Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

FARMING

France culls over 600,000 poultry in new bird flu outbreak

France has culled 600,000 to 650,000 chickens, ducks and other poultry over the past month, officials said Friday, in a race to contain a bird flu virus threatening to become the fourth major outbreak in the country since 2015.

Published: 31 December 2021 12:47 CET
Chickens at a henhouse near Loon-Plage in France.
Austria has detected cases of avian flu. (Photo by PHILIPPE HUGUEN / AFP)

The Agriculture Ministry reported virus clusters at 26 factory farms, mainly in the southwest — home to France’s lucrative foie gras pate industry — as well as 15 cases in wild fowl and three at barnyards.

Several European countries are now battling a highly contagious flu strain, H5N1, just a year after a similar virus decimated flocks.

Belgium and Britain have announced outbreaks, while Czech veterinarians said Wednesday that 80,000 birds would be culled at a single farm where over 100,000 animals have died from the virus since last week.

In France, the government ordered farmers in November to keep poultry indoors in a bid to stop the spread of the virus by migratory birds, though the first case was detected later that month, at a site in the north.

READ ALSO: France steps up duck cull as bird flu hits foie gras farms

The first case to strike the southwest, where most outbreaks are now located, came on December 16th, the ministry said.

Last winter more than 500 farms saw mass infections that prompted the culling of some 3.5 million birds, mainly ducks, prompting the government to spend millions of euros in compensation.

Poultry farmers had already been hit by massive bird flu outbreaks in the winters of 2015-16 and 2016-17.

READ ALSO: From frogs to foie gras: Your guide to French dinner etiquette

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

FOOD AND DRINK

Bad weather slashes wine harvest in France’s Jura region

Heavy rainfall, hail and mildew have ravaged most of the wine harvest in eastern France’s Jura region for this year, leaving winegrowers struggling.

Published: 13 September 2024 09:02 CEST
Bad weather slashes wine harvest in France’s Jura region

The Jura, nestled between the Burgundy wine region and Switzerland, is one of France’s oldest wine-growing areas, featuring some 200 vineyards spread over 2,000 hectares.

Their unusual elevation and the region’s cool climate give a distinctive flavour to its wines – some of which are famous, notably the white wine known as Vin Jaune (yellow wine).

But this year is delivering a bitter taste for winegrowers as the Jura – the smallest of France’s 17 major wine-growing regions – is headed for a drop of 71 percent in this year’s wine production volume, according to a government estimate.

The main culprit is a period of frost in April that destroyed many of the budding vines.

“The vines had already grown shoots of three or four centimetres,” said Benoit Sermier, 33, a winegrower in the Jura. “Those leaves were very thin and fragile, and sub-zero temperatures destroyed them, costing us 60 percent of the harvest.”

Although this year’s harvest is expected to be of high quality, the lack of quantity has put winegrowers in a precarious position, as frost in previous years has not allowed them to build up enough wine stock for lean times, said Sermier, who heads a local wine cooperative.

Winegrowers were also hit hard by incessant rain in July, which forced them to reapply protective vine treatments ‘every three or four days’, said Patrick Rolet, who grows organic wine and owns cattle. “I don’t think any winegrower remembers having ever seen this much rainfall,” he said.

The persistent humidity also facilitated the spread of mildew, a fungus that can devastate entire vineyards.

“Compared with the past 25 years, our losses are historic,” Olivier Badoureaux, director of the Jura winegrowers committee, said.

France’s overall wine volumes are headed for a fall of almost a fifth this year because of the unfavourable weather, the agriculture ministry said last week.

Overall wine production is now estimated to drop by 18 percent to 39.3 million hectolitres.

A little over a month ago before wine harvesting began, the ministry had still targeted up to 43 million hectolitres.

But ‘particularly unfavourable’ weather forced the revision, as the extent of damage done by frost, hail and also mildew became clearer.

The Charente region, in the southwest of France, is looking at a 35 percent drop in wine production this year, the biggest fall in terms of volume of any French region.

This, said the agriculture ministry, was due to ‘a smaller number of grape bunches’ and ‘insufficient flowering because of humid conditions’.

Losses in the Val de Loire and Burgundy-Beaujolais regions are also expected to come in above average.

Champagne production, meanwhile, is likely to drop by 16 percent, but will remain some eight percent above its average over the past five years.

The impact of bad weather is being compounded by winegrowers’ decision over recent years to reduce the size of vineyards in response to falling wine consumption in France, especially of red wine.

SHOW COMMENTS