Safety Regs Muted as Barn Fires Rage

Another devastating year for barn fires is in the books: More than 573,000 animals are known to have died in fires during 2025. What isn’t in the books: state-established fire safety standards that might have spared many of these animals from such a horrible fate.

As in previous years, the overwhelming majority (99%) of the victims were chickens, mostly on densely crowded industrial farms. The three deadliest fires in 2025—all on large-scale poultry operations—reportedly killed 410,000 chickens combined. More troubling still is that, on two of these farms, this wasn’t the first such incident: Both have previously experienced conflagrations that killed hundreds of thousands of chickens on the premises.

New York logged the highest number of fatal barn fires last year (14), followed by Pennsylvania (13), Illinois (9), Ohio (8), and Wisconsin (6). Ohio, however, had the highest number of fatalities—200,136—a total almost entirely due to a single fire on a pullet (young laying hen) operation in Darke County. None of these states have established specific fire safety standards to protect animals on farms. AWI is urging states to adopt the latest version of NFPA 150, the National Fire Protection Association’s animal housing fire safety standards.

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