State Secrets: Maryland Chicken Farms

Chicken waste — shown here stored illegally in an uncovered two story high ‘poop hill’ at a factory farm in Maryland — is particularly high in phosphorus.

State Secrets: What are they Hiding on maryland Chicken Farms?

By Bill gerlach, Waterkeeper alliance

»marYlanD PoultrY farms raise 270 million chickens each year and produce more than one billion pounds of poultry manure. This waste contains enormous amounts of phosphorus, nitrogen and other toxins — including human carcinogens, arsenic and other heavy metals. And when it rains, this waste doesn’t stay on the farm. Stormwater washes it off farms and fields straight into Chesapeake Bay. Today, agricultural runoff is the single largest source of pollution in the bay.

But the state agency responsible for managing this waste — the Maryland Department of Agriculture — is hiding the polluters. The department refuses to allow public access to the operational plans that detail how chicken farms dispose of their waste. No one actually knows where all this poop is going, except for factory farm operators, their bosses at large integrators such as Perdue, Tyson and Montaire, and a few privileged state bureaucrats. Maryland’s policy of keeping factory farm pollution a state secret poses a huge obstacle to citizen efforts to hold poultry operations accountable for water pollution. And federal requirements are little help. Federal law requires that large-scale factory farms operate under a Clean Water Act permit. Theoretically, these permits should detail waste plans and be available to the public. Unfortunately, in clear defiance of federal law, the State of Maryland has not required that these large operations obtain permits.

Waterkeeper Alliance and Waterkeepers Chesapeake are exploring litigation to open up the secret poop policy of Maryland’s tight-lipped chicken cabal of big poultry, their allies in the state assembly and pro-chicken state bureaucrats. It is only a matter of time before this information is made available to citizens. Litigation has already been successfully brought by Delaware Riverkeeper challenging New York State’s refusal to make similar factory farm plans available to the public. And a federal court has ruled in a case brought by Waterkeeper Alliance against U.S. EPA that factory farm waste management plans must be made available for public review. The time is coming soon for big poultry to face the music for their waste disposal practices. W

The business model of a factory farm simply doesn’t work unless they are able to pollute.

What we’ve found in the Eastern Shore of Maryland is that many chicken factories are in the tidal zone. The chicken factories and fields where they spread their waste are underlain with pipes and ditches. The waste flows into these ditches. When the tide comes up, these ditches are connected to the bay. We have found fishermen’s bait boxes floating up the ditches, we’ve seen minnows swimming in chicken factory pipes. Poultry factories use the bay to dispose their waste.