Due to concerns over the avian influenza virus, the Minnesota State Fair announced new policies on Friday for cows currently producing milk.

With the State Fair less than a month away, State Fair officials said that while Open Class, 4-H and FFA dairy cattle shows will still be held as scheduled, new guidelines from the Minnesota Board of Animal Health will require all lactating cows brought to the State Fair to be tested for the H5N1 virus within seven days.

Other livestock shows will continue as usual.

At the CHS Miracle of Birth Center, there will be no live dairy calf births, but dairy calves, a non-lactating dairy cow and beef cow/calf pairs will be on display.

Other animals such as sheep, pigs and poultry will still have live births, and representatives from the FFA, University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine and Minnesota Veterinary Medical Association will still be on hand to educate visitors.

The Cattle Barn and Moo Booth milking parlor will still be open to visitors at its regularly scheduled time. Only lactating cows with negative H5N1 tests will be in the barn; the Moo Booth is enclosed, and visitors watch the milking process through glass windows.  Hand-milking demonstrations will take place with a fiberglass cow.

No changes are planned for the poultry exhibits, but the statement said that State Fair officials are taking precautions “to minimize contact between dairy cattle and poultry at the fair.”

The Minnesota State Fair update can be found at mnstatefair.org/updates.

H5N1 in Minnesota

In early June, H5N1, also known as avian influenza type A, was detected in dairy cattle in Minnesota, according to the state Department of Health. Originally found in wild birds and domestic poultry in 2022, H5N1 has been detected in more than 200 mammals in 2024 as well as a small number of dairy workers who had been in contact with sick cattle.

Lucas Sjostrom, a dairy farmer and executive director of the Minnesota Milk Producers Association, said that avian influenza was not something dairy farmers had to worry about much before.

“We’ve had to learn a lot in the last seven months,” Sjostrom said.

One thing he did learn, he said, is that all milk and mammary glands are a vector for the spread of any type of influenza, including avian influenza. However, according to Sjostrom, there isn’t much known about what sort of exposure leads to the spread of H5N1 — whether it be as direct as ingesting raw milk, fumes or touch. Sjostrom noted that it is specifically raw, unpasteurized milk that can carry the virus. The pasteurization process “obliterates” viruses and infections, Sjostrom said.

The main reason the disease took so long to detect, Sjostrom said, is because symptoms tend to be much more mild in cattle than they do in birds. Particularly for poultry like chicken and turkey, it can be deadly. Sjostrom said that the symptoms in cattle like cows tends to look similar to their equivalent of a “tummy ache,” and awareness of it being H5N1 only began to spread when dairy farmers noticed multiple herds of cattle all getting sick at the same time.

The danger of H5N1, Carol Cardona of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences says, is this recent leap from avians to cattle. Those types of animals often share an ecosystem, which implies that the virus has mutated to be able to “leap” from avians to mammals like cattle, which are much closer to humans on the evolutionary tree.

The impact is smaller when it’s a handful of dairy farmers that work with animals regularly, but chance for infection increases when there is a large number of human interaction with the animals at an event like the State Fair.

According to health officials, dairy farmers who were infected in Michigan and Texas experienced “mild illness, including red or water eyes (conjunctivitis) or cough.”

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