MD Gets Tough on Chicken Farmers

Maryland regulators today will announce the tightest-ever controls on what Eastern Shore poultry farmers do with their birds' waste, officials said yesterday, adopting a tougher stance toward state agricultural interests in a bid to reduce pollution in the Chesapeake Bay.

The rules, proposed by the Maryland Department of the Environment, would create unprecedented scrutiny of the state's powerful poultry industry, currently not subject to several regulations that apply to dairy and hog farms. Environmentalists say poultry waste washes downstream, eventually helping trigger low-oxygen "dead zones" in the Chesapeake.

Today's proposal would limit where, how and for how long chicken farmers may store excess manure in outdoor piles, open to the rain. And for the first time, it would allow state officials to inspect poultry farms unannounced.

These changes seems likely to revive a debate between farmers and environmentalists that has been simmering since poultry waste was blamed for the outbreak of the bacteria Pfiesteria in the Chesapeake in 1997.

"It's controversial, but it's necessary," Maryland Environment Secretary Shari T. Wilson said.

Representatives of the state's poultry business said yesterday that they would not comment on the regulations until they had read them.

But in the past, chicken farmers have said that they feel scapegoated for the bay's larger problems. They say that pollution doesn't make business sense: Why would they let large amounts of manure, a valuable fertilizer source, slip away in the rain?

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