Poultry farmers can now apply for government money to keep wild birds out of their sheds, under a $1.5 million grant that opened on Tuesday while New Zealand waits to find out whether H5 bird flu reaches a commercial flock.
The Poultry Biosecurity Grant will reimburse producers for up to half the cost of the work, to a maximum of $25,000 each. It covers infrastructure, access controls, bird proofing, and cleaning and disinfection facilities. A further $3,000 is available to help farmers write the farm biosecurity plan they will shortly be required by law to hold. Applications close on 30 September, and details are on the Ministry for Primary Industries website.
Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard said in the announcement that strong on-farm biosecurity is one of the country’s best defences against H5 bird flu, and that the Government was “supporting Kiwi poultry operators to strengthen their preparedness for H5 bird flu, helping protect jobs, livelihoods and New Zealand’s domestic food supply”. He said the grant had been developed in partnership with industry and built on preparedness work already under way.
The money is limited to operators with fewer than 100,000 birds, which points it at independent farms rather than the handful of large companies that supply most of the country’s eggs. The sector runs to roughly 170 layer farms holding about four million hens between them, and around 80 percent of the eggs sold here come from about 20 large operations, according to the Egg Producers Federation of New Zealand. Most farms sit under the grant’s threshold and most birds sit above it.
The reason for the spending is a month old. H5N1 bird flu of the clade that has swept through wild birds and poultry across the northern hemisphere and South America was confirmed in New Zealand for the first time on 15 July, in a brown skua found behaving strangely on Petone Beach and taken to Wellington Zoo. Two days later the Department of Conservation confirmed a second case, a swamp harrier found in the Wairarapa.
Hoggard said at the time that finding a native bird with H5 bird flu was disappointing but “not unexpected following the confirmation earlier this week”, and that the detection showed the continuous surveillance and testing programme was working. Conservation Minister Tama Potaka said the department had been preparing for the arrival of bird flu for several years, “with a focus on minimising the impact to wildlife populations”.
Since then, nothing. There have been no further confirmed detections since 17 July. Biosecurity New Zealand says there is no evidence of mass mortality in wildlife, no sign of transmission between wild birds here, and no detection in poultry at all. Officials are triaging a surge of public reports using internationally recognised risk criteria, so clusters of sick or dead birds, seabirds and waterfowl, and species that gather in large groups get looked at first.
That quiet month has not slowed the regulatory work. In late July, Cabinet agreed to make farm biosecurity plans compulsory for every poultry operator with more than 100 birds, a decision we covered when it was made. Farms will have to register a plan, keep records, submit to audits, and set out in advance how they would humanely cull, dispose of birds, clean and disinfect if the virus got in. The rules are being drafted now and are due in force by the end of 2026. The grant arrives ahead of that requirement, which is why the extra $3,000 for plan writing is in it.
Hoggard has been blunt about why a voluntary approach was not judged enough, saying that while industry co-operation is strong, “farmers doing the right thing can still be put at risk by those who are not”. Bird flu does not respect a fence line, and a single infected shed becomes everyone’s problem the moment movement controls go on.
New Zealand already has a costed example of what that looks like. In December 2024 a different strain, H7N6, turned up at Mainland Poultry’s Hillgrove farm in Otago. About 160,000 hens were culled across four sheds, movement controls sat over the property for months, and the virus was declared eradicated only after thousands of samples came back clear. H7N6 is a different strain that did not arrive with migratory seabirds, so the relevance of Hillgrove is the bill rather than the biology.
Free range farms carry the awkward end of this. About a third of the national laying flock lives outdoors, which is exactly where contact with wild birds happens. When the second case was confirmed, free range farmers were encouraged to consider temporarily housing their birds as a precaution, which sits badly with the labelling and the price premium that free range depends on.
The conservation side of the response is running in parallel and is harder to buy your way out of. The Department of Conservation is vaccinating around 300 core breeding birds across five of the most threatened species, including kakapo, takahe, shore plover, black stilt and orange-fronted parakeet. For birds whose entire adult population would fit in a school hall, a single introduction event is an extinction risk rather than a production loss, and there is no shed to shut them into.
For everyone else, the official advice has not changed. Chicken and eggs remain safe to eat, and the risk to human health is very low. Anyone who finds three or more sick or dead wild birds in one place is asked to report it on 0800 80 99 66 and to leave the birds alone rather than handle them.
Whether $1.5 million is the right number will not be clear for a while. At a $25,000 ceiling and a fifty percent match, spread across the small and medium end of a sector with roughly 170 layer farms plus the broiler operations, it covers a fair share of a bird proofing upgrade on a modest farm and much less of one on a large farm.
Have you had to change how you run your birds since July, or are you a backyard flock owner wondering what any of this means for you? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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