Thread by @SharonAstyk

So about that pig with H5N1 in Oregon. It occurred on a backyard farm - the kind of small, home scale farm that local agriculture has been supporting. The kind of farm that DOES NOT feed chicken shit to pigs, but raises them on pasture, that doesn't confine them and fill them

With antibiotics. The kind of person who raises a pig for themselves and two to sell to cover the cost of butchering. I know this sort of agriculture very well, having practiced it and worked with a lot of people who practice it.

On first glance it seems like that's better than a huge confinement operation, which it is, in a sense. But it is also an indicator - because a. I promise you this isn't the only pig in the US with H5N1 - there are simply too many migratory birds passing around. And this sort

Of small farm really has very little capacity to isolate animals - which means every animal on the farm has been exposed. Generally these are pasture raised animals on grass who are exposed regularly to other animals.

And I promise you that the folks who feed and care for them are not wearing PPE, because the messaging has been that this is a problem of industrial agriculture (which it is - H5N1 emerged in commercial poultry farms) not small sustainable farms.

And in many ways these folks are modelling the kinds of best practices in agriculture that are desperately needed to survive - combined rotational grazing, regenerative agriculture. And for many folks the pigs and cows and sheep in their pastures are a huge economic investment

As well as a huge cultural investment - their kids do 4H and raise livestock. They believe, rightly that they are raising better food, better for them, the planet and everyone, than extractive agriculture. Which is why finding H5N1 is so destructive to small scale ag.

I've been advocating for months with small backyard and sustainable farmers to wear PPE when handling livestock, and disinfect boots and up biosecurity, and the problem is that they don't have the space or the equipment that big farms have. They can't put their sheep under cover

In the barn during migration, because if they don't graze until the grass is gone, there won't be enough hay in winter and they will starve. They can't isolate their animals fully from wild birds, because their barns aren't tight - and that's generally good for animals health.

Their whole grazing model, which supports carbon sequestration in grass as a renewable, sustainable resource, often depends on rotating multiple species (that eat different parts of the pasture) over the same land - so geese follow cows followed by pigs, for example.

We've known for a while that this was going to break down hard in H5N1. And its bad - because distributed, small scale agriculture is THE alternative to confinement industrial agriculture. That is, instead of massive farms with a million egg laying hens, you want a farm with...

50 laying hens that also raises 100 pastured chickens and also sheep, goats and ducks. Except H5N1 makes that wildly unsafe, and impossible. And as this spreads, it is also going to make small scale, sustainable agriculture untenable for a lot of people.

For example, do you know what the alternative to Haber-Bosch 10-10-10 is? Manure. Manure that farmers shovel and manage and turn over and compost and then put on their gardens. This is both traditional and natural, and environmentally preferrable - it enriches and builds soil

Sequesters carbon, avoids industrial emissions, grows plentiful earthworms, and reduces the need for chemicals on your food. Yes, you CAN farm sustainably without animal manures, but it is VERY much harder, and few people who aren't passionate vegans would do so. So for small

farmers, every thing in their system is multipurpose - the chickens give eggs, and manure the ground for vegetable production. In turn, the chickens eat parts of the vegetables and weeds that humans don't eat. Pastured after the sheep, whose wool can sold or makes good mulch...

The chickens eat the worm eggs in the sheep's manure, reducing the need for chemical wormers. The manure from both species feeds the grasses which feed all the animals and...and so this is a huge disaster to the kind of agriculture we need. Only large industrial farms

Have the means to keep all animals completely separate, under cover all year (and sometimes not even those). So functionally, this is going to operate to concentrate agriculture back in industrial systems, and reduce precisely the food systems that we most need.

I expect bans on things like backyard chickens which will probably even make sense, but that means that the only animal foods are precisely the industrial, overcrowded systems that got us to this point. The folks who have been trying to make something better will get destroyed.