Earlier this month, at the University of Vermont dairy farm in South Burlington, Jess Waterman climbed up to an opening in a large storage tank, inserted a long metal dipper, and pulled out a test tube’s worth of raw milk.

Gathered around Waterman — a dairy farm inspector with Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets — stood a handful of dairy farm inspectors, taking notes. They watched as Waterman transferred the milk into a vial to be sent to Cornell University, where scientists will test it for highly pathogenic avian influenza, also called HPAI, a form of avian influenza that is deadly to poultry.

The dairy inspectors were learning the sampling process, which they plan to soon conduct on about 425 dairy farms across Vermont each month. It’s part of an effort to keep Vermont’s farms free of the virus, and allow farmers to take quick action if it’s identified in their milk supply.

A DAIRY FARM inspector with Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets pours a sample of fresh milk from a bulk tank into a vial at the University of Vermont Miller Dairy Farm on Dec. 13 as she demonstrates how the state is testing milk across Vermont for the presence of bird flu.
VTDigger photo/Glenn Russell

Vermont’s testing regimen follows an early December announcement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it would begin testing the country’s milk supply for the avian flu, which has circulated globally since 2022. Last spring, highly pathogenic avian flu began to spread among dairy cows.

“This is the first time that we’re aware of in the history of the world that HPAI jumped to dairy cattle,” said E.B. Flory, dairy section chief at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets.

Since the spring, the avian flu has spread to hundreds of dairy herds in at least 16 states. At least 60 people — mostly farmworkers — have caught the virus, according to the NYTimes.

No Vermont dairy herds have tested positive for the virus. The closest states with dairy herds that have tested positive for the virus are North Carolina and Ohio, and those cases were not recent, Flory said.

For officials with Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, the federal plan to take test samples from silos at regional processing facilities that contain milk from multiple states didn’t seem to make sense for Vermont. If testing yielded a positive result, they wouldn’t know which state the infected milk came from, or which farm.

“For us in Vermont, we export over 80% of our milk, and we were concerned that our milk will end up in other states, mixed with other states’ milk. And, what do we do when our milk is mixed with 12 or 15 other states, and there’s a positive?” Flory said.

Without on-farm testing, officials would have had to scramble to trace the positive test result back to its origins in Vermont so they could deploy procedures to quarantine the herd. The process of locating the farm could be disruptive to the dairy community and potentially mean infected cows aren’t being appropriately handled as quickly as they could be, Flory said.

Instead, Vermont is taking “a step above” the USDA’s minimum requirements by sampling at the farm level, she said. It’s one of only three states to conduct on-farm testing, and is home to many more farms than the other two states moving forward with the more time-intensive process.

Vermont’s program is set to be funded entirely by the USDA, giving the state resources to carry out the wide-scale testing, according to Agency of Agriculture spokesperson Scott Waterman.

While the pasteurizing process typically kills pathogens, officials want to reduce the risk of spread as much as possible.

“What we do not want to happen in Vermont, and what the federal government doesn’t want to happen, is that this virus continues to spread, and that it mutates and becomes something that humans can contract and then spread to each other,” Flory said.

If milk were to test positive for avian influenza through the state’s sampling process, the agency would work with farmers to restrict moving animals, vehicles and people in ways that might cause the virus to spread “while still maintaining normal business functions for the farm and normal animal health functions,” said Emily Buskey, the state veterinarian.

“Milk would still ship to market,” she said. “It would still be pasteurized and be perfectly safe for consumption.”