If the turkey industry isn't hit by highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) as hard as it was in 2022, then it should recover somewhat in 2023.
In a WATT Poultry Chat interview, Dr. Thomas Elam, president of FarmEcon LLC, said the impact of HPAI is already lower than it was at this point last year. He said he's cautiously optimistic about HPAI going forward.
Austin Alonzo: The USDA, in 2023, is projecting that turkey production will increase by 8%. A significant increase. Do you think that's going to happen this year?
Thomas Elam: Probably. You know, every percentage has the numerator and a denominator. In this case, the numerator in that percentage is approximately what we produced in 2021, two years ago. The denominator was significantly affected by HPAI last year. So we had a huge drop in 2022. And now they're forecasting basically that we will get back to 2021 production levels. That would not be surprising. If we can keep HPAI out of these turkey houses. That was the root cause if we can reduce or eliminate HPAI in 2023, then we can produce 2021 levels.
Also looking at the forecast just before we got on the air here, they're forecasting a significant jump in per capita consumption. But we had a significant drop last year exacerbated a little bit by a drop in exports that they're forecasting, a pretty significant drop, which is a lingering effect of HPAI and phytosanitary barriers that exist around the world. When you have an infection like this and they take a while to go away.
So if we do get back to those, those normal if you will production levels, we are going to see a drop in prices. But they're going to drop from record levels for, particularly for white meat: breast meat, tom breast meat, and for whole birds. We set new records last year for both of those. Dark meat prices were pretty flat and they may drop a little bit as well.
However, if we get back to that level and don't have the production effects from HPAI that we had last year, it's still a very healthy revenue situation, even lower prices for producers, especially producers who were affected by HPAI last year. Those who weren't affected will see a drop in revenue from lower prices. But the ones who were heavily affected in the Midwest, in particular, and to a lesser extent in the East Coast and West Coast, will have a much healthier year if we can get back to normal production.
Austin Alonzo: Alright, we still have a little time left. Was there anything else you'd like to add?
Thomas Elam: It does appear based on the latest HPAI data that's coming in from APHIS that the winter time incidents that we've had in turkeys, and poultry in general outside of a localized area of Pennsylvania, Lancaster County, that the the number of cases in commercial birds has dropped off from what we were seeing last fall.
But we are still seeing fairly widespread exposure from wild birds and from backyard flocks. So the virus is still out there. But it's not getting into commercial flocks at the rate it was last year. And we are here in March and April. If we think back to 2015. This is that period of time where we saw just absolutely horrible outbreaks in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa.
So I think cautiously optimistic: That is a good way to think about this HPAI situation right now. It's certainly not as bad as it was last year and nowhere near as bad as it was in 2015.
