A Recall Update and Chance to Help
October 2nd, 2026
Hi Everyone,
Earlier this month we recalled our eggs due to positive tests for Salmonella enteritidis (SE). Our mission is to feed and nourish our Leaping Bear Farm community and thoughtfully steward our land and animals, so this was deeply upsetting. We believe we owe our community transparency, so we wanted to update you on what happened, what we've learned, our solutions to prevent this from happening again, and how you can support us.
If you’re reading about this for the first time, we have to advise anyone who could still have our eggs in their fridge not to eat them. Please, please throw them away and sanitize any surfaces, including your fridge, that they may have come into contact with. Your health and safety is our highest priority.
What happened
We made the tough decision to recall our eggs mid September due to positive tests associating our eggs with SE.
In early July, cases of salmonella illness started popping up in Southern VT. By early September the department of health determined through interviews with sick patients that our farm and eggs had become a strong signal for the possible origin of these illnesses. Working together with the Department of Ag, they visited our farm and swabbed our processing facility, hens and hen houses and collected fresh eggs.
Their samples positively identified direct matches in our egg washer, a perch in our older flocks hen house, and in the eggs from our younger flock. The science was irrefutable with a 100% match to the whole genome sequence found on our farm and these sick patients. Unfortunately for our farm, the testing indicated our hens were carrying a strain of SE that they passed directly into their eggs. This was devastating news to us as a farm whose mission is to provide healthy, healing food for our community, and we knew we had some tough decisions to make.
How do hens get Salmonella
Over the last few weeks we reached out to state officials, poultry health experts, researchers, scientists, food safety experts, farm advisors, and other reputable producers to understand how this could happen on a pasture raised operation and what our options were for our hens. We now understand that are many vectors that could have introduced the SE to our hens, like local wildlife, the rodent population, contaminated water, soil or feed, as well as using second-hand equipment. While we’ll never pinpoint what caused the contamination, we have learned what factors we have control over and how best to mitigate this from happening again in the future.
Salmonella is ubiquitous in chickens and they carry without symptoms, and our chickens appeared healthy, giving us no external indication that this had spread throughout our flock.
Culling and starting over
Unfortunately, the process to eradicate this strain from the hens and clean and sanitize their environment really wasn’t feasible for us. The best case scenario for our hens looked like it would be a many months long process that we simply could not manage, and even then did not ensure 100% eradication.
With no egg cash flow we had no way to feed our flock or manage their output, so we decided to cull all of our laying hens. For three nights, we systematically culled 1,600 chickens while they roosted in their houses for the night. As much as we didn’t want to do this, it really was the only way to make sure we could stop the salmonella cycle. As you can imagine, this has been an extremely traumatic experience because we care deeply about our animals, our land, and the food we provide; but protecting the health and safety of our community is our farm’s greatest priority.
Our solutions
We have been hard at work developing a plan of action that would adequately ensure that this scenario never happens again for us in the future. To safely begin again, we have been advised to pour concrete in our winter housing rather than deep bed them over the winter on the soil. We will be thoroughly cleaning and disinfecting everything, but you can’t disinfect dirt. We plan to purchase vaccinated pullets to ensure some additional resilience against possible environmental exposure. We will also do further testing of the environment to make sure we are clear before we bring a new flock of laying hens onto the farm. And lastly, we need to finish our food safe processing facility to safely wash, process, and store our eggs year round. These solutions are vital pieces that we need to implement to ensure we can safely provide eggs to our community again.
How to help
Over the past few weeks, our gracious and generous Leaping Bear community from Reading, Ludlow, Londonderry, Putney and Woodstock, friends, neighbors, small business owners and other farms have been asking us how they can help us. We are so incredibly grateful for the support of everyone who reached out to us.
We find so much purpose in providing food for our community and we want to be able to continue bringing you pasture raised, organic eggs grown on this beautiful land in the mountains of Vermont. Just last year, after years of searching, we were able to acquire this amazing land to farm on, and we want to continue doing so for many, many more years to come.
Our eggs were an important source of cash flow for the farm, particularly through the winter. Losing our entire flock has created an enormous financial strain at a time when we have already invested heavily to obtain our farm and build over $100,000 in infrastructure this past year to support our egg business after moving.
It takes a lot to farm, especially when you’re first generation, small scale farmers. There is no institutional safety net for farms like ours. Without the income and cash flow that our eggs provided we will need your help to start again.
To ask for help at this time is humbling, especially from a community that has also been affected by this experience. With your donation we will begin rebuilding our flock and continue providing fresh, organic, pasture-raised eggs to our community.
Our next steps to rebuilding include more than cleaning and sanitizing our equipment. To start again, we need to:
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Complete the build of our food-safe egg processing facility
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Install concrete flooring in our winter housing
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Purchase a new, vaccinated flock
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Cover feed costs while the new flock grows into production
Our projected costs for these goals are more than $100,000.
Our goal is to raise $75,000 to help us rebuild.
We want the opportunity to come back from this experience safer, more knowledgeable, and better equipped to farm for many years to come. Your donation will help us get back on our feet and continue doing what we love: caring for our animals and land and providing fresh, organic food to our community, farming ethically, and being stewards of the land.
If you’re able to give, thank you. If you can’t, sharing our campaign is also a meaningful way to support us.
With so much gratitude,
Justin & Vanessa