Crescent Duck Farm not shuttering; hopes rest on remaining eggs

Despite some recent reports to the contrary, Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue has no plans to close its doors permanently. 

“I laid off my packing house company the day I heard of the declaration of the flu as we had nothing left,” company president Doug Corwin said in an email to the News-Review Wednesday evening. “I also sent [New York State] a WARN notice,” Mr. Corwin added, referring to the state labor law requiring certain businesses to provide advance warning of layoffs and closures. Word of that filing appeared to prompt some news reports that the business was shuttering. “My farming company is still active and working to help get us out of the quarantine,” Mr. Corwin said.

While the farm did lose between 80,000 and 100,000 eggs in the quarantine process, eggs that were being cooled have been deemed safe. These eggs were cleaned in a chlorine solution and transported to an undisclosed, prepared location to begin incubation. “If [an egg] doesn’t go into an incubator, it goes into a cooler, where the development stops, and then when you’re ready, you put them in an incubator. We were allowed to hold onto those,” said Mr. Corwin. “By the time they’re taken off the property, they’re relatively old. They’re not gonna hatch out very well. But we’re crossing our fingers; we’re hoping we can get enough of these eggs to maintain a place to start. It wouldn’t be enough for me to start this place, but it would be enough to try to reproduce a secondary [batch] to start this place. So that’s where we are with eggs.”

Because there will likely be too few ducks in the first hatch of eggs to start the farm, and ducks take six months to reach maturity, it will be the second round of birds that truly restart production. “I’ve got to start as soon as possible, but I’ve got to hatch the eggs. That takes four weeks … A bird isn’t mature for six months to start laying eggs, then I have to get enough eggs from them to hatch out a second generation. Then that second generation is going have to grow at least another six months. So all this takes time,” said Mr. Corwin.

Mr. Corwin is thankful for all the support from the community and elsewhere. Beyond rebuilding his flock and maintaining duck farming on Long Island and the East End, he plans to push for a vaccine. “It’s a big challenge, but thankfully, New York State allowed us to take this step, and we’re going to take advantage of it and try to see if we can’t start up again. Support has been phenomenal. Political supports been strong. We’re going to try again.” 

With the ongoing HPAI outbreak now in its third year — and the main strategies for confronting it being culling and quarantine — the economic impact is being felt in across the livestock and dairy farming industries. Vaccines have been developed and are available for use in some countries, but not in the U.S.

“This thing is endemic,” Mr. Corwin said. “Since it’s a ‘foreign disease,’ it’s something that the USDA is very nervous about approving a vaccine for. The fact is, this one strain has been over here solidly for three and a half years and has wiped out 150 million birds. We see what it does to the price of eggs and everything else.” 

According to the World Organization for Animal Health’s international standards, the use of vaccination, “does not affect the status of a country or zone as being HPAI-free,” and even birds that have been vaccinated cannot be exported to certain countries. Thirty countries, including China and Mexico, currently vaccinate for bird flu.

“I might ship a little bit to the Bahamas, a little bit to the Dominican Republic and a few places like that,” Mr. Corwin said. “But I’ll sacrifice that in a heartbeat to keep my birds alive. It’s just very scary that this thing is going to be so prevalent.”