Italian gov't official said traditional livestock farming might have to end due to biosecurity concerns

Cows can't graze because a bird with bird flu might defecate on them? From last September's Guardian

It is important to know what government officials are saying. This is scary.

September 25, 2023

… Almost 34,000 pigs were culled in Italy last week after a cluster of outbreaks in Lombardy, a region known as Italy’s pork belt and one of Europe’s main pig-producing areas.

“The cluster of outbreaks [in Lombardy] was the largest in Italy caused by the ASF virus genotype II,” said Francesco Feliziani, who leads Italy’s national reference lab for [African] swine fever.

He said the Lombardy outbreak had been “quickly extinguished” but “posed a major threat to the entire sector as the region is the largest producer of pigs in our country”.

Because there is no vaccine for ASF, Feliziani said culls to contain the disease were compulsory. The underlying problem, he said, “remains the presence of the virus in the wild boar populations”, which provide a reservoir for the virus.

“In Europe, the threat [of ASF] is very strong; the pressure of the virus is high and it seems inevitable that the disease will involve other domestic herds,” he said.

ASF was disrupting pig breeding around the world, Feliziani said, but he warned that non-intensive, traditional livestock farming models, which might not have sufficient levels of biosecurity, were particularly at risk and could disappear altogether.

“This would have strong economic repercussions on many social strata and would also affect the biodiversity of rural areas where intensive livestock farming is not possible, and which survive thanks to the typicality of products reared according to traditional methods,” he said…

Even though the cooked meat is fine to eat and humans do not catch the virus—Nass