Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gramie 500 days ago
To cite a close-to-home example, chicken farms in Canada typically have about 25,000 chickens, whereas ones in the U.S. often have millions. So an infection that requires the entire flock to be slaughtered has a much bigger effect on the supply of eggs south of the border.
1 comments
mrweasel 500 days ago
That makes a lot of sense, because I lookup up how we handle it in Denmark and it's the same, destroy the entire flock if a farm is infected. It's just it's not millions, it's 6000, 40.000, 20.000 chickens per farm, not a million.

Weird that the size of the farms aren't being regulated if you know from other countries that it makes containment easier.

link
azinman2 500 days ago
But the population is about 57x smaller. So 17.5k chickens would be equivalent in terms of impact.
link
Symbiote 500 days ago
Are eggs regularly transported long distances in the USA? I don't think I've seen eggs from outside Denmark for sale in Denmark, though many other things (cheese, meat) are.

If people in Minnesota (same population) aren't regularly buying eggs from out of state, then the comparison with Denmark holds.

link
mrweasel 500 days ago
> I don't think I've seen eggs from outside Denmark for sale in Denmark,

That is because of the strict rules regarding salmonella. Danish chicken farmers will test for salmonella and kill any population of chicken found to have salmonella, leaving our eggs "guaranteed" free of salmonella. Any other country that wish to sell eggs in Denmark will need to be able to make the same guarantee. This is one of the few exceptions for the free movements of goods within the EU.

link
Symbiote 500 days ago
Sweden, Finland and Norway seem to have the same checks as Denmark [1] but we don't see their eggs for sale here either.

But from a quick search, it looks like I've happened only to live in egg-exporting countries within the EU, which explains why I've never seen it. Even so, whole eggs don't seem to be transported great distances — most imports and exports are liquid or dried egg.

[1] https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/biological-safety/food...

link
mrweasel 500 days ago
Unless you segment up your chickens and spread them out, so one farmer may have a million chickens, but spread out on 40 locations. The problem is that you need to kill ALL of your chickens in just a few is sick and having a million chickens in a single location will pretty ensure that you have to constantly kill of all your chickens and replace them.

But there's probably more going on that just sick chickens being killed of.

link