Cattle industry warns of killer parasite posing $11 billion threat to Texas

The U.S. is ramping up the fight against a parasite that experts say is a multibillion-dollar threat to the Texas cattle industry.

America has temporarily blocked cattle imports from Mexico due to concerns of the New World screwworm, which devastated herds in the Lone Star State for decades in the 20^th century.

The action came as the price of beef in the United States was already at an all-time high.

Carter Johnson runs Fort Worth Cattle Company, which ships packages of beef directly to buyers through their website.

He says a full-scale threat to the US beef industry is getting closer and closer to Texas.

“It’s really bad, it kills a lot of cattle, it kills a lot of wildlife,” said Johnson, the CEO of Fort Worth Cattle Co. “Can get in any, you know, dogs, humans, pretty scary.”

Last month the USDA closed the southern border for 30 days to shipments of cattle from Mexico after the New World screwworm was sighted within 700 miles of the U.S.

“It is a predator fly that feeds on the living flesh of all warm-blooded animals,” said Wayne Cockrell, a member of the board of directors of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. “And that’s humans all the way to obviously cattle, wildlife, deer.”

The screwworm was eradicated from Texas in the 1960s after four decades, during which the fly spread its eggs between cattle and killed them by the thousands.

The resurgence of the screwworm comes as beef prices in the US are at record highs: in April, data from the National Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the average cost of a price of ground beef was $5.80, the most it’s ever been.

Cutting off access to cattle from Mexico for a month has only driven up that cost.

“Less inventory -- it’s increased the prices,” said Cockrell. “Closing that border, that’s 1.25 to 1.5 million cattle a year that cross, so just the timing of that is why this had an impact.”

Experts said the bigger impact would be if the screwworm makes it back into the US. Texas A&M AgriLife estimates that between the cattle industry and shutting down tourist spending for the Texas deer hunting season, the state could lose more than $11 billion a year to the New World screwworm.

Texas ranchers said for businesses like theirs, it could be a death sentence.

“You lose 10 head in a lot of 40, which is absolutely possible with the screwworm, that’s $40,000,” said Johnson. “That is killer on a small business.”

So, how did Texas eliminate the screwworm before?

Three factories were built that used radiation to sterilize the male flies, stopping the parasite from reproducing.

Today, only one of those factories is still running: the COPEG plant down in Panama, which is producing only 12% of the 800 million flies a week that were used to stop the last outbreak.

“With the hundred million flies we currently have, we won’t even eradicate it from Texas,” said Cockrell.

The USDA has announced it’s working to build a new fly factory in Mexico to help drive back the threat.

Here in North Texas, ranchers could only hope that action would be taken fast enough to keep their cows alive.

“It is a real problem,” said Johnson. “And if we have to worry about that, that brings a lot of uncertainty to the market, and I have no idea what that’s going to do.”