The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry held a hearing Tuesday, July 7, 2015 to discuss the response to the bird flu.
"We lost 56,000 turkeys on our farm personally. Many other producers lost even more birds and that's going to wipe out two-thirds of our annual income this year," said Brad Moline of Moline Family Farms.
Moline was one of two people from Iowa to testify at the hearing that was requested by Iowa Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley.
"It also brings to everyone's attention problems that we've had with the USDA lately on administering the programs and working with the producers," said Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley.
"One of the biggest problems that we faced in the industry was not only the devastating loss, economic loss, the emotional toll and loss that we had just dealing with these birds we worked so hard to raise, but it was complicated by unclear communications by APHIS and the USDA, and also complicated by some of their contractors and also some of the cumbersome paperwork as well," said Moline.
For example, Moline said USDA workers would spend three weeks on a case before they were replaced with a new crew of USDA workers.
"With that, the spread of the virus was happening very, very rapidly and that delayed those communication errors that case managers weren't moving from case to case," he said.
Producers that testified also said they had problems with contractors hired by the government to help depopulate and disinfect.
"Some of them were pushing their own initiative to increase their companies value and revenue off this outbreak and others that were very, very good contractors just simply weren't informed properly of the exact steps that needed to be done," said Moline.
In the future, the producers said they would like to have a bigger role in that process.
"Where possible, I feel it's important for producers to do their own work and to do their own clean up," said Jim Dean, Chairman of United Egg Producers.
Senator Grassley said the USDA is planning on placing federal workers with every group of contractors to help provide consistency in the process.