The Farm Was Their Dream. It Now Holds Bird Graves

After software entrepreneur Marty Thomas survived Stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma, he and wife MariKate started raising chickens for eggs—part of a move away from chemical- and pesticide-laden food. By 2023, that hobby had grown into a business that demanded more space, and they purchased a 74-acre property about 45 minutes south of Chicago. As Suzy Khimm writes for NBC News, Kakadoodle Farm is a relatively small operation, with 3,000 hens and seven part-time workers, some of whom alerted Marty in early January to a few dozen dead birds found in the coops. He attributed it to the single-digit temps and frozen water lines; a vet agreed. The telltale signs of bird flu—trouble breathing, nasal discharge, or depressed egg production—weren't present. Within two days, so many had died the vet notified the USDA.

Federal veterinarians were soon on the scene in hazmat suits and confirmed it was bird flu. By that point, a full week hadn't even passed—and yet only 500 hens were alive. The USDA returned and killed them all, leaving the body parts for the Thomases to clean up. Along with two farmworkers, they spent a full day burying the birds, their eggs, and feed on the farm's perimeter. The USDA will pay them $5 for each bird that was alive when it arrived, meaning $2,500. That's a sliver of the $100,000 in egg revenue they would have made through June, when the 120-day quarantine expires.

At that point, they can bring chickens back to the farm, so long as they can get them. They hope to rebuild in an even more resilient way, like constructing coops in a way so that potentially-flu-carrying wild birds can't get to the feed. They've raised about $50,000 on GoFundMe from supportive customers, but "we're at the bottom of our barrel," says Marty. "If this doesn't work, we're out our entire life savings." (Read the full story.)