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 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 295 million kilograms of chicken manure produced in Maryland 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 US 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 the rules 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.
‘ONE OF THE BAY’S BIGGEST POLLUTERS’
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 roughly just over US$4 per kilogram when virtually no other protein source with so little fat is that cheap, Winegrad said.
Environmentalists and state officials have also become frustrated that after more than a decade of spending over US$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.”
RSS