Hatching Plans to Prevent Avian Influenza
What a local chicken farm and the bird flu outbreak can teach us about food production
Story by Seddie LeBlanc
Photos courtesy of Matt Nelson
Matt and his daughter Evelyn planting crops in the summer of 2022. The birds on their farm get to enjoy their home-grown crops, which include pumpkins, berries, corn, apples and kale. | Photo courtesy of Matt Nelson
Nestled behind a gate, down a little dirt road in Bellingham’s Cordata neighborhood and surrounded by skinny alders and full-bodied cottonwoods, is Spring Creek Heritage Farm: a secluded family operation focused on producing healthy, high quality poultry.
At Spring Creek, biosecurity is the name of the game for the Nelsons and the chickens they raise. Matt Nelson, his wife Amanda, and their two daughters, Evelyn and Priscilla, raise roughly 800 birds without pesticides or herbicides. Spring Creek’s primary goal, Matt explains, is chicken preservation.
South of the farm is 20 acres of woodland the girls call the “Fairy Forest.” The trees protect the farm from more than just road noise — they prevent cross-pollination and allow the Nelson family to tinker with seed genetics, untampered by outside influences. Though crops aren’t their main product, a small grove of fruit trees grows in front of the house. Kale and corn plants dot the hill further down the property. The girls grow flowers in the springtime, Matt says.
“The big component for us is keeping the birds safe and our family safe,” he says. “We’ve got so much time and money involved in it. We’ve been doing this full-time since 2005.”
The farm is arranged in compartmentalized sections: breeders stay in the barn at the base of the hill, and beside the barn is a riding arena where the layers are housed. The chickens are cared for roughly by generations to ensure germs are isolated and not tracked backwards.
The Nelson’s farm vehicle stays on the farm to avoid bringing in diseases like fowl typhoid from migratory birds. The family showers and sanitizes chicken foods before returning to the brooder house.
Generally, visitors are not allowed past the farm gate, especially if they raise poultry of their own.
These precautions make the Nelson’s flocks safer from threats like Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), a disease that has been killing birds across the country for over 20 years. According to USDA data, over 166 million chickens have been infected by avian influenza since 2022. There have been over 70 confirmed human cases in the United States since 2024, according to the CDC.
Matt says that Spring Creek’s biosecurity practices keep their birds safer than industrially produced chickens. They employ these practices because they care deeply about their animals — Matt describes their family as “poultry people.” The care they take in raising their birds shows through in the product. Industrial farms often run on razor-thin profit margins and take shortcuts to make as much money as possible.
White, black and brown chickens frolicking in the grass at Spring Creek Farms. Chickens at the Nelson’s farm are given free reign to roam and feed in the pasture. | Photo courtesy of Matt Nelson
“Everything done in volume industrially doesn’t necessarily work,” he says. “If all the small farms had flocks of 50 or 100 birds, and they know their birds, the names of their birds and they care about their birds, not just a commodity, I think that’s where we win.”
The Nelsons raise rare and purebred chickens, and are one of a few farms in the country to do so. One breed that they raise, called the Hungarian Yellow, has only three small surviving flocks in North America. The family also keeps a breed of their own called Amrock, which is the girls’ favorite.
Backyard flocks have become an increasingly popular option in the past several years, in part due to homesteading and sustainability trends, the COVID-19 lockdown, better access to educational information and surging egg prices.
“It’s like a literal chicken gold rush,” Matt says. “Everybody on Craigslist is buying birds from hatcheries in the middle of winter and shipping them here, hoping they make it. They’re gonna raise them and sell pullets and get rich.”
Pullets are young hens, which do not yet lay eggs but will soon.
While Matt advocates for people to raise chickens of their own and sell them to interested parties, he is wary of birds hatched in another part of the country and shipped great distances, where they are more likely to be exposed to disease along the way. He said that buying locally is the better option.
Matt maintains a blog on the farm’s website, where he posts periodically about different breeds, educational how-tos and occasionally think pieces about genotyping and egg prices.
“Industrial poultry is not really feeding you eggs. It’s more like an egg substitute produced by a chicken,” Matt writes on the Farm’s blog. “Our eggs versus commercial farms win every time. I don’t know what the big farms feed their chickens to produce an egg for a nickel but I can’t even come close. And my chickens are so spoiled they refuse to eat cardboard & calcium pellets.”
According to Matt, buying local is better because farmers like the Nelsons see eggs as a precious commodity, instead of convenience food produced by industrial production lines. The problem is, most Americans disagree. Eggs have historically been readily available, easy to come by and cheap.
Egg prices have soared in recent years due to outbreaks of HPAI. Josh Magnus, owner of Bellingham restaurants Little Cheerful and Diamond Jim’s, says the shortage has caused a significant strain on his business.
“It's not something you can easily recoup, unless you want to start charging people $30 for bacon and eggs,” Magnus says.
Eggs from Spring Creek Farms laid out by color on a wooden table. The eggs hens produce can be predicted by the color of their earlobes. | Photo courtesy of Matt Nelson
HPAI has been driving up prices since the initial outbreak in 2022. Egg prices are predicted to increase 41.1% in 2025, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service.
Prices aren’t the only way avian influenza could impact the public. Health officials and epidemiologists have raised concerns about the virus potentially mutating to spread from human to human. So far, humans have only been infected in limited cases from proximity to sick birds.
Buying locally may not be feasible for restaurants like Little Cheerful or Diamond Jim’s, but for individual households, it might be a better option.
Local farms that are more familiar with their birds and take steps to maintain biosecurity are safer for the consumer and those who work to produce our food.
“Taking a little bit of extra time and care is really what’s kept us doing what we’re doing,” Matt says.
This care is evident in the volume of happy critters across the property — from the 10 cats to the ladybugs that flit about, unimpeded by pesticides, to the family of pigs grunting in the front yard.
Still unconvinced? You can order a dozen of the Nelson’s eggs to try yourself for $9.49 a dozen on their website.