Homestead mailing list

[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

Evidently this stuff is not worth trucking to fields to sell or give away as 
fertilizer

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Maryland, Focus on Poultry Industry Pollution 
 
Veronika Lukasova for The New York Times

Lee Richardson next to a manure shed on his chicken farm in Willards, Md. 
Excess poultry manure is washing into the Chesapeake Bay, worsening its 
condition. More Photos > 


 
By IAN URBINA

Published: November 28, 2008 
WILLARDS, Md. — Standing before a two-story-tall pile of chicken manure, Lee 
Richardson pondered how times had changed.

 “When I left school and started working the land, this stuff was seen as 
farmer’s gold,” said Mr. Richardson, 38, a fifth-generation chicken grower, 
explaining that the waste was an ideal fertilizer for the region’s sandy 
soil. “Now, it’s too much of a good thing.”

How to handle the 650 million pounds of chicken manure produced in the state 
each year has sparked a fierce debate between environmentalists and the 
state’s powerful poultry industry. State officials hope to bring Maryland in 
line with most other states next month by enacting new rules for where, how 
and how long chicken farmers can spread the manure on their fields or store 
it in outdoor piles. 

“We don’t let hog or dairy farms spread their waste unregulated, and we 
wouldn’t let a town of 25,000 people dump human manure untreated on open 
lands,” said Gerald W. Winegrad, a public policy professor at the University 
of Maryland who is a former state senator. “So why should we allow a farm 
with 150,000 chickens do it?”

As the amount of cropland in Maryland has shrunk and the number of chickens 
raised has grown to 570 million, these mountains of manure have become a 
liability because the excess is washing into the Chesapeake Bay, one of the 
nation’s most polluted estuaries, and further worsening the plight of the 
fishermen who ply its waters. 

But the chicken farmers say that they are already doing their part to protect 
the environment and that the proposed regulations come as the industry is 
reeling from record-high energy and feed prices.

“This will absolutely kill anyone coming into the poultry industry,” Kenny 
Bounds, a government affairs officer for Mid-Atlantic Farm Credit, said at 
one of three public hearings in the last month, where farmers objected to the 
regulations and said they might push some growers out of the state.

The poultry industry in Maryland, the state’s most lucrative form of 
agriculture and one of its largest employers, has expanded to feed the 
nation’s growing hunger for cheap chicken.

The lower prices, however, are possible only from huge economies of scale. 
And the bigger the farms, the more birds and the more manure there are to 
handle. 

State officials have started to realize that there are consequences to being 
able to sell skinless, boneless chicken breast for just over $2 per pound 
when virtually no other protein source with so little fat is that cheap, Mr. 
Winegrad said.

Environmentalists and state officials have also become frustrated that after 
more than a decade of spending over $100 million a year in state money on 
restoration efforts, the Chesapeake, unlike most other mid-Atlantic 
waterways, has only grown more polluted.

As the phosphorous and nitrogen levels in the bay have grown, so have the 
algae that deplete oxygen needed by other aquatic life. 

In the past two decades, working oystermen on the bay have dropped to less 
than 500, from 6,000. The crab population has fallen by 70 percent. 

“A lot of chicken farmers are already doing the right thing when it comes to 
pollution,” said Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen’s 
Association, adding that he thought the poultry regulations would be a step 
in the right direction. “But there needs to be more done to make sure that 
everyone does the right thing.”

Under the state’s proposed rules, 75 to 100 of the 800 largest poultry 
farmers in Maryland would have to apply for permits to handle manure. State 
officials would also begin inspecting these farms unannounced and levying 
heavy fines if violations are not eventually corrected. The rules would not 
affect smaller farms.

Michele Merkel, a lawyer with the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental 
advocacy group, said the permits did not go far enough. Too few farms would 
be required to have them, Ms. Merkel said, and they allow farmers to pile the 
waste in their fields open to the rain for 90 days, while most other states 
permit it to be uncovered for only 14 days.

Maryland is most famous for its blue crabs, oysters and watermen, so it has a 
lot to lose from polluting these waters, Ms. Merkel said. 

“That’s exactly why it’s never made sense to me,” she said, “that the state 
is so unwilling to really regulate one of the bay’s biggest polluters.”

The economic might of the poultry industry is certainly part of the reason.

Concentrated in Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester Counties along the Eastern 
Shore, the industry contributes more than $700 million annually to the 
Maryland economy.

For every job added on a chicken farm, seven related jobs are created in 
slaughterhouses, construction and trucking, according to industry estimates. 

Just inland from the shore, the scope of the farms overwhelms the senses. The 
500-foot-long chicken houses stretch from the roadways like airplane hangars.

Inside each house, 20,000 to 35,000 chickens cramp the floors farther than 
the eye can see. Feed and water are delivered in automated pipes that stretch 
the length of the houses.

Corn and soy fields separate the houses from the roads, and three quarters of 
the state’s crop go toward feeding the birds. 

Gigantic fans suction ammonia from the birds’ waste, filling the air for 
miles around. 



Under the proposed regulations, chicken growers would be required to maintain 
a 35-foot-wide filter strip of vegetation along streams and ditches, or not 
to apply manure within 50 feet of streams or 10 feet of ditches, and they 
would be required to keep manure piles more than 100 feet from streams. The 
permits would also assess fines of up to $32,500 per day if farmers did not 
correct problems after being told to do so.

The liability for the manure would fall to the growers who raise the 
chickens, rather than the larger companies that own the birds, provide the 
feed and drop off a new batch of chicks every eight weeks. 

Bill Satterfield, director of the local poultry trade association, Delmarva 
Poultry Industry Inc., said the farmers were an important engine for the 
state’s economic well-being. 

“We’re also already doing our part when it comes to the environment,” Mr. 
Satterfield said.

Farmers already work to plant trees and environmental buffers around chicken 
houses and feed the birds an ingredient to cut down on the phosphorous in 
their manure. They also recycle some of their manure in the world’s largest 
chicken manure recycling plant, which produces organic fertilizer pellets 
that can be shipped elsewhere. 

Storm runoff from urban areas, lawn fertilizers and pollution from cars and 
sewage treatment plants also play major roles in polluting the bay. But 
Environmental Protection Agency officials say that agriculture is the largest 
single source of pollutants and sediment in the Chesapeake Bay, accounting 
for over 40 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorous and over 70 percent of 
the sediment. 

State officials say that animal manure produces more phosphorus and nearly 
the same amount of nitrogen pollution as all human wastewater from treatment 
plants in the state. 

Although the dairy and hog industry in states near the bay produce more 
pounds of manure, poultry waste has more than twice the concentration of 
pollutants per pound. Reducing pollution from agriculture is also about a 
tenth as costly as it is to achieve the same reductions from urban 
development, state and federal environmental officials say.

“The reason to focus on poultry,” said Tom Simpson, executive director of 
Water Stewardship, an environmental nonprofit agency, “is that sewage 
treatment plants have already been required to reduce their pollution and 
storm water runoff from cities and large dairy and hog farms have permits 
that can be used to limit their water pollution.”

But in the past two decades, the poultry industry has carved a special role 
for itself in terms of the oversight it receives, and it has twice defeated 
state efforts to impose permits.

Maryland is one of the only states where the poultry industry is regulated by 
the State Department of Agriculture, whose primary mission is helping 
farmers, and not by the State Department of the Environment, which is charged 
with enforcing pollution laws.

Most other states with large poultry farms already require the permits and 
regular inspections.

In Maryland, however, chicken farmers have only had to file nutrient 
management plans with state agriculture officials, describing how they 
control their chicken waste each year. 

These documents are not public. The guidelines for manure storage are 
optional, and the fine for not filing a plan is $350. 

Standing in front of his pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said “It’s 
not farmland without farmers,” Mr. Richardson shook his head in frustration.

“As far as I can tell, the current system works fine except a few bad 
apples,” he said. “What they are proposing now is just more cost for us 
growers and more time doing paperwork.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/us/29poultry.html