Giant Chicken Houses Overrun Delmarva, and Neighbors Fear It's Making Them Sick
In Wisconsin we have mega dairy farms with manure run off that pollotes the waterways and rural wells. Gov Walker and his repug minions just let them grown bigger and more and more of them
Giant Chicken Houses Overrun Delmarva, and Neighbors Fear It's Making Them Sick
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23042018/poultry-industry-epa-asthma-respiratory-illness-chicken-houses-delmarva-legislature-health-study-delaware-maryland-virginia
Even families who work in the industry worry about the air blowing out of the barns, some packed with 40,000 birds. But Big Poultry has the political clout here.
By Georgina Gustin
Apr 23, 2018
After a local company built four hulking poultry barns across the street from April Ferrell's farmhouse on Maryland's Eastern Shore, thousands of chickens were trucked in and giant exhaust fans on the outside of the barns began to whir.
Almost immediately, Ferrell noticed a sickly stench and the sting of ammonia in the air. A dusty, mustard-colored film started coating some trees near the fans, and Farrell started to wonder: Is the air blowing out of the barns toxic? And what will happen this coming summer, when it gets warmer and all 64 of those fans across the road start turning?
"As bad as it is now," she said on a late winter afternoon in the kitchen of the house where she grew up, "this summer it's going to be horrible."
The Delmarva Peninsula, an area along the Chesapeake Bay that encompasses most of Delaware, Maryland's Eastern Shore and a spit of eastern Virginia, hosts one of the nation's highest concentrations of poultry producers. The peninsula is the birthplace of modern American chicken production, where the poultry business—including heavyweights Perdue Farms, Mountaire Farms and Tyson Foods—is entrenched in the local economy, politics and culture.
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Map of Delmarva Peninsula
As the country's demand for chicken has soared—Americans eat three times more chicken now than they did 50 years ago—Delmarva-area production has soared along with it. Last year, the region produced more than 600 million chickens, more than double the tally from the 1960s. Much of that meat is shipped out of Norfolk, Va., the poultry industry's fourth-largest port, to feed a booming global demand.
Now, tourists headed to the peninsula's beaches speed along a flat coastal plain studded with gleaming chicken complexes, as an older generation of obsolete barns collapses in the background.
But recently, more residents have started pushing back against Big Poultry. They're tired, they say, of seeing bucket-loaders routinely dump hundreds of dead chickens into "mortality composters." They're tired, they say, of the smell, of driving home on roads flecked with manure, or pulling into their driveways at night through showers of manure particles and feathers that drift past headlights like falling snow.
It's not just the unpleasantness or diminishing property values that bothers people. Many residents worry that emissions from chicken barns—ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter—mostly from chicken manure and urine, are making them sick and worsening the region's rates of asthma and respiratory illnesses.
Even though these animal feeding operations, or AFOs, emit climate-warming gases and air pollution that's linked to illness, these air emissions are not generally regulated or monitored under federal or state law.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has yet to approve a method for estimating AFO air emissions that would allow regulators to determine if the facilities meet air quality standards under the Clean Air Act. The EPA has also exempted most AFOs from reporting air pollution under the federal Superfund law, which regulates ammonia and hydrogen sulfide as hazardous substances, and under the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act, or EPCRA.
A federal circuit court overturned those exemptions last year, saying the EPA violated the law. But earlier this year, members of Congress, including Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware—where Sussex County produces more chickens than any county in the country—began pushing a bill that would make the Superfund exemption permanent.
That legislation was tucked into a government spending bill that Congress passed in March, taking away a powerful tool for understanding air pollution from animal agriculture.
In the absence of state or federal safeguards, residents of the Eastern Shore—where nearly everyone's livelihood is linked to the poultry industry, and where poultry-heavy counties are among the poorest in the state—have unsuccessfully pushed for local action. They want the state to require an air monitoring study near the AFOs. That, at least, would tell them what's in the air they're breathing, they believe.......................................
.......................Asthma Rates Are High, but There's Little Regulation
AFOs are among the largest producers of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide in the country. According to the most recent National Emissions Inventory, of the 3.9 million tons of ammonia emitted in the U.S., 2.2 million tons came from livestock waste and 1 million from synthetic fertilizer.
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Four large chicken houses went up across the road from April Farrell's home this past winter. Credit: Anna Belle Peevey/InsideClimate News
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