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The UC Cooperative Extension poultry farm advisor for Southern California, the Central Coast and the San Joaquin Valley, Doug Kuney, completed a 34-year career working with the California egg industry when he retired April 1.

Kuney was exposed to agriculture as a teenager when his Tulare Union High School football coach lined up summer jobs for players that kept them in shape and heat tolerant. In various positions, Kuney chopped cotton, served as an assistant irrigator and loaded hay. The farm labor piqued an interest in the agriculture industry, though he angled toward agricultural science.

After a four-year stint in the Air Force, Kuney earned a bachelor’s degree in microbiology at Colorado State University in 1975. When he entered graduate school to study animal science, the only position available was in the poultry department, happenstance that shaped his career.

An internship at UC Riverside with poultry specialist Milo Swanson brought him back to California in 1977. The opportunity led to his hiring as Swanson’s staff research associate the same year.

“I fell in love with the work,” Kuney said. “I never returned to Colorado, except to defend my master’s thesis. I did my master’s research in California under Milo Swanson.”

In 1985, Kuney became a farm advisor, a role that permitted him to focus on public and environmental health issues, poultry health and disease prevention, nutrition and general management.

“I love to serve people and help people in agriculture,” Kuney said.

Kuney’s career has been oriented toward commercial chicken egg production, the primary poultry industry in Southern California. He worked with farmers to develop nutrition, disease management and environmental management practices that would promote egg quality. Over the years, he began to take on a role in public policy and land use issues, especially as they related to the urban-agriculture interface.

For example, poultry manure supports the development of several fly pests. Residential development on former ag lands or open lands near poultry farms led to conflicts between farms and their new suburban neighbors. Kuney and his colleagues developed management strategies that minimize the fly population on chicken farms.

In October 2002, a devastating animal disease was discovered in several small flocks of chickens in Southern California. By December, Exotic Newcastle Disease had spread to large commercial flocks of egg-laying chickens. To eradicate the disease, over 3.5 million chickens had to be euthanized, however, there was a shortage of soil for covering the carcasses at landfills.

“Some other method of burial had to be developed,” Kuney said.

He worked with the Riverside County Waste Management Department  and landfill managers to develop a biosecure method of covering the carcasses with 12 feet of trash that could be compacted into a three-foot-thick cover. Each delivery of carcasses could be completely covered within 10 minutes. The impervious layer of compacted trash kept out sea gulls and other scavengers that could have spread Exotic Newcastle Disease.

Kuney was one of the founders of the California Egg Quality Assurance Program, which was established to prevent egg-associated human outbreaks of Salmonella and he worked with the UC Riverside Department of Entomology to determine the economic impact of Northern Fowl mite infestations in producing flocks.

More recently, Kuney has supported the industry as it plans to meet new animal husbandry requirements that were instituted by passage of Proposition 2 in 2010. Beginning in 2012, the industry must provide laying hens room to turn around and stretch their wings, but many details remain unclear.

“The proposition doesn’t say you can’t have the hens in cages, and it doesn’t say whether or not all the birds need to be able to outstretch their wings and turn around at the same time,” Kuney said. “There has been no research done in the U.S. on the conditions Prop 2 was recommending. My role has been to sit down and talk to producers to help them interpret and understand the new law.”

Though Kuney is retiring, he will not exit the poultry industry. He will work as a part-time consultant to the Pacific Egg and Poultry Association and will continue to serve as executive secretary of the Inland Empire Poultrymen Inc.

In his free time, Kuney said, he will spend more time golfing, hunting and fishing.