USDA to Spend $750 Million on Texas Fly Facility to Combat Screwworm

By Ryan Hanrahan

Reuters’ Tom Polansek and Leah Douglas reported that “the U.S. Department of Agriculture will spend up to $750 million to build a facility in Texas that produces sterile flies to fight the flesh-eating livestock pest New World screwworm, Secretary Brooke Rollins said on Friday.”

“The plan signals increasing worries about the risk of screwworm, a parasitic fly that eats livestock and wildlife alive, to infest U.S. cattle after the pest moved north in Mexico toward the U.S. border,” Polansek and Douglas reported. “An outbreak could further elevate record-high U.S. beef prices by reducing the U.S. cattle supply. ‘It could truly crush the cattle industry,’ Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at a news conference with Rollins.”

“The production plant in Edinburg, Texas, would be located with a previously announced sterile fly dispersal facility at Moore Air Base and be able to produce 300 million sterile screwworm flies per week, Rollins said. Sterile flies reduce the mating population of the wild flies,” Polansek and Douglas reported. “Rollins did not say when the plant would open but previously said such a facility would take two to three years to build. The USDA will spend another $100 million on technologies to combat screwworm while the facility is being constructed and hire more mounted officers to patrol the border for infested wildlife, Rollins said.”