Texas Gov. Greg Abbott expressed concern Friday that a new plant is not expected to break ground Breeding of sterile New World screwworm flies for more than a year as part of a major effort to prevent their flesh-eating larvae from threatening the $113 billion livestock industry.
Abbott pledged that Texas would help the USDA speed up the construction process $750 million breeding facility Just outside Edinburg, Texas, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Texas is willing to spend its own money to make sure construction “continues 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said.
Abbott said during a press conference in the state capital, Austin, that without increased production of sterile flies, “we cannot get through a second summer.”
US Department of Agriculture The infection was confirmed of New World screwworm fly larvae this week in a 3-week-old calf in La Priore, Texas, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) southwest of San Antonio and 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the Mexico border. It is the first confirmed case in Texas since 1966.
The new plant in Texas is the larger of two fly-rearing facilities funded by the USDA.
Separately, the USDA invested $21 million in converting a site in southern Mexico from raising fruit flies to raising screwworm flies. This factory is expected to start producing flies next month, i.e. 100 million per week.
The other plant in Texas will be the size of two Costco stores, said Adm. Michael Schmoyer, a member of the USDA’s screwworm response team. It is expected to produce up to 300 million flies per week.
Officials believe both plants are needed to eliminate the fly from the United States, Mexico and Central America.
The federal government has already shortened the planning and construction timeline significantly, drafting plans in a few months instead of taking a year, for example, Schmoyer said. The USDA hopes to be up and running sooner than the scheduled opening date of November 2027, US Agriculture Secretary Brock Rollins said.
But Abbott said Texas is determined to speed up construction.
“This will spread out over the course of the summer,” he said of the fly.
An untreated infestation of New World screwworm fly larvae can kill an animal, but there are now dozens of government-approved drugs to treat livestock. Federal and state officials were quick to stress that the fly’s larvae — which feed on living matter — do not infect meat or fruit.
“There is a food production issue, but it is not a food safety issue,” Abbott said.
Beef supplies are unlikely to be affected unless officials restrict livestock movement more than at the local level or unless infections appear in feedlots or other places where cattle are concentrated, said Derrell Bell, an agribusiness professor at Oklahoma State University. He doesn’t expect that to happen.
“This is probably not a big problem in the market,” he said.
Consumers pay Record beef prices Due to tight cattle supplies, Bell expects prices to rise further as ranchers remove calves from the supply chain to rebuild their herds. But he said the screwworm’s arrival in Texas “doesn’t change the fundamentals of the show.”
A screwworm outbreak in Mexico starting in 2024 has prompted U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brock Rollins to close U.S. ports of entry to livestock. In May 2025. Mexico’s imports previously amounted to about 1.2 million animals annually, and fell by about 80% last year, according to industry statistics.
But Mexican imports represent only about 3% of the U.S. livestock supply, Bell said.
“It was just an additional thing on top of other things,” he said, not a major driver of prices.
The New World screwworm fly was an annual warm-weather pest of U.S. ranchers from the 1930s through at least the 1960s.
But breeding sterile flies and dropping swarms of them from airplanes led to their elimination in the United States by the early 1970s, except for a brief outbreak among deer in the Florida Keys in 2016 and a confirmed case. In man maryland Who traveled to El Salvador last year. Until an outbreak in Panama in 2023, this fly was considered to have been eradicated outside the remote southernmost region on the border with Colombia.
Females mate once in their months-long lives, and if they mate with sterile male flies, their eggs will not hatch after being laid in the open wounds and mucous membranes of warm-blooded animals, including livestock, wild mammals, domestic pets, and humans.
Once the United States and other countries eradicated the fly years ago, they closed their fly-breeding facilities until there was only one facility left in the Western Hemisphere, in Panama. It can produce about 117 million flies per week.
However, previous eradication efforts needed about 500 million flies per week, Schmoyer, a member of the USDA’s screwworm response team, said during Abbott’s news conference.
Schmoyer estimated that the USDA has already distributed 130 million fly drops in Texas since January, most of them from airplanes, and the number of those drops is now about 4 million per week. They also release another 4 million per week into the ground as cocoons, which are flies in the stage between larvae and adults.
But even with these millions of flies, the USDA has to be strategic about where to distribute them, Schmoyer told reporters. Federal and state officials use scientific models to predict how the fly will move.
“In essence, it’s not about where the flies are today, but where they could be weeks from now,” he said.
Part of the science involves using traps, and Texas state veterinarian Bud Dinges said they were deployed 120 miles (193 kilometers) from La Priore to monitor the fly’s movement.