Barnwell Bio

There's a moment every poultry producer dreads.

You walk into the barn for morning rounds. Everything looks normal. Then you notice it. A few birds moving slower than usual. Maybe some sitting down when they should be active.

By the next day, dozens more are sick. By day three, you're losing birds.

The pathogen was already there a week ago. Spreading quietly. Multiplying. You just couldn't see it yet.

This isn't a hypothetical. It's happening right now. Bird flu has cost the U.S. economy over $14 billion in 2024-2025 alone. Over 70 million birds affected.

The gap between when disease arrives and when you can detect it is where the damage happens. By the time symptoms appear, it's already too late to stop the spread. You're in damage control mode.

Traditional testing waits for sick birds. Then you test. Wait for results. Try to contain what's already spreading through your barn.

But what if you could see the disease coming before the first bird got sick?

During COVID, that's exactly what wastewater surveillance did for cities. Public health officials could spot outbreaks before hospitals filled up. The data gave them a critical head start.

Three people who helped build that national wastewater monitoring system realized something. The same approach could work in agriculture.

They're now doing for poultry barns what they did for cities during the pandemic.

Here's what they built.

Barnwell Bio uses metagenomic sequencing on livestock wastewater to detect diseases weeks before symptoms appear, giving producers an early warning system against outbreaks.

Let's start with what's broken about disease detection on farms.

Right now, producers rely on visual checks and testing sick animals. You walk through the barn looking for symptoms. Lethargy. Reduced feed intake. Respiratory issues.

By the time you see those signs, the disease has already been spreading for days or weeks. You're playing catch-up with something that's already out of control.

Even when you suspect a problem, traditional testing looks for one specific pathogen at a time. Is it E. coli? Is it Salmonella? Is it avian flu? You test for each one individually. It's slow. It's expensive. And you might be looking for the wrong thing.

Barnwell Bio flips this entire approach.

Instead of testing individual sick birds, they analyze the waste from the entire barn. They collect foot swabs from the floor, which contains fecal matter from all the birds. Then they run it through metagenomic sequencing.

Metagenomic sequencing doesn't look for one pathogen. It reads everything. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites. The entire microbial ecosystem living in that barn.

Think of it like taking a complete census of every microbe in the environment. You're not asking "Is bird flu here?" You're asking "What's the complete microbial story of this barn right now?"

This creates what Barnwell calls a "microbiome fingerprint" unique to each facility. Every barn has its own baseline. Good bacteria. Bad bacteria. Neutral bacteria. All living together in a specific balance.

When something shifts in that balance, Barnwell catches it immediately. A pathogen starts multiplying. Beneficial bacteria drop. The fingerprint changes.

The system flags these changes weeks before birds show symptoms.

One of their customers wanted to test a probiotic litter amendment. They applied it to the barn floor before bringing in birds. Barnwell's monitoring detected a spike in the beneficial bacteria from the product five days after application.

But then it got interesting. The effect was short-lived. By the next sample a week later, those beneficial bacteria had returned to baseline levels.

However, the data showed something unexpected. The amendment reduced Staphylococcus levels for about a week. Nobody was looking for that. Nobody expected it. But the data caught it.

This changed everything for the customer. Instead of using the amendment throughout production, they're now testing it in pullet houses right before high-stress vaccination periods. That's when Staphylococcus control matters most.

That's the power of whole-barn intelligence. They didn’t just detect what they were looking for. They also were able to discover patterns they didn't even know existed.

Barnwell is currently focused on poultry, working with producers across layers, broilers, and breeders. Their partners include Mississippi State University, West Liberty Foods, and Vital Farms.

The bird flu work is particularly important right now. Barnwell has a grant from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research to build out their RNA platform for early avian flu detection.

But they're not just detecting presence. They're identifying which variants are circulating in a barn. Just like they did with COVID.

This matters for vaccine efficacy if bird flu vaccines ever get approved. But even without vaccines, knowing which variant you're dealing with helps prioritize biosecurity resources.

CEO Michael Rhys saw the same pattern in human health. The missing link between guessing and knowing is data. Veterinarians rely on limited diagnostics and intuition. They lack visibility into what's actually happening at the microbial level.

What Barnwell is really selling isn't just early disease detection. It's the shift from reactive firefighting to proactive management.

Producers can finally see what's happening in their barns before it becomes a crisis. Feed additive companies can prove their products actually work. Vets can make treatment decisions based on real data instead of best guesses.

And maybe, just maybe, we stop losing $14 billion to diseases we could have caught earlier

Barnwell Bio brings COVID-era bio surveillance to poultry ↗

How the team that built America's COVID wastewater monitoring system is now using the same approach to detect poultry diseases before outbreaks happen. [6 min read, AgFunderNews]

The turkey microbiome series: Part 1 ↗

On the road with Barnwell Bio visiting and working on turkey farms in Iowa. [Barnwell Bio]

Here is the link for part 2: The turkey microbiome: Part 2
Here is the link for part 3: The turkey microbiome: Part 3

Early detection in action: Catching crop mycosis in layers three weeks before symptoms ↗

Real case study from Barnwell's blog showing exactly how their system flagged a disease outbreak three full weeks before birds showed any symptoms and what the producer did about it. [6 min read, Barnwell Bio]

Two quick things:

- Enzo