When I arrived at the farm, along with my editor and photographer, Richard greeted us near the driveway with a nod and a half-smile. Standing right behind the Sabols’ worn, charming home, it was easy to think the farm is a small operation. It was difficult to fathom that the land, in reality, takes up nearly 91 football fields—and that the Sabols have worked nearly every inch of it over three generations. Richard’s grandparents bought the land in 1940, when it was a dairy farm, but after enduring the whiplash of fluctuating milk prices, his father and grandfather pivoted to sheep and field crops. By the time Richard was coming of age, he was the only sibling of six who stuck around. “I was sort of aimless for a while,” he explained, shrugging as he dusted ash off his hoodie. In 1986, he started selling produce at the farmer’s market. Beef came next, and sheep again. The poultry and eggs remained constant.

Then, in 1999, his wife Sue entered the picture—introduced by a mutual friend who insisted they were both “weird.” She arrived with a few goats and sheep of her own, a veterinary background, and the kind of dry wit that made her a natural fit for the land and for Richard. She joined us in the conversation soon after we arrived, wearing an outfit that was practically identical to Richard’s: navy zip-up hoodie, light blue jeans, laced black hiking boots, and rectangular framed glasses. She brought along another guest—one of her six dogs, Luther. He’s just a puppy, a ten-month-old German Shepherd, and had a propensity for sitting on my Docs and eating goose poop, which, according to Sue, he finds very tasty. 

Richard and Sue have since run the farm together, supported by a small, aging cast of family and a relentless stream of work. But Sue and Richard seemed to embrace the intensive labor. When I asked about retirement, Sue told me “retiring to the Bahamas—that’s just not us…We’ll probably work until we die.” But more importantly—important enough to mention three times—Sue added, “I just love the animals.”

As I spoke to the two of them, the birds ruffled behind. Chickens in one pen, ducks and geese in the other—that is, except for a single golden hen, Sue’s pet chicken, who appeared to have defected. Or taken over. It was hard to tell. 

Those birds were why I was there, at Sabol’s Farm. More precisely, I was there because the rapidly spreading avian flu has inevitably found its way to birds in Ithaca, and I wanted to see what it meant there, on the sort of small, independent farm that makes up the core of the local economy. Richard’s birds haven’t been affected yet—neither have chickens in the area. (The most devastating infection has been in the pheasants at the state-owned Reynolds Game Farm, where a positive case has forced the euthanization of the remaining 6,000 or so birds.) But I wanted to understand what it feels like to farm in the shadow of a virus that’s quietly crossing state lines—and species.

The virus moves frighteningly quickly, passing from bird to bird primarily through saliva, feces, and secretions from the nose and eyes. When one chicken gets sick, it’s only a matter of time before the rest follow; they peck the same feed, drink the same water, breathe the same air. In factory farms, where birds are crammed into cages, it doesn’t take much for a virus to find its way through. The trouble is that free-range chickens and wild birds are only marginally safer from this disease. H5N1 is so infectious that one infected bird could potentially transmit the virus to about 13 others—and once infected, death is nearly certain. Infected chickens often exhibit a sudden onset of severe symptoms, including respiratory distress, a significant drop in egg production, and, ultimately, sudden death. In many cases, according to the CDC, these mortality rates approach 100% within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms. Since 2022, over 169 million poultry birds have been affected by the disease, according to the USDA’s most recent data. One million birds have been affected since I first began working on this article—the span of a single month.

Because of this ostensible death sentence, the standard response has been a matter of staving off contamination and choking out the virus wherever it appears. Current USDA guidelines emphasize biosecurity, highlighted by their “Defend the Flock” campaign, launched in 2018 and named with the gravitas of a mid-budget war film. The initiative provides comprehensive resources, including checklists, videos, and webinars, to promote daily biosecurity practices that protect flocks from infectious diseases. The advice, while sound, reads at times like a list of common-sense reminders dressed in bureaucratic urgency: clean your boots, wash your hands, limit visitors (both winged and human).

But cleaning can only go so far. If—or perhaps when—these measures fail, the government requires that one bird sick with H5N1 means the entire flock must go with it. It’s drastic, but effective at limiting its spread to surrounding farms. As veterinarian and Cornell University dairy herd specialist Dr. Robert Lynch explained, if farmers “eliminate all animals,” they eliminate too “any possibility for that virus to then infect the next animal.” That containment buys time—and safety. The longer the virus lingers, the more chances it has to mutate into something worse: more infectious, more severe, more deadly. “Every time a virus replicates in a host animal, you're rolling the dice,” Dr. Lynch told me. “We want to eliminate the number of times it gets to roll the dice.” 

The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) provides guidelines for this poultry elimination, with the goal to completely cull the flock within 24 hours of the first detection. With a limited time frame, the recommended methods reflect a grim fate for the animals: Floor-raised birds are generally blanketed and suffocated with a water-based foam; caged birds are rendered unconscious and asphyxiated with carbon dioxide gas; and small flocks are either contained and gassed, or killed each in turn by cervical dislocation—snapping the spinal cord—or shot with a captive bolt gun. These methods are considered the quickest and least painful—but when measures aren’t taken soon enough, or don’t work fast enough, farmers opt for a ruthlessly efficient method called “ventilation shutdown.” All air inlets, fans, and vents to a facility are sealed, and heat, steam, or gas is turned on, leaving the animals to die of hyperthermia. Essentially, the measures are a form of suffocation en masse. Still, Dr. Lynch told me these “depopulation” measures are considered the “humane” options; H5N1, so swift and merciless, makes it difficult to find a morally uncomplicated solution, since, as Dr. Lynch put it, “those birds are so horribly sick.”

But these drastic measures have equally drastic economic fallouts, and the financial stakes can mount with epidemiological speed. For consumers, the overt rising price of poultry products has become a rather conspicuous consequence, and at times feels like a jumpscare in the grocery aisle. In 2021, before H5N1 became endemic in commercial poultry, eggs cost $1.67 a dozen on average in the U.S., adjusted for inflation. That number has now reached more than $6.22. But these costs are only a reflection of the devastating impacts H5N1 can have on farmers, who lose their entire flocks—and income—from one sick bird. 

To mitigate such effects, APHIS offers 100% indemnities—compensation for culled birds—meant to stabilize producers and ensure that they prioritize safety. I asked Dr. Matthew MacLachlan, a former USDA economist and current professor in Cornell University’s Department of Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences about these policies. He explained that they “mitigate disease spread through culling and assure that people won’t hide the fact they have avian influenza in their facility.”

These policies are certainly lifelines, but ones better suited to industrial operations that can afford to pause, reset, and re-purchase. The indemnity program doesn’t cover costs for birds that have already died from the virus, which could make it difficult for small farms to access the necessary materials and qualify for the indemnities before the whole flock is lost. Thus, for smaller farms, where a flock is not just an input line but an investment raised over months, the loss is less a write-off than a wound. “It would be a pretty big financial hit,” Sue told me, “because it takes 18, 20 weeks to get them up to where they start to lay eggs. And you’ve got a lot invested in them up to that point.” Feed, labor, care—sunk costs, all wiped away in a single round of state-mandated slaughter. “It’s… you know, it’s a pretty big worry.”

The ability for H5N1 to move between species is what makes this strain of the avian flu uncomfortably ominous. Strains of avian flu are generally restricted to birds, finding it difficult to pass onto mammals, let alone replicate and transmit between them. But a recent mutation, allowing it to cross this line, now poses a grave problem. Because once a cow contracts the virus, her udders become infected, red and swollen, and her milk, where large amounts of the virus are shed, becomes flaky, thickened, and discolored. Suddenly, the routine act of milking becomes the vehicle for contagion, becoming a threat to the farm—and the farmer. 

While the science is still evolving, researchers across departments at Cornell are trying to understand this virus and how it moves—across barns, across species, and across entire systems of food production. Current theories suggest that wild birds carrying the virus shed through their biological fluids, which then contaminate cows’ water sources, feed, or environment. Farm workers who interact with infected birds or contaminated equipment might also carry viral particles on their clothing, boots, or tools into dairy barns. Those same farm workers, suddenly in contact with sick cows, may become vulnerable to the virus through contact or respiration. Thus, this bird flu no longer constrains itself to birds—a fact that the dairy industry in Ithaca must now prepare for.

Cornell, for its part, makes a concerted effort to support the local farming industry in managing this spread through various initiatives, including establishing the online Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Resource Center. The site makes an effort to corral not just the virus, but the misinformation around it, offering clear, if sometimes sobering, information aimed at farmers, wildlife professionals, and the concerned public alike. Meanwhile, the university’s Animal Health Diagnostic Center has become a reliable outpost to help shape containment plans by processing samples, flagging and mapping outbreaks, and monitoring H5N1 cases. 

These resources are particularly valuable for the Sabols, who were planning on joining a Zoom meeting that following night run by Cornell Cooperative Extension, which would provide updated information about H5N1 and what to watch for. In reference to Cornell’s “whole poultry department,” Sue told me “I know if [we’ve] got a problem, you know, they’re the people to call.”

As this current strain of avian flu crosses into dairy herds, the guidelines from both Cornell and the USDA have, for the most part, stayed the same as in past outbreaks: clean and quarantine. Dairies, Dr. Lynch told me, already had biosecurity measures in place long before H5N1 entered the picture: basic protocols designed to prevent the spread of any disease, not just this one. “Clean boots, disinfecting boots, clean clothing, washing hands,” he listed off, as if second nature. And when cows do become sick, he told me, they’re moved to a hospital pen, where they remain “away from the rest of the herd” and are able to receive “extra TLC.”

With the arrival of H5N1, these habits haven’t necessarily changed, but rather intensified. This more measured response comes from the fortunate fact that when cows become ill with the virus, they aren’t likely to die from it or spread it indiscriminately—according to Dr. Lynch, affected cows generally only spread it to 10-30% of the others in the herd. And, with current restrictions on cow movement from an affected farm, the risk to other farms is greatly reduced. As Dr. Lynch put it, “It's like if a cold virus enters a nursery school, not every kid in the classroom gets it. Surprising, right?” 

Some examples of these intensified biosecurity measures include being especially stringent with hygiene practices, requiring a complete change of clothes before stepping onto a facility, and turning away nonessential visitors at the gate.

The trouble is that though biosecurity, in theory, is neat, farms are not. On Sabol’s Farm, Sue kept apologizing for the ground, slick with spring thaw and spotted with hoof prints in the mud. But that’s the nature of farms—organic, literal and otherwise. She told me, “a lot of people think that animals are these completely clean, little pristine things,” but “I mean, there’s mud there… they make a mess, you know?” 

And this sentiment is no different from other local farmers I’ve spoken to. There’s a sense that maintaining the biosecurity measures necessary to prevent the flu from spreading is nearly impossible, and only leads to needlessly lost flocks and economic hardship. One local producer, who preferred to remain anonymous, admitted that watching industrial farms fail to prevent spread and monetary losses—despite their large scale and sophisticated infrastructure—makes it difficult to imagine his own small operation faring any better. An impending infection can feel inevitable. 

And once the dairy cows are infected, the economic impacts can be devastating. A sick cow produces milk at drastically lower levels, sometimes completely halting her production, with effects lasting from roughly 6 to 17 days. Yet even virus-free farmers have already begun to feel the burden. Lost milk production, mortality, and early herd removal can cost farmers nearly $1,000 per cow. The government, for this reason, provides compensation to farmers for up to 70% of their milk losses, but as the disease spreads, the economic effects—just like the virus—can ripple outwards from their own farm. 

The prices for buying cattle have started to increase significantly, due in part to required quarantine of animals. Dr. MacLachlan told me that “under normal conditions [replacement costs are] around 15% to 20% of a dairy's total operation cost. So if those costs—that 15% or 20%—go up by 30%, 40%, you have a pretty substantial increase in cost. So even if you don't have direct [economic impacts from] infections, there can be some of these economic spillovers or indirect effects as well.”

These effects only compound upon the difficulties of maintaining a foothold in the dairy industry at all, which is tumultuous by its very nature. So tumultuous, in fact, the USDA has a single person dedicated to working on milk pricing alone. The agency, Dr. MacLachlan told me, “control[s] the amount of supply that meets the market. So how exactly it gets priced can be a little bit convoluted at best.” Because of this federal price-setting process, fluctuations in the market felt by farmers aren’t always reflected in the grocery store, and the prices of matcha lattes remain safe—it’s the farmers who experience the brunt of the issue. 

For this reason, the Sabols don’t do dairy anymore—too unstable, Richard told me. “The dairy industry goes from boom to bust very regularly. The milk price goes up and down,” he said. My editor mused in response: “Hard way to make a living.” Richard and Sue made a knowing glance to one another. In response, Richard nodded: “Yeah, it is.”

But that doesn’t mean the Sabols are cow-less. Sue, an animal lover at her core, naturally keeps a pair of pet Jersey dairy cows named Snooki and JWoww—stars of the reality show Jersey Shore who likely wouldn’t appreciate the comparison. Sue doesn’t watch the show, but she told me, “I have seen snippets of it, and I just have to shake my head.” And as I listened to Snooki and JWoww mooing, calling for as much attention as their namesakes do, I couldn’t help but think about the real stakes here. 

Since 2024, there have only been 70 confirmed cases of H5N1 in humans. The recorded human cases have, for the most part, been mild: conjunctivitis, fatigue, cough. And the patient from Louisiana, who had had pre-existing health conditions, has been the only reported death. According to the CDC, these infections most likely resulted from prolonged exposure to contaminated environments: touching secretions, handling carcasses, or inhaling viral particles from feces or mucus. Of the reported cases, 67 had some form of animal exposure—41 of those were from cattle. The agency maintains that the public risk of infection remains low, but the concern isn’t solely the virus’s current state. It’s what it could become. 

Virus samples from the Louisiana patient showed that they had contracted a new strain of H5N1—the D1.1 genotype—with signs of mutations that may make it more transmissible to humans. On November 7th, 2024, the same variant appeared in a child in Canada who was hospitalized for her symptoms. This particular variant is far less widespread, even among animals. But the more H5N1 spreads between animals—birds to cows to cats to ferrets—the more chances it has to mutate. As Dr. Lynch said, each jump is a roll of the dice. And one of these days, we might not like what it lands on.

With the stakes continuing to mount, it seems obvious that coordinated and direct action would be taken by the government. Appropriately, in 2024, the Biden administration set aside $306 million for additional surveillance, laboratory testing, and medical research for H5N1. But it should come as no surprise that the current administration, skeptical of science and seemingly keen on bringing back measles, has taken on a different approach.  

Commendably though, the Trump administration made a $1 billion investment to combat the spread of H5N1 through a five-pronged strategy, made up of increased biosecurity measures, relief for affected farms, and vaccine research. It’s worth noting, however, that this money was taken directly from another money pot intended for food banks and schools. Moreover, the administration has simultaneously implemented substantial budget cuts and staff reductions across crucial health agencies, including lay-offs of hundreds of employees of the CDC and the Epidemic Intelligence Service—scientists, testers, and inspectors who were supposed to manage the avian flu response. In January, his administration withdrew from the World Health Organization. And on April 1st, the administration fired the chief and senior veterinarians at the FDA who were overseeing response investigations. Trump has reportedly even considered pulling the funding from Moderna that had been allocated for the development of its H5N1 vaccine, mRNA-1018.

These shifts are no-doubt concerning, but not necessarily a surprise after the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). RFK Jr. touts a “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, but his policies seem suspiciously aimed at the opposite goal: He has raised skepticism about crucial vaccines like those for measles and polio, promotes “alternative” medical treatments that are proven to be ineffective or downright harmful, and has advocated for the removal of fluoride from drinking water. Despite claiming the opposite, he is worryingly anti-vaccine, anti-science, and, bizarrely, anti-teeth—but Americans can rest assured that they will no longer have to consume Red Dye 40. 

Perhaps fittingly, then, Kennedy’s response to the avian flu has been simple: “letting it run through the flock.” Like a philosophical scientist, Kennedy claimed, in an interview with Fox News, that this would allow poultry flocks to identify naturally immune birds and preserve them. But this is a suggestion scientists have condemned as both inhumane and epidemiologically reckless. It’s not the sort of response you’d anticipate for something Dr. MacLachlan referred to as a “doomsday kind of disease.”

But this sort of free-range advice, even if not federally endorsed, has begun to trickle down to farmers who might not be up to date with the latest epidemiological research journals—they do, after all, have farms to tend to. And that includes the Sabols. The risk of wild birds landing on their farm, they told me, is low, since the geese are more attracted to the next farm over, which grows their preferred corn and soybeans. However, were the virus to spread, the drastic measures they’d have to take present an economic hardship they’re not sure is a worthy trade-off. 

So the advice Kennedy gave on Fox News, eventually finding its way down to the farmer’s market, then down to Richard, was far more appealing. Richard told me that he’d heard “if you kill all the birds, you’re losing birds that are resistant to [the flu].” He went on to say, “I think probably what they're doing is going through figuring out ‘well this one looks sickly so we will kill this one, but this one doesn't so we'll leave this one.’” Lost in the Fox translation is that if one bird gets sick, it’s only a matter of time before they all do—and perhaps, too, the Sabols themselves.

To some comforting effect, the tide on poultry vaccination has started to turn in response to the gravity of the situation. The Trump administration has made bringing down egg prices a rallying message, and thus funding continues to flood into limiting the death toll of H5N1—anything to protect our (yearly) 10 billion delectable chicken citizens. 

I recently spoke to a researcher at Cornell, who preferred to remain anonymous, and to whom we’ll refer to as Dr. B. The researcher did not divulge their reason for anonymity, but it may be reflective of the Trump administration’s hostile attitude towards education and research in the sciences: The administration has already frozen $1 billion in funding at Cornell, and has even proposed cutting funding by 37% at the National Institutes of Health and over 50% at the National Science Foundation, the two major U.S. funders in science. 

Despite these cuts, Dr. B informed me that the USDA recently released application requests for research projects developing vaccines, therapeutic measures, and other prevention strategies for H5N1. Meanwhile, Cornell’s Department of Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences has been working on developing vaccines for animals, birds, cattle, and cats. Dr. B told me, “we’ve reached a point in this enzootic that use of vaccines would probably be recommended.” They explained, “There have been over 168 million birds that died or were killed as part of the control strategy. That's a lot of animals that had to be euthanized and a lot of food that was basically wasted, and I think that's a major problem and a huge cost to the country.” To mitigate the potential impacts on exports, the department is also working on developing testing methods that can differentiate between a chicken that has been vaccinated from one that is actually infected. But Dr. B made sure to remind me, “It's not magic, you know. It's not the magic bullet that will eliminate this virus. I think that vaccination will have to be used as an additional tool in the toolbox.”

Many of those additional tools are the aforementioned strict biosecurity methods. But Dr. B went a step farther than some of the seemingly mild recommendations, and suggested that “the barns or houses where poultry are kept would have to be sealed” and “filtration systems would probably have to be used to keep the virus out.” On small farms, where advanced air filtration systems are economically infeasible, Dr. B suggested keeping all animals inside. Skeptical, I asked if there was an ethical concern for the animals, locked away from the outside world. In response, Dr. B was frank: “Right now, it’s a biosecurity [method] that you implement, or they die of avian influenza.”

After the conversation, I was relieved to learn of the government’s continued investment in eliminating the virus among our livestock, and the ongoing research at universities like Cornell. The same concern, however, has not been extended to humans.

One particularly frustrating example of this fact is found in Kennedy’s attitude towards raw milk. Though it is unclear exactly how humans contract H5N1, in animal studies involving cats, mice, and ferrets, drinking raw milk from an infected cow all but guaranteed an infection, and as such, the CDC suggests against its consumption. Fortunately, this threat is easily neutralized through the FDA-required process of pasteurization, which destroys or inactivates potentially dangerous pathogens in dairy products. For this reason, to those I interviewed, the risks of drinking contaminated milk—and the near certainty that it wouldn't happen—were so obvious that they seemed baffled I even thought to ask.

But Kennedy is an uncomfortably loud proponent of drinking unpasteurized milk. The HHS Secretary claims that certain health benefits in milk are destroyed by the pasteurization process in what he views as an over-regulated, overmedicated system. Case in point, two weeks ago, the administration officially suspended quality-control of milk and dairy products due to its reduced capacity after the termination and departure of 20,000 employees of the HHS. Trump only seems to desire further reducing this capacity, now proposing to cut another $40 billion from the agency. But budget cuts only seem to be part of the reason for this move. It seems as though deregulation has always been the goal, evidenced by Kennedy’s recent recruitment of Mark McAffee, founder of the Raw Milk Institute and Raw Farmas, as an advisor for the FDA with the goal of deregulating the sale of raw milk. In the aforementioned interview with Fox, Kennedy even claimed “the disease cannot pass through food. As far as we know, you cannot get it from an egg, or milk, or meat.” It’s a statement that would surprise reality—as well as the agency he oversees.

What makes this debate exasperating is that the health benefits of raw milk are scientifically dubious—minimal at best—while the potential consequences are only alarming, drastically increasing the chances of contracting completely avoidable illnesses. The injection of politics in this debate, then, may be why a local farmer who sells raw milk, upon request for an interview, turned it down by telling me they didn’t want to be involved in “all that political shit.”

Still, however irritating the debate, raw milk is not the primary concern. In fact, recent studies have found that keeping the milk warm for even 10-15 seconds may be enough to kill it—boiling ensures it. 

More common routes of infection are theorized to be respiratory or tactile—solutions to which are more difficult than the mere act of microwaving milk. This makes it all the more worrying that Kennedy’s fondness for anti-vaccine rhetoric has filtered into policy: The CDC has dialed back its flu shot campaigns, vaccine advisory meetings have been postponed or canceled, and $2 billion in cuts have been made to vaccine programs nationwide. And as confidence for vaccinating poultry grows, trust in vaccinating humans has moved in the opposite direction. 

The lamentably ironic fact is that preliminary vaccines for H5N1 already exist. Even before the virus spread into cows, the Biden administration had been preparing for its potential spread. The CDC and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response had been working with vaccine manufacturers to develop potential H5N1 vaccines targeting different variants, and the government had invested $766 million in mRNA vaccines to this purpose. By the end of 2024, there were nearly five million doses of the vaccine in the federal government’s stockpiles—but the administration stalled, and never released them to vulnerable farmworkers. Now, under Kennedy, they may not be released at all. Kennedy claimed in January, on the social media platform X, that “there is no evidence these vaccines will work, and they appear to be dangerous”—a conspiracy he named a “Bioweapons Connection.” The secretary’s skepticism may lead him to interfere in the approval process for the vaccines, either by withholding their approval or lengthening the process. And though bureaucratic norms usually keep this sort of political interference in check, norms aren’t laws. And the current administration seems unconcerned with either.

The result is a fragmented national strategy, where science takes a back seat to ideology, and the virus is given more hosts—and more time—to adapt. Another pandemic is by no means guaranteed, but it’s a serious possibility here—and we are wholly unprepared.

Political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, authors of In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, argue that our nationwide failure to engage in a critical reflection of the pandemic response has hindered our abilities to prepare for the future. In their view, the U.S. lockdown was launched on lackluster evidence and driven more by panic than deliberation. They note that early pandemic plans in 2019 from the World Health Organization, and Johns Hopkins University, months before the COVID outbreak, had already warned that nonpharmaceutical interventions—like school closures, business shutdowns, and stay-at-home orders—were likely to be socially costly and only weakly effective at scale. 

As Lee said in an interview with The New York Times, four interventions were “recommended not to use under any circumstances. Those four measures were quarantine of exposed persons, border closure, entry and exit screening, and contact tracing”—all of which were implemented anyway. Lee went on: “there were no assurances that these measures would work. But we were assured that they would have costs.”

And the costs were indeed massive: in 2020 and 2021, the U.S. spent nearly $5 trillion on relief packages—equivalent to the New Deal five times over—while national test scores plunged, chronic absenteeism doubled, and learning gaps between wealthy and poor students widened with no signs of recovery. Still, these sweeping measures didn’t translate into better outcomes, when measured by mortality due to disease. “Democratic-leaning states maintained stay-at-home orders two and a half times longer than Republican states,” Lee noted, “but at the time vaccines were rolled out, there was no difference in COVID mortality between them.” In fact, the only meaningful decline in deaths came after vaccines became widely available, when death rates diverged sharply between highly vaccinated and under-vaccinated states. What worked best is exactly what is now under attack.

For this reason, Macedo and Lee suggest that a more targeted approach—securing the most vulnerable—would have been more effective. In the case of H5N1, there have not yet been enough cases to determine who may be most vulnerable to severe illness. But we know that farmworkers and those who interact with animals are those most likely to contract the virus—and thus most likely to host a mutated, transmissible strain. Yet, securing them a vaccine in the current administration may prove to be out of reach.

This sort of crucial discussion, however, tends to be sidelined or outright ignored, in part because reckoning with the trade-offs of our pandemic response is politically uncomfortable. As Macedo put it, “there was an intolerance of criticism and divergent points of view that emerged fairly quickly in the pandemic, and that hurt us, that hurt our policy responses, that hurt our ability to course-correct.” 

That silence gave ammunition to right-wing skepticism, even where it wasn’t warranted, and converted what should be an urgent bipartisan health priority into a political battle. And now, with public trust low, scientific authority politicized, and agencies like the CDC and FDA subject to the authority of someone who has no respect for them, our urgent ability to “course-correct” may be gone altogether.

Meanwhile, the consequences for farmers like the Sabols are not hypothetical, but  hard and true threats—to their farms and to their livelihoods. And their trust is in the people that claim to protect them. Sue told me, “you know, sometimes I'll try to look into things, but doing the legwork to find out if it's true or if it's not true is sometimes mind-boggling.” Richard and Sue don’t have the time or resources necessary to research the best way to distribute vaccines or the best temperature at which to drink raw milk. Their focus is on taking care of their animals the way they know how.

Still, this story doesn’t end at the farm gate, the testing center, or the Wegmans dairy aisle. This affects our entire ecosystem. More than 12,800 wild birds have been detected with the virus in the U.S. alone. At least 48 mammal species have been affected too, including seals, sea otters, dolphins, foxes, polar bears, bears, skunks, zoo tigers, and so on and so forth. Early last year, an estimated 18,000 dead baby elephant seals washed up on the shore of Punta Delgada, Argentina—the species’ largest die-off ever—all dead from H5N1.

After all, there was plenty of ammunition. Sizing up the booth, it was easy to forget that I had interviewed Richard about his eggs and not those potatoes. Richard had a corner booth, with two tables set up in an L-shape, and they were piled with so much starch I didn’t notice any other produce—even the pennants hanging from the roof were decorated with printed images of the root vegetable. It took a moment, but after explicitly searching for the eggs, I found them nestled right at the corner of the booth, practically inconspicuous, with only three dozen on the table. 

Back on the farm, he had zealously told me about his potatoes, beginning to describe each of his 21 varieties until Sue reminded him to get back on topic— “I don’t think they want to talk about potatoes,” she told him. “He loves potatoes,” she said to me, almost apologetically. But no apology was necessary—it only made me more excited to try one. The trouble was choosing which variety.

I asked Richard which potato he recommended I buy, but he struggled to choose. Each, he told me, was best suited for different cooking methods, and with Sue no longer there to interrupt him, he began to list the pros and cons of each type. Ultimately, he told me his favorite were the Yukon Golds, which he usually eats boiled. 

I hate boiled potatoes. Sorry, Richard.

He then mentioned a collection of exotic varieties that he grew, and intrigued, I asked if any of those were better suited for frying—the right way to cook potatoes, in my humble opinion. He told me he grew blue potatoes that were marbled when cut open, with a nutty flavor and a texture ideal for frying and making chips. I had found my match.

I bought a medium crate, at $3.50. They were half the price of the eggs, which were priced at $6.50. When I had asked him at the farm why he priced them so high, considering he hadn’t yet been impacted by the flu, he explained that he didn’t want to undercut the other sellers—it was a move of solidarity. I respected it. But I left with only the potatoes.

The following morning, at home, I decided to make myself a pile of blue hash browns. They looked slightly off putting once in fried patty form—like what might happen if you left regular hash in your fridge for three months—but they tasted far better than they looked. Normally, I’d have cooked up fried eggs to eat alongside the potatoes for breakfast. That morning, I opted for a plate of scrambled tofu instead.⬥