Exploring bird flu prevention with farm owner Shannon Hayes. Discover boot washing, flock protection with coyotes, and best practices in biosecurity. Summary ???? The Lede: Bird flu cycles have shortened, forcing farmers like Shannon Hayes to reimagine their biosecurity protocols completely. Farm owner Shannon Hayes reveals how her family protects their livestock from bird flu at Sap Bush Hollow Farm. Key strategies include washing boots with soap and vinegar solutions, timing poultry purchases for summer months, ending public farm tours, and maintaining coyote populations as natural buffers against wild waterfowl. Hayes emphasizes that bird flu prevention requires continuous practice and adaptation, not perfection. The episode highlights farmers' critical but often overlooked role in biosecurity and food supply protection during disease outbreaks Click here to view the printable newsletter with images. More readable than a transcript, which can also be found below. Contents Table of Contents Toggle EpisodeProemPodcast introIntroducing Shannon HayesBird Flu: Context and HistoryAn Ecosystem for BiosecurityProtocols for Biosecurity Call to actionChanging Protocols – Our BootsChanging Protocols – Chicks, Eggs, and ChickenDucks, Geese, Overflying BirdsTraining our CoyotesMore about Shoes and BootsGap Found at a Farm MeetingPractice, Not PerfectReflectionPodcast OutroRelated episodes from Health Hats Please comment and ask questions: at the comment section at the bottom of the show notes on LinkedIn  via email YouTube channel  DM on Instagram, TikTok to @healthhats Production Team Kayla Nelson: Web and Social Media Coach, Dissemination, Help Desk  Leon van Leeuwen: editing and site managementresil Oscar van Leeuwen: video editing Julia Higgins: Digit marketing therapy Steve Heatherington: Help Desk and podcast production counseling Joey van Leeuwen, Drummer, Composer, and Arranger, provided the music for the intro, outro, proem, and reflection, including Moe's Blues for Proem and Reflection and Bill Evan's Time Remembered for on-mic clips. Podcast episode on YouTube Inspired by and Grateful to Sue and Jay Spivack, Jim Donahue, Pat Hultz Links and references Sap Bush Hollow Farm The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow Podcast & The Radical Homemaker Blog “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards, 'Your Local Epidemiologist' Substack by Katelyn Jetelina and Edward Nirenberg New York State Grown and Certified Episode Proem The only time I felt I could draw was when my Oma was dying. I sketched the outside of her. I had recently read “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards, which revolutionized art instruction by teaching readers to perceive edges, spaces, and relationships—core skills for realistic drawing. It features exercises in contour and blind contour drawing, emphasizing the importance of drawing what you actually see, not what you think you see. Now, when I’m curious, I want to know the backstory to fill out the edges. My antennae stirred when reading 'Your Local Epidemiologist' about Bird Flu. The Paramedic and Emergency Nurse personas in me feel anxious. No reports are coming out of the CDC, the aggregation of State infection data has been discontinued, and the administration is comfortable with days-long reaction times to disasters, having defunded and staffed mitigation work. So, look out farther to the edges of bird flu –the front line of people managing flocks of birds. Bird flu is nothing new, but the usual 10- to 15-year interval between epidemics has changed. Bird flu isn’t dying out or going dormant anymore. The CDC is reporting incidents of infection jumping from birds to people. Our federal government seems unprepared - danger, danger, danger. I know so little, and I’m scared. Not a healthy mix. Podcast intro Welcome to Health Hats, the Podcast. I'm Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged cisgender old white man of privilege who knows a little bit about a lot of healthcare and a lot about very little. We will listen and learn about what it takes to adjust to life's realities in the awesome circus of healthcare. Let's make some sense of all of this. Introducing Shannon Hayes Fortunately, I have a dear friend, Shannon Hayes, owner and CEO of Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York - West Fulton. Shannon and I met 25 years ago when my wife and I were buying lamb, chicken, turkey, and eggs from her parents. Shannon podcasts, too. Warm, humorous, informative: The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow Podcast & The Radical Homemaker Blog. I recommend them.   This conversation with Shannon took place in February of 2025. Shannon is informed, humble, and eager to share.  I’ll cut in a couple of times. Not because Shannon’s tale needs a drop of translation or background. But I’ve learned more from these words each time I’ve touched them in production. I needed a second to digest what I just heard. I’ll do that aloud with you. Appropriately, we jumped right in talking about shit, bird shit. Shannon: Men are allowed to use that term without any problem, but women are looked at as being foul if they use it. However, I'm now 51 years old and I couldn't give a shit. That's so funny because that is the language. That we use. You don't say there's fecal matter. You don't leave there's manure. It's fast, it's effective. It's what it is. Health Hats: Is a cow shit called something different than chicken shit? Shannon: No, shit is shit. We identify species, then shit. Health Hats: Okay. All right. That's good to know. Shannon: Hi, Danny. How are you? Good. I'm glad to see your saxophone. Health Hats: I was thinking about how we met. I met your mom first. Because we were customers, we met you on the farm? Because we did. I thought you were in school or something. Shannon: I've been with Sap Bush Hollow since 1979, when we moved there. But I went away to college. I met you when I was still in grad school. So, I used to help when college was out for the season, then for the summer. And then, when I started grad school at Cornell, my mom was handling all the sales through the farm kitchen. Then I came home every time there was a sale. I also came home every weekend. And, helped on the farm. So yes, it was a big event. She would've had to be back there in time to help. Big event with the chicken pickups. Oh yeah. Yeah. And lamb. Yep. A lot of lamb. Health Hats: A lot of lamb. Shannon: That's still the centerpiece at Sap Bush Hollow. We do lamb better than anybody else. Our lamb is the best. Health Hats: Shannon, please introduce yourself. Shannon: I'm Shannon Hayes, and I'm now the CEO of SAP Bush Hollow Farm, which my parents founded in 1979. Health Hats: You're located in upstate New York. Shannon: We are located in West Fulton, New York. Anyone from West Fulton is very proud to tag that onto our name because nobody else knows where it is. But it's in West Fulton, New York, which is in Schoharie County. That's about 45 minutes west of Albany. Bird Flu: Context and History Health Hats: The reason is that you and I have been talking. I was particularly interested in your blog post about bird flu. The reason for my interest was that there's often a lot of abstract talk about bird flu, and there's a lack of epidemiological information about it. I appreciated your discussion of the topic on your blog. Oh, and what's your blog called? Shannon: It's https://theradicalhomemaker.net. You can also find it at https://sapbushfarmstore.com. Health Hats: Okay, thank you. Anyway, I found the concept of having protocols for safety to be intriguing. So, can you explain what that means in terms of establishing protocols for safety against bird flu? Because obviously you have a flock. Shannon: I'm going to give you a little bit of a historical context first. You came into the circle of Sap Bush Hollow at a time when farmers were really trying to reach out and connect very deeply with the public. And you were one of the leaders in the farm-to-table movement. As far as I can tell, you were one of the original people who decided it was worth connecting directly with farmers. That was a time, and the expectation of small, local sustainable farmers is that our lives, we were all told, had to become an open book. We needed to be very transparent in what we did and invite the public in to see what. We were all about it, so they could learn to trust us, because everyone thought that if you wanted safe food, you had to go to a grocery store. They had to learn to trust the farmer, as well as trust us as people. And you were one of the leaders in moving forward and saying, 'Let's break this barrier.' Let's get to know the farmer directly. And that's how you started stepping foot on SAP Bush Hollow Farm. Health Hats: I wasn’t a pioneer. I was a back-to-the-land hippie living in rural West Virginia in an intentional community (commune), more rural than West Fulton. We kept chickens, bees, and, for a brief period, goats and a horse. We were used to getting our meat locally. We were excited to discover Sap Bush Hollow in upstate NY. An Ecosystem for Biosecurity Shannon: However, before that time, my dad, who was a professor of agriculture, used to always talk to us about biosecurity and closing the farm loop. We always have to think about biosecurity in terms of if you bring an animal on, you don't want to bring disease onto your farm. So, for example, we don't bring other people's boars onto the farm. We artificially inseminate the pigs. You try to, we call it keeping the loop closed. You try to keep the farm as an ecosystem. This era in American history, in which small farmers opened up their land and welcomed people onto it, marked a departure from the closed-loop system. But it was great.