Records show that the federal government has paid more than $230 million to California dairy farms to subsidize milk production losses caused by bird flu, which the dairy industry is expected to increase as more claims for damages.
Since August 2024, the H5N1 bird flu has swept over 75% of California’s 1,000 dairy farms, making cattle sick and causing a sharp drop in milk production.
Farmers are able to obtain relief under the USDA program, called livestock, bees and farm-raised fish program, or emergency assistance from ELAP. The program usually helps farmers affected by wildfires, droughts and floods, but last year, aid was opened to dairy farmers last year as bird flu began to ravage cattle.
USDA records show that between November 2024 and June 2025, 644 payments were paid to 359 California dairy farms, totaling $231 million. The average payment per farm is about $645,000, ranging from $2,058 to Pereira Dairy Farm in Visalia to $4.4 million, and $4.4 million to Channe Islands dairy farm in Corcoran.
However, these payments are expected to increase significantly as more claims are submitted and processed. Many payments issued in May and June were outbreaks in 2024, which suggests there is more.
Remedies payments were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Farm Forward, a nonprofit that advocates against factory agriculture. The group asserted that these subsidies helped to support industrial-scale dairy operations and perpetuate the spread of influenza in birds.
“These are huge industrial operations,” said Andrew Decoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward. “Bird flu spreads in the various environments we pay for preservation.”
Anja Raudabaugh Western United Dairies, CEO of the industry’s largest state trading group, said the payments have ensured that “make sure our dairy community and its workers remain employment and healthy. This storm is not possible until we get approval for the dairy vaccine to pay for the dairy vaccine through milk loss.”
Jonathan Cockroft, managing partner at Channel Islands dairy farm, said his losses exceeded the $4 million he received despite payments helping his farm experience a drop in milk production of about 30%.
He said the virus caused cattle miscarriage and often prevented them from getting pregnant again. Infertile cows do not produce milk. In other cases, he said, the Uds were so scarred by the disease that cows could not produce milk at level before they were infected.
“I’m not sure other versions that the public will understand, and that’s a huge impact on reproduction,” he said.
He also noted that many animals died—especially when the first erupted last fall, its novelty combined with the fiery heat of the Central Valley, accounting for 10 to 15% of many California populations.
Joey Airoso, a dairy farmer in Tipton, broke out in $1.45 billion in subsidies at his farm last October.
The outbreak costs more than $2 million, he said, “only paying for milk income, excluding the $250,000 additional care required for cows consulted with drugs, additional staff and veterinary doctors.”
And it cannot cover the cost of dead cows – it cannot produce milk or sell meat. Cocroft said the average cow price is about $3,500.
Jay Van Rein, a spokesman for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said the loss payment is “the most realistic way for producers to recover and avoid huge disruptions in the food supply of these products.”
USDA officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a former top USDA official left the agency in January saying it was important to provide relief to dairy farmers once the agency identified H5N1 bird flu in a few Texas clusters in March 2024. By then, the disease had been spreading for weeks, and even in a few months, it was impossible to contain a state.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, and we know we’re going to need to support producers, and we know that the faster we get help from them to help them with testing, the better we develop, the faster we’ll be able to control the infection.”
However, Decoriolis, the farm forward, and others say the plans permanently make the agricultural industry, trapping hundreds, if not thousands of animals with similar genetics into narrow batches, a novel virus. He also noted that the federal relief program does not come with any conditions, such as incentives for disease mitigation and/or biosafety.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, said it was a mistake to distribute subsidies to farms without trying to understand or investigate the practices they used to eliminate the disease.
“What do they do on the farm to prevent reinfection?” she said.
USDA payments are based on a four-week loss per milk production. Several farms have received multiple subsidies, according to Farm Forward. While about half received only one payment, 100 farms received two payments, 58 received 3, 19 received 4 payments and 2 separate payments.
On a farm in Tulare County, four USDA payments were submitted once a month between November 2024 and February 2025. In another payment, payment time is from December 2024 to May 2025.
Rasmussen said multiple payments are most likely to cause depending on the specific circumstances of the dairy products involved.
Cockroft of the Channel Islands dairy farm said he and other farmers have seen waves of tidal and milk testing that hold the anode for months. He said he knew of a farm in quarantine for nine months.
When the herd is quarantined, animals are not allowed to be transferred on site or closed. In California, a farm was quarantined for 60 days within 60 days of the initial virus test. It wasn’t until the test showed that its milk was virus-free-for three weeks in a row that it could move out of quarantine.
National agriculture spokesman Van Rein said the average time for quarantine was 103 days. He said 940 of the 1,000 groups in California were out of quarantine. 715 of them have been previously quarantined and released from quarantine.
But even if the milk tests positive, the isolated farm can still sell milk. Pasteurization has been shown to kill the virus.
Relief payments are another sign of how the U.S. government supports the agricultural industry, which some believe is crucial to national interests.
“We decided politically that this is an industry we want to support, and it’s obviously not their fault, and we’re going to help them because it’s a catastrophic thing,” said Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. “If we consider these payments, because we’re using taxes to help people in need, because their families are poor, that’s not the case.”
