The federal government has paid more than $ 230 million from California Dairy Farms to subsidize milk production losses resulting from the bird flu, according to files, an amount that the dairy industry plans to climb later as more claims for damages are processed.
The H5N1 bird flu swore more than 75% of the 1,000 dairy farms in California since August 2024, eco -friendly cattle and leading to a lowered drop in milk production.
Farmers were able to obtain help as part of an American program in the agricultural department known as emergency aid program for livestock, bees and the breeding fish program, or ELAP. The program generally provides assistance to farmers affected by forest fires, drought and floods, but was opened to dairy producers last year while the bird flu was starting to ravage their cows.
The files of the American department of agriculture show that 644 payments were made in 359 California Dairy Farms between November 2024 and June 2025 totaling $ 231 million. The average by payment of the farm was around $ 645,000 and varied from $ 2,058 to the Pereira dairy farm in Visalia, $ 4.4 million at the Dairy Ferme des îles Numbers, in Corcoran.
However, these payments should increase, as more and more complaints are subject and processed. Many of the payments issued in May and June were intended for epidemics in 2024, which suggests that there are others to come.
Lighter payments were obtained thanks to a request from Freedom of Information Act by Farm Forward, a non -profit group that pleads against industrial agriculture. The group claims that subsidies help to support dairy operations on an industrial scale which perpetuate the spread of the bird flu.
“These are industrial operations that feed an epidemic,” said Andrew Decorolis, executive director of Farm Forward. “The bird flu is spreading exactly in the types of environments we pay to preserve.”
Anja Raudabaugh, director general of the largest commercial state of industry in industry, Western United Dairies, said that payments “assured that our dairy communities and their workers remain employed and in good health. Until we obtained the approval of a dairy vaccine in the cow, the alteration of this storm was only possible with the help of milk loss payments. ”
Jonathan Cockroft, managing partner of Channel Islands Dairy Farms, said that payments have contributed around 30% in milk production that his farm suffered, his losses exceed the $ 4 million he received.
He said the virus aborted the cows to interrupt their pregnancies and often prevented them from falling back pregnant. A dairy cow that does not give birth does not produce milk. In other cases, he said that UDDERS were so marked by the disease that cows could not produce milk at levels before infection.
“There is a completely different version, I am not sure that the public understands, which is the enormous impact on reproduction,” he said.
He also noted that many animals died – especially when the epidemic struck last fall, and its novelty combined with the flamboyant heat of the central valley lost 10% to 15% of many Californian herds.
Joey Airoso, a dairy farmer in Tipton, received a subsidy of $ 1.45 million for an epidemic at his farm last October.
He said the epidemic cost him more than $ 2 million “just about milk income and that this does not include additional care costs of more than $ 250,000” necessary to treat cows with medicines, additional staff and veterinary consultations.
And it does not cover the cost of dead cows – which cannot produce milk or be sold for meat. The average dairy cow costs around $ 3,500, said Cockroft.
Jay Van Rein, spokesperson for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said that loss payments are “the most realistic means for producers to recover and avoid huge disruption in the food supply of these products”.
USDA officials did not immediately respond to a request for comments, but a former senior USDA official who left the agency in January said that it was important to provide help from dairy producers once the agency has identified the H5N1 bird flu in a handful of herds from Texas in March 2024. By then, the disease has spread for weeks, if not, rendering the confinement to an impossible state.
“It was a unique event, and we knew that we were going to need to support the producers, and we knew that the more we could get help to help them test, the better we were going to be, the more we would be able to master the infection,” he said.
Farm Forward’s decorolis and others, however, say that these programs perpetuate an agricultural industry designed around containing hundreds, even thousands, of genetically similar animals in confined lots – real playgrounds for a new virus. He also noted that federal rescue programs are not delivered with attached channels, such as incentives for the attenuation of diseases and / or biosecurity.
Angela Rasmussen, virologist in the organization of infectious vaccines and diseases from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, said that the distribution of firm subsidies without trying to understand or study the practices they use to cancel the disease is a mistake.
“What are they doing in farms to prevent reinfection?” She said.
USDA payments were based on cow’s milk production losses over a four -week period. According to Farm Forward data, several farms have received more than one subsidy. While around half received only one payment, 100 farms received two payments, 58 received three, 19 received four and two received six separate payments.
On a Farm in the County of Tulare, four payments from the USDA were subjected once a month between November 2024 and February 2025. To another, payments extended from December 2024 to May 2025.
Rasmussen said that multiple payments were most likely subject to specific circumstances to the dairy involved.
Cockroft of the Channel Islands Dairy said that he and other farmers have seen waves of reinfection and milk tests that remain positive for months. He said he knew a farm that was in forty for nine months.
When the herds are quarantined, animals are not allowed to be transferred to or out of site. In California, a farm is in quarantine for 60 days after the initial detection of the virus. He cannot leave the forties as long as the tests show that his milk is without virus – for three weeks in a row.
Van Rein, spokesperson for the state of agriculture, said that the average time in quarantine was 103 days. He said that of the 1,000 herds in California, 940 are not in his forties; 715 of them had already been infected and released from the forties.
A quarantine farm can always sell milk, even if the milk is positive. Pasteurization has been shown to kill the virus.
Repair payments are another sign of how the American government supports the agricultural industry, which is considered by some to be vital for national interest.
“We have decided politically that it is an industry that we want to support, which was affected by something that was obviously not their fault, and we will help them, because it was a disastrous thing that struck the industry,” Daniel Sumner, agricultural economist in UC Davis, told UC Davis. “If we think of these payments because we use our tax money to help someone who needs them, because their family is poor, that is not the case.”
