There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over Pennsylvania farm country when something is wrong. Drive through Lancaster County on any given morning and the fields look the same — flat, wide, and impossibly green. But behind those neat rows and red barns, farmers are navigating a season that has piled crisis on top of crisis in ways that are genuinely hard to keep up with.
Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding has been at the center of most of it. In June 2026, his office issued a quarantine order limiting animal movement across the state, citing rising concern over New World screwworm — a parasite that hasn’t established itself in Pennsylvania but has been turning up in Texas and New Mexico. The pest is not like the ordinary flies farmers swat away without a second thought. Its larvae burrow into living tissue, feeding on the flesh of livestock, pets, and wildlife. State Veterinarian Dr. Alex Hamberg described the distinction clearly: these larvae cause wounds that can become life-threatening quickly if left untreated. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s just the biology.
Redding was careful with his language when announcing the quarantine. Pennsylvania, he said, has no confirmed cases. But the proactive order was clearly designed to keep it that way — restricting unnecessary animal movement from affected regions and tightening biosecurity standards before anything arrives. It’s the agricultural equivalent of locking the barn door before the horse has any chance to bolt. Whether that turns out to be wise precaution or unnecessary disruption probably depends on how the next few months unfold.
The screwworm order, though significant, is only part of what Lancaster County has been absorbing. Months earlier, in February, Redding and Governor Josh Shapiro were at the Lancaster County Rapid Response Center for a different emergency entirely — a surge in Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, commonly known as bird flu or HPAI.
They sat down with poultry producers and industry leaders face to face, which matters in places like Lancaster, where farmers are more likely to trust a conversation than a press release. Pennsylvania’s poultry industry generates roughly $7.1 billion in economic activity. When HPAI starts moving through flocks, that number becomes very fragile very fast.
Then came April. A late freeze swept through the state and devastated fruit crops before growers had any real warning. By May, Redding and Shapiro were walking the grounds of Cherry Hill Orchards in Lancaster County, meeting with growers who had watched their harvest essentially disappear overnight. The administration sent a letter to USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins urging expedited disaster designation — faster damage assessments, quicker access to crop insurance payments, broader federal support. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture had by that point spoken with more than 200 growers statewide to document what they’d lost.
There’s a sense, watching all of this unfold, that Redding is managing several different emergencies simultaneously while trying not to let any one of them define the whole story. That’s a difficult position. A quarantine order gets attention. Bird flu roundtables get photographs. But the slow work of pushing federal agencies to move faster, of coordinating testing capacity, of sitting with farmers who are genuinely frightened about their financial futures — that’s the part that doesn’t photograph well.
It’s still unclear whether the federal response will come quickly enough to make a real difference for the growers hit by the April freeze. Disaster designations and insurance claims take time. Farmers don’t always have much of it. What is clear is that Lancaster County has become something of a testing ground for how the state handles simultaneous agricultural pressures — pests, disease, weather, federal bureaucracy — all arriving at once.
Redding, to his credit, has stayed visible. Whether visibility translates into outcomes for Pennsylvania’s farm families is the question that doesn’t have an answer yet.
