of chickens together indoors.
Bird flu has now affected 167 million birds across the United States, and it’s also spreading to cats, rats, tigers and seals, among other species. The risk to humans remains low, with one death and 70 known cases, most involving people who had been in close contact with infected animals.
But the rampant spread of the virus increases the likelihood that it could mutate into a version that’s far more dangerous to humans and can be passed easily between them, creating another pandemic. And for domestic birds like chickens — which contract the virus through direct contact with infected birds or contaminated surfaces — the virus has a mortality rate of nearly 100%.
The USDA, along with some animal health officials, has advised limiting outdoor access for poultry given the risk from wild birds — but the virus is also striking farms where birds are only kept indoors. While some birds may display symptoms, the USDA says, others can die suddenly without any warning.
Bird flu is “is a devastating disease for large and small flock owners alike,” the USDA said in a statement, pointing to the agency’s recent efforts to help poultry farms affected by the outbreak “USDA is committed to exploring additional ways to aid flock owners and minimize their financial burdens.
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Just days before their chickens started to die, another farmer had warned the Thomases that bird flu was spreading in southern Illinois. But he said some farmers never reported it, because they didn’t want the USDA to come in, shut down and quarantine their operations.
MariKate had worried about the wild birds that flitted around the pastures where the chickens roamed and pecked at their feed, knowing they could transmit the virus. But it was impossible to completely isolate their flock. “There are things you can’t control,” Marty told her.
As he picked up one dead chicken after another, Marty didn’t immediately think it was bird flu, he said. So many were dying, but without the obvious symptoms of the virus — difficulty breathing, nasal discharge or low egg production.
And at first, the veterinarian agreed: It was probably the freezing weather that had done in the birds. The vet pointed out that the newest, most modern coop hadn’t been hit and advised Marty and MariKate to keep the birds comfortable. They all hustled to bring in more bedding and heaters. Driving home, Marty felt assured that his flock was in good shape.
“These birds look great,” he remembers thinking. “They’re scratching; they’re laying eggs. They seem perfectly healthy.”
Within two days, there were dead chickens inside every coop.
The vet realized it might be worse than they all thought, the Thomases said — and let them know he was notifying the state Agriculture Department. Shortly after, MariKate got a call directly from the USDA, which wanted to visit the farm immediately — and asked her to collect the bodies of three dead birds for testing. By the time the federal veterinarians showed up in their hazmat suits, less than a week after the first chickens had fallen, nearly 2,500 birds were dead.
There were splatters of blood in the snow where Marty and MariKate had killed the ailing birds, which flop around when their heads are severed, and an ashy pit where they’d burned some of the carcasses.
Only 500 were still alive.
MariKate steadied one in her arms as the vet approached, it cawed as the vet stuck a long swab down its throat.
Just a few hours later, she got the call: Their chickens had come back positive for bird flu. The USDA was coming back the next morning to slaughter the rest inside the coop — a standard procedure known as “depopulation.”
The Thomases didn’t have to be there if they didn’t want to.
They didn’t want to be there.
After it was all over, farmworker Joline Lyons was the first to open the coop door.
She walked inside, then immediately walked back out, her face pale.
“There’s a lot of blood and a lot of heads over here,” Lyons recalled telling the Thomases.
The USDA had gassed the 500 remaining chickens with carbon dioxide to stun them, then decapitated them. The body parts were scattered throughout the coop, with blood streaked on nesting boxes and roosting bars.
The farmers were left to clean up the mess.
Marty worried whether he’d have a business left to run — and what on Earth their customers would think. Anyone driving by the farm that day would have been able to spot the white hazmat suits and wonder what the hell was going on.
He and his wife agreed: They had to tell their customers. They had to tell everyone. The whole point of their farm was for people to understand where their food was coming from, what was going into it and how it came to be. This was part of that, too.
“Important Message from Kakadoodle,” they wrote. “This week our chickens started dying without any symptoms …” After some hesitation, they also set up a GoFundMe campaign.
The USDA compensates farmers only for the birds that are alive when it gets there and dead when it leaves — not the ones that have already died from bird flu. The Thomases will get $5 a bird from the USDA, they said, which means $2,500 in total. It doesn’t come close to the $100,000 in egg revenue Kakadoodle will lose by the time the mandatory 120-day quarantine is over in June, when they can have chickens on the farm again.
If they can get chickens on the farm again. The loss of more than 1,600 flocks in every state since 2022 has meant a nationwide run on egg-laying chickens.
The farm is also being squeezed by the broader cuts to federal funds: In October, it was greenlit for a $220,000 grant to transform an old barn into a distribution center for their online marketplace, pending USDA approval. The Thomases spent $80,000 on renovations — pouring a concrete floor, putting in insulation — fully expecting to be reimbursed. But the Trump administration has since cut funding for the program.
MariKate keeps thinking about what their pastor said in church, just a week before their birds started dying.
“There’s two kinds of people in life,” she said. “You can either say ‘why me?’ or ‘what’s next?’”
They dug the graves on the edge of the farm, in a field dotted with dried corncobs.
The four of them went out together: Marty, MariKate and two farmworkers. It took them all day to dig the holes, then cart over all the chicken carcasses in a skid steer.
They buried all the bodies, along with thousands of dollars of feed and eggs, as the USDA had instructed them to do.
MariKate wept inside her N-95 mask.
That day, a car had pulled up to the farm, and one of their regular customers got out, hoping to pick up fresh eggs. Still dressed in her hazmat suit, MariKate explained what had happened. He immediately handed her all the cash in his wallet.
Then the messages started pouring in.
“Praying for you guys in this time of struggle.”
“All your dental friends are rooting for this to be all fixed up as quickly as possible!!”
Donations to their GoFundMe campaign have swelled since word got out — as have orders for their online farmers market, the main source of their remaining revenue. They’ve been moved by the outpouring of support from their customers and community. But Kakadoodle Farm is still in financial peril. They’re considering applying for a private loan to keep the farm afloat.
“We’re at the bottom of our barrel,” Marty said. “If this doesn’t work, we’re out our entire life savings.”
What they keep telling themselves: They’ve weathered other disasters on the farm — and somehow found a way to survive.
There was the barn that burned down because of a faulty extension cord. The bacterial infection that tore through their flock, cratering egg production. There were endless mishaps and mistakes they made as they expanded their operation, battling mites and frozen water lines and the aftermath of tornados, scouring YouTube and turning to more seasoned farmers for answers.
“It’s happened again and again and again,” Marty said. “This is crazy, what we’re doing. Like — we don’t know this world at all.”
And the next time, he and MariKate will be better prepared. They want to renovate their coops to keep wild birds out of the feed, while still giving the chickens space to roam. They’ll make sure to keep their farm shoes on the farm, to help reduce the spread of disease.
Because bird flu isn’t leaving America any time soon. Just three weeks ago, Marty and MariKate got a call from another local farmer who suspected he had a bird flu outbreak. He agonized over whether to call the USDA. His father begged him not to, warning that the agency would come and slaughter all of their birds.
“All I can tell you is what we did,” MariKate told him before she hung up.
The farmer made the call.
