The Fly Factory Is Hiring 228 People. The Building Isn't Finished Until April.

Somewhere between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. on any of three days next week, at a hotel convention center in McAllen, USDA plans to hire the workforce for a factory that does not yet have a finished roof.

The department announced Tuesday that it is filling 228 positions at the New World Screwworm Sterile Fly Production Facility at Moore Air Base in Edinburg. Applications opened the same day on USAJobs, and the in-person hiring fair runs Nov. 17 through Nov. 19 at the Embassy Suites by Hilton McAllen Convention Center on Convention Center Blvd. Hiring managers will be on site interviewing during the event, according to the announcement, and APHIS is advertising on-the-spot offers for select positions. No registration is required; the agency says openings will be posted online the week before the fair, and that applicants can apply in advance to have an interview scheduled rather than queueing.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins framed the hire as a strategic milestone rather than a staffing notice. "Protecting U.S. livestock and wildlife from New World Screwworm is a national security priority, and this new facility will drastically boost the availability of sterile flies — our most successful offensive capability to drive these serious pests away from our border," she said in the release. Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Dudley Hoskins, who has carried much of the department's public messaging on the outbreak, described the fair as a route into government work for people who had not considered it: "This hiring event gives people who may never have considered working in government an opportunity to join a mission worthy of the challenging work."

APHIS's own careers page for the site is broader than the press release. It describes "hundreds of professionals across multiple career fields, from scientific and technical roles to skilled trades, safety, administrative support, and information technology," and puts the facility's opening in spring 2027. USDA's release gives April 2027 as the construction completion date. The department has not published a breakdown of what the 228 positions are, what grades they carry, or how many of them are production-line rearing and irradiation jobs as opposed to support roles.

The production targets attached to those jobs are the reason the number matters. USDA says the Edinburg plant will be the first sterile fly production facility on U.S. soil, anticipated to begin producing 100 million sterile flies a week in 2027 and roughly 300 million a week at full capacity. The comparison set is small and mostly foreign: the Panama facility operated with Panama's agriculture ministry is described in the release as "the backbone of current efforts" at 100 million flies a week, and the plant in Metapa, Mexico, which opened in June 2026, is still ramping toward the same 100 million figure.

That arithmetic is what the outbreak has been short of. As Reuters reported last week, the two existing plants together were producing on the order of 150 million sterile flies a week, against the 500 million a week that the 1960s eradication campaign ran on — the benchmark experts still cite for holding the fly south of the Darién. USDA's release quotes capacity, not current output, and the two numbers should not be read as the same thing.

Divide 300 million by 228 and you get a little over 1.3 million flies per employee per week at full capacity. That is arithmetic, not a staffing standard: it says nothing about how many people work a rearing line, how many handle irradiation, or whether the plant runs one shift or three. Nobody outside the department has those numbers yet.

The schedule claim in the release is worth reading closely too. Rollins credits "the speed of the Trump Administration and the support of the Department of War and the Army Corps of Engineers" with an opening "nearly five years ahead of schedule." The release does not say what baseline that refers to. What is on the public record is the recent stretch of it: the project was reported in September as cut to roughly eighteen months, or fall 2027, and then moved to April 1, 2027 — a shift Rollins's screwworm adviser, John Bellinger, described to the Texas A&M Board of Regents as costing "only $250 million more."

What the hiring fair actually tests is whether the last eighteen months of construction schedule can be matched by a workforce. A sterile insect plant is a biological production line: it needs people who can rear larvae at scale, sex and load pupae, run irradiators, keep a biosecure building biosecure, and do it every week without a gap, because the technique works by flooding a landscape with sterile males continuously. Concrete gets poured on a calendar. Staff get hired, cleared, trained and retained, and the release gives no date for when the first flies are expected out of Edinburg.

For anyone in the Rio Grande Valley who wants one of the jobs, the fair runs 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Central each day at 800 Convention Center Blvd. in McAllen. The outbreak, meanwhile, is at 126 confirmed animal infestations since June, 63 of them still active as of Monday's federal count, with movement restrictions now covering parts of 25 Texas counties.