Is the Chesapeake Bay Environment Henpecked by the Chicken Industry?

12 May, 2012

The Gulf of Mexico dead zone seems to get all the attention. Yes, this low-oxygen area that forms every year in the waters surrounding the Mississippi Delta is the largest dead zone—currently around the size of Massachusetts—but it’s not the only one in U.S. waters.

The Chesapeake Bay has a dead zone, too. In fact, it covered a third of the Chesapeake last year and continues to grow. And last month, the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science gave the Bay a D+ in its annual “health report card.”

About a year and a half ago, in response to the crisis, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stepped in to put the states that surround the Chesapeake on a “pollution diet,” meaning the state has to keep its “Total Maximum Daily Load”—whether from agricultural, municipal or private landowners—down to a minimum.

And where the Gulf dead zone is caused by runoff from the oceans of corn grown in the Midwestern states whose waterways drain into the Mississippi, chicken farms dominate the Chesapeake’s watershed. The Delmarva region (i.e. Delaware, Maryland and Virginia) has become one of the most intensive poultry farming regions of the country. Industry behemoths Perdue and Tyson contract with operations in the area that add up to tens of millions of birds housed in enormous facilities that generate a lot of chicken crap.

Of course, as MTV taught us Gen-Xers, too much is never enough. Grist reported a couple of years ago on a plan by Perdue to significantly increase its poultry operations in the already taxed region. As a Waterkeepers study of the issue put it at the time:

“Billions of pounds of chicken litter have flowed into the bay in the decades since international poultry conglomerates such as Perdue and Tyson targeted the Delmarva Peninsula for their multi-million-dollar operations.” The industry has been “treating the Chesapeake Bay like an open toilet.”

As you’d expect, Big Ag has reacted badly to the EPA’s attempt to address the pollution problem. The American Farm Bureau filed a lawsuit to stop it. And House Republicans attempted to defund the plan.

But it turns out Big Ag had nothing to worry about. Maryland’s Democratic governor and rising star Martin O’Malley—someone who has a significant say in any Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan—is on Perdue’s side. And it appears that his relationship far exceeds what’s typical between a governor and a large corporation. Or at least one would hope it does.

The advocacy group Food and Water Watch (FWW) has obtained 70 pages of emails between O’Malley and Perdue officials—primarily Perdue general counsel Herb Frerichs, with whom FWW says O’Malley went to law school.

Click here to read the rest of this article at Grist.org.