At the beginning of the year, Doug Corwin’s duck farm was thriving. By January 13, one of his barns held 12,000 two-week-old ducklings. It was cold, but they looked healthy. Another flock of 800 birds, six to seven weeks old, was doing well too. “They were absolutely beautiful,” Corwin says, sitting at his desk in Aquebogue, just east of Riverhead. On the walls are a framed photo of duck farmers posing outside John Duck’s Restaurant and a few aerial shots of Crescent Duck Farm, which Corwin’s great-grandfather Henry founded in 1908 on land the family had lived on since the 1640s. On Tuesday, January 14, though, those flocks were hurting: Hundreds of the 12,000 ducklings were dead. Concerned, Corwin called Dr. Gavin Hitchener, the director of Cornell’s Duck Research Laboratory. Hitchener arrived on Wednesday morning to investigate. By then, the illness was spreading fast. “We were crossing our fingers hoping this was something different,” Corwin remembers. That Thursday, the worst was confirmed: bird flu. Hitchener called the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which told him what needed to happen next. Corwin would have to cull every duck on the farm — all 100,000 of them. The entire place would have to be quarantined indefinitely.
When Crescent opened more than a century ago, Suffolk County had a bounty of duck farms, but by the 1980s, rising costs and competition from the Midwest had made the business less feasible. Still, Corwin — who had just graduated from Cornell — decided to go to work for his father, whom he credits with rescuing the farm from the brink of bankruptcy. Corwin took pride in the quality of his ducks, perfectly bred for cooking with a thick, but not too thick, layer of fat. “I’ve hand-felt billions of birds,” he says, walking me out to the now-emptied farm. “I’ve bounced sound waves off chests to see the breast thickness, the skin-fat thickness of probably a million birds over the years.” In time, the farm developed a following among chefs — Daniel Boulud is a Crescent loyalist, as is Tom Colicchio. Other duck farms continued to shutter, and eventually Corwin was the last duck farmer on Long Island.
Crescent is hardly the first farm to be hit by bird flu recently. Over the past three years, 162.6 million domestic and commercial birds have been infected. As of February 19, the USDA has confirmed outbreaks in 157 flocks, affecting more than 23 million birds so far this year. Wild birds are dying in unknown numbers; egg prices are soaring. (When a strain of the virus jumped from birds to cows recently, an evolutionary biologist told the New York Times, “This is not what anyone wanted to see.”) It’s not the first time Corwin has seen an outbreak — during his career, he has witnessed three, each of which, he says, was seasonal and contained by the USDA’s policy of flock depopulation. But to him, this time feels different: “I’ve never seen anything as contagious and as virulent as this, nothing that even compares.”
After he figured out what was going on, he called the feed mill in Eastport, where his son Blake is the facility manager, to tell him that, for the time being, there wouldn’t be any more ducks to feed. Then he had to let go of 45 employees. “It’s right up there with my parents passing away as the hardest day of my life,” Corwin says. The next day, local leaders from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service arrived and instructed him to remove as many dead birds as possible before the culling began in earnest. So Corwin spent the weekend driving a payloader filled with bucket after bucket of dead ducks destined for the compost barn. On January 21, 14 government workers from APHIS and the State Department of Agriculture and Markets and 30 contractors arrived for the depopulation. While Corwin is reluctant to go into lurid detail, most rapid culling in this country is performed through asphyxiation, either by spraying birds with a water-based, suffocating foam, which is what Crescent was forced to do, or cutting off ventilation in an enclosed barn. (Other farms have employed a method called ventilation shutdown, which involves turning off the air and pumping in heat in an enclosed barn.) After the Suffolk County Board of Health showed up, informing all employees that they would need to be tested, word began to travel. “That opened the floodgates,” Corwin says. An NBC News helicopter hovered over the farm, “all while we’re trying to do the ugliest of the ugly.”
After the culling, tens of thousands more carcasses had to be taken to the compost barn, a 26,000-square-foot building with concrete floors and a domed ceiling that glows yellow in the sunlight. Corwin shows it to me. Most of what’s left of Crescent now sits in four giant black mounds, like huge stacks of coal, containing 80 percent of the ducks’ remains. The rest is in another compost pile elsewhere on the farm. The compost piles are built to allow airflow so the heat generated by the bacteria breaking down the ducks will be distributed equally.
“I never want to be a victim,” Corwin says. “It is what it is.” As we walk, I watch a group of workers in white Tyvek suits climb into a truck. His remaining employees — farmhands and a handful of his family members (his sister and niece, his brother and brother-in-law, and his son Pierce all work on the farm) — are cleaning. They’re removing litter, manure, and feed for composting; washing tube fans; and emptying the hatchery of eggs. Next, each barn has to be cleaned by hand. Then the high-power disinfectant can be used. Then they’ll fumigate. Finally, the USDA will swab each barn 25 times. Nodding at one, Corwin explains that some barns are made of timber from the Second Avenue elevated train that was brought to the farm by his grandfather in the 1940s.
Corwin estimates that there’s a 95 percent chance he’ll reopen. The USDA allowed Crescent to keep some eggs that were laid before the outbreak. The eggshells were subjected to a high-strength chlorine wash, then brought to a hatchery for incubation; Corwin doesn’t expect them to hatch well. It will still be some time before he has enough ducks to operate at all. The USDA will apparently compensate the farm with $500,000, he estimates, for ducks he says were worth $1.5 million. He guesses he’s spending $40,000 a week cleaning the farm and couldn’t make any income until October 2026. After that, if there’s another outbreak, he says he’ll throw in the towel. But for now, he plans to keep going. “I’d be richer if I said ‘Fuck it,’ got a big concrete-crusher, brought in some equipment, tore this place apart, and marketed it as real estate,” he says. “But I don’t care about being the richest person. I like growing ducks.”