Wisconsin’s Department of Agriculture and Trade Protection will begin testing milk from dairy farms in the state for avian flu under a USDA program announced in December.
State officials said Monday they had reached a cooperative agreement with USDA that calls for testing samples from each of more than 6,000 dairy farms. Department Secretary Randy Romanski said USDA had wanted to test at milk silos, but Romanski said, “Wisconsin has more dairy farms than any other state, and we've got a whole lot of processors as well. So doing it at the silos was going to be cumbersome for collection.”
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Thus far, after 6,000 tests the state’s dairy farms have not detected the H5N1 strain of bird flu that has hit more than 1,000 herds in 17 states.
