Poultry production is a manufacturing process. Think Sparrows Point. Think Detroit. But instead of rolls of steel or lines of autos, a few Delmarva industrialists—Allen Foods, Perdue, Mountainair–push out hundreds of millions of processed chickens annually. According to Delmarva Poultry Industry, Inc. these industrialists shipped some 565 million chickens in 2013, or around 3 billion pounds. As that trade organization proudly reports: “Each week about 1,000 refrigerated truckloads of chicken are shipped from the Delmarva Peninsula to wholesale, retail, and food service outlets throughout the eastern part of the United States and around the world.” Think about it: a thousand truckloads per week! That is great thing to say for our local economy, and for the thousands it employs.
But as with all industrial processes, there are residual materials, waste that must be dealt with. No one today would say its OK for Bethlehem Steel to dump its waste into the adjacent rivers, or for GM to discharge PCBs, even though they did so for years in the past, and even though they also employed thousands. And no one would excuse them for poisoning of our water because to do otherwise would cost Bethlehem Steel a penny a pound or GM $25 per vehicle. Nor would we tolerate highly profitable industrialists hiding behind the skirts of “family steelworkers” or “family assemblymen”.
Chicken manure is unquestionably a waste product. But we know that it is not inherently a poison; it’s a rich organic resource of value in the right situation. (Predictably, Perdue AgriRecycle LLC is dedicated to making serious money on that waste product.) But on those fields already saturated from decades of spreading this phosphorus-containing waste, the material indeed has become a poison to our rivers.
Oh, but the chicken-industrialists are nowhere to be seen in the nutrient discussion. It’s all about the decimation of the Shore’s “family farmers”. People are not stupid: everyone knows the broiler industry escapes its responsibility through documents its lawyers devised decades ago, to “contract out” the manure-making phase of its manufacturing to “poultry producers” (most of whom work the chicken house only part time, as they primarily farm corn and beans—bought by the chicken-industrialists to process into precisely specified chicken feed those same producers are required to feed to the chicken-industrialists’ chickens).
No insult is intended in observing that “family farmers” holding legal title to chickens and tending them, in very strict accordance to the dictates of the chicken-industrialists while the birds put on pounds–and not incidentally produce tons of manure–are indeed industrial workers in that role, maybe like your granddaddy (a good family man too, no doubt) who might have worked down at the Point.
To couch this as a fight between environmentalists and the “family farmer” is a sad charade. Sure, some small farmers are partly responsible, as they signed the Faustian contracts that leave them with the manure problem.
But the people we must really engage to change the system, to fix the Shore’s nutrient problem, are men like Hong Kuk Kim, Chairman of Allen Foods, and owners of the four privately held poultry manufacturers. We all know, but for some reason ignore, the fact that these are the guys in power, the guys hiding shamelessly behind their “family farmers.” These are the people who seem to care more about another penny-a-pound of profit (on 3 billion pounds of product) than about the Chesapeake dead zone.
Experienced businessman that he is, I’m sure Governor-elect Hogan “gets it”, as do all but the dimmest of our legislators. Time to stop playing charades in Annapolis: engage with the chicken-industrialists and fix the problem.
Dan Watson
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