Poultry specialist explains spectacle of chicken composting amid bird flu outbreak [Lancaster Watchdog] | Local News

Lancaster County, the leading poultry producer in Pennsylvania, sits at the epicenter of the latest national outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t list the farms where outbreaks occur, and the state Ag Department identifies only broad geographic zones around infected farms, which this year have included parts of Mount Joy, Penn and Rapho townships.

Still, some telltale indicators of infection are hard to ignore, like the big sign at the entrance of Esbenshade Farms in southern Rapho Township that tells visitors, for purposes of “farm biosecurity,” to stay out.

Kreider Farms, the county’s flagship egg producer, bought Esbenshade Farms’ egg operation in 2023, including a layer flock of 2 million hens. A flock that size, producing at peak efficiency, can lay more than 1.5 million eggs a day.

A spokesman for Kreider Farms confirmed a bird flu infection at the site and said the farm is working closely with state and federal regulators to properly dispose of bird carcasses. When the disease is detected in a flock, the standard response is culling every bird and disinfecting the poultry houses.

There are four ways to properly dispose of animals in Pennsylvania, according to the state’s Domestic Animal Law — burial, incineration, rendering or composting — and at Esbenshade Farms, it’s hard to miss which method they’re using.

Anyone driving by the farm on Eby Chiques Road can see the dozens of rows of mounded compost, some hundreds of feet long, spread across 15 to 20 acres of the property.

An LNP | LancasterOnline reader recently drove past the farm and saw people in white, full-body suits walking up and down the rows of compost and wrote to the Watchdog wondering what they were doing. The reader also wondered whether runoff from the composting site presented any danger to Chiques Creek just south of the property.

To answer those questions, the Watchdog tracked down one of the folks who regularly steps into those white suits, Gregory Martin, a poultry specialist with Penn State Extension and a member of the team of specialists spearheading disease control in Lancaster County.

“It is a horrible loss for our industry,” Martin said, “but our industry is resilient, the farmers are working in good faith, and we are trying to stamp this out as quickly as we can with the help of the Department of Agriculture.”

Martin said he has personally overseen the composting of more than 3 million birds and took some time to explain the process. The following interview with Martin has been edited for clarity.

Why compost the birds?

Composting allows us to monitor the process because it’s above ground. It cooks the birds to the point where there’s no meat left on the birds. The temperatures, which can get up to 160 degrees, are enough to cook any virus that might be remaining on the birds that got sick. … If you open a fresh bag of mulch, you may see steam come out of it. We see the same things out on the piles. They will steam in the morning, and what that shows is there is a natural heat being built up by the thermophilic bacteria, the bacteria that loves high temperatures … and we use that to our advantage. Rather than moving diseased birds around the countryside, we tend to compost them on site so that we stamp out the disease where we find it. So the few that we lose will save the many that remain here in the county.

How long does that process take?

About a month … to go from a bird to nothing. All the meat is gone, all the fat is gone, all the skin is gone. We might see a few bones here and there, but that’s it.

What happens to the compost?

The USDA checks it out and clears it for us, and then the farmer can use it as a soil amendment. We spread it just as we do manure or any other organic material. … Many people compost at home. They compost leaves, they compost table scraps and other things in backyard compost, and what it does is it just renders it into a humus that can be spread as a soil amendment.

What about runoff? Does the compost pose a threat to local waterways?

The runoff would be filtered by the mulch itself. It acts as a biofilter (a porous medium that breaks down contaminants). … We also have certain setbacks away from rivers and streams. We build setbacks into the piles, so they are not going to harm any of the waters of the commonwealth. So if there is a well there, a stream, a river, we set back away from it beyond what is asked for from the Department of Environmental Protection. And we do monitor any type of runoff that we see. Even when it rains, we don’t see that much in terms of ponding or runoff at all. The compost tends to absorb that moisture and keep it within the pile. It’s like a sponge.

What do the folks in the white, full-body suits do?

They are monitoring temperatures on the compost, so that we know we’ve reached the requirements of the composting phase. … We check temperatures every day to make sure the compost is composting as we want it to. Every now and then we may need to add more mulch to the pile to increase coverage.

The suits are part of what we call biosecurity. If you were in a hospital operating room, you would see the very same things worn by the doctors. Basically, what we’re doing is we’re keeping whatever diseases that might be there or any dirt or any dust particles that might be there … it stays on the farm and we don’t spread it around. Not that the disease is there; we just do it as a preventative.

So the people in the white suits are not in harm’s way?

They’re not in harm’s way. People think it’s a hazmat event, and it’s not. … This is more of a threat to animals than it is to people. Very few people have gotten sick over this. … And this is not a food-borne illness. Any of the eggs and meat you see in the store are perfectly fine to eat.

(Bird flu is spread by wild birds and has been detected in poultry, cattle, humans and cats, which like to hang out on farms. Several dozen human cases have been detected nationwide since 2024, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and most of those cases were among farmworkers exposed to infected poultry or dairy cows. The CDC has confirmed no cases of person-to-person transmission of bird flu.)

Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.

Error! There was an error processing your request.