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Intensive Poultry Production:
Fouling The Environment 
The poultry industry is a major cause of environmental
degradation in the United States. It kills fish and other
wildlife and it makes people sick. In nature chickens and turkeys
range in small flocks over wide areas contributing to the health
and beauty of the land. In poultry factory farming, thousands of
birds are crammed unnaturally into extremely small areas. Filth,
ugliness and disease are the result of this unwholesome and
unnatural confinement of living creatures.
U.S. slaughterhouses now kill more than 30 million birds every day, 8 billion birds a year (NASS). This carnage pollutes land, air, and water with diseased carcasses, feces, heavy metals, chemicals, bacteria, parasites, pathogen cysts, and viruses (Report 9). Poisoned well water is a major problem on the Delmarva Peninsula (the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia), which slaughters over 600 million chickens a year, resulting in an annual 3.2 billion pounds of raw waste, 13.8 million pounds of phosphorous, and 48.2 million pounds of nitrogen (Harkin 11). A typical slaughter plant kills over a quarter of a million chickens and uses 2 million gallons of water per day (Lipton A18). Awash in Manure
Factory Poultry Manure Harms Wildlife, Habitat, and Human HealthPoultry manure contains large amounts of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. According to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, though hog and dairy operations produce more manure than a chicken or turkey operation, poultry litter--the mixture of fecal droppings, antibiotic residues, heavy metals, cysts, larvae, decaying carcasses, and sawdust the birds are forced to bed in--has 4 times the nitrogen and 24 times the phosphorous (Allison C7). The annual litter from a typical broiler chicken house of 22,000 birds contains as much phosphorous as in the sewage from a community of 6,000 people (Harkin 12). Excess nitrogen converts to ammonia and nitrates, burning the fragile cells of land plants and poisoning ground and surface waters. Concentrated poultry waste spawns excess algae that consume aquatic nutrients and block sunlight needed by underwater grasses. In decay, the algae suffocate fish. High levels of nitrate in groundwater used as drinking water can cause methemoglobinemia, a blood disorder in infants, known also as "blue baby disease" (Holleman 28).Factory poultry manure contains heavy metals. The 5,100 tons of poultry manure produced daily in Arkansas dumps into the environment, each day, 3,100 pounds of manganese, 3,300 pounds of iron, 540 pounds of copper, 3600 pounds of zinc, and 300 pounds of arsenic. Arsenic is "a known carcinogenic agent that when inhaled can cause cancer in humans, particularly lung cancer" (Holleman 29-30). Factory poultry manure exposes fish, humans, and wildlife to diseases not normally found in the environment. When earthworms ingest soil containing chicken droppings infected with the cecal worm larvae that carry blackhead disease, wild turkeys, grouse, quail and other wild birds who eat these worms get sick and die (Holleman 34-35). Pfiesteria piscicida is a one-celled microbe that has been linked to the abundant excess of poultry and hog manure on the eastern United States seacoast, eating holes in flounder and in menhaden, a fish that is used in farm animal feedstuffs and as fertilizer (Weingarten F5). Humans exposed to the toxic aerosol released by pfiesteria have experienced neurological injury, headaches, skin sores, memory loss, stomach cramps, respiratory restriction, and violent moods (Barker 117, 129, 168). And even though "water pollution from dry poultry litter is greatest after it is spread on crop land (Harkin 4), poultry litter is routinely applied to crop fields near the water. It is fed to cattle as well. In West Virginia, for example, "80,000 head of cattle, many raised adjacent to the chicken houses to take advantage of the litter-based feed, produce more waste" (Gerstenzang A7). Poultry houses: Paradise for Pathogens and Other PollutantsA 40 X 400 ft broiler chicken house holds 20,000 birds. A 5- lb bird gets only 0.8 sq ft of floor space (North & Bell 457-58). A 50 X 500 ft caged hen house holds 80,000-125,000 hens used for egg production. Each 16-inch-high cage holds 3-9 hens. Each hen has only 48-6O sq inches of wire to live on (North & Bell 315- 29). Typically, 3 to 5 long metal houses sit side by side in the densely concentrated poultry and egg producing areas."Airborne contaminants in poultry confinement units include the mixture of agents comprising organic poultry dust--skin debris, broken feather barbules, insect parts, aerosolized feed, and poultry excreta--and a variety of immunogenic agents, such as viable bacteria and Gram-negative bacterial endotoxins. Industrial hygiene surveys in the chicken processing industry have demonstrated that poultry confinement workers are exposed to high concentrations of such respiratory toxicants" (Morris 195- 196). Excretory ammonia fumes from the nitrogen in decomposing droppings damages the systems of both humans and birds (Morris; Carlile). Mounds of Dead Birds
In the Potomac Headwaters in West Virginia, 155,000 tons of
annual waste from the more than 90 million birds confined in 870
poultry sheds have polluted local streams with poisonous coliform
bacteria. These small creeks and rivers enter the Potomac River,
which provides drinking water for metropolitan Washington D.C.
(Lipton, A18). As the Report prepared for Senator Harkin's office
points out, "Animal waste consists of not only of manure and
urine [in poultry, uric acid], but also of dead animals, used
bedding, waste feed, and other residual organic matter" (Harkin
5).
Each year, millions of chickens, turkeys, and ducks die of heat suffocation, drug reactions, crowding, stress, and disease before going to slaughter. An operation with 100,000 broiler chickens produces 1,000 lbs of dead birds--250 birds--a day (Report 15). The bloated, decomposing bodies and skeletal remains of these birds are stuffed in trash cans inside, and piled outside, the poultry sheds. Eventually the carcasses are buried, burned, dropped down feed shoots, and dumped in unlined pits "which become cesspools of bacteria, leaching into groundwater" and local streams (Lipton A18). Desecrating the EnvironmentAreas of great natural beauty such as Arkansas and the southeastern United States are being turned into smelly, fly- infested places by the poultry industry. Wildlife habitat is destroyed to erect ugly new poultry houses, slaughtering plants, and workers' trailer parks. In Accomac, Virginia, a Perdue slaughterhouse dumped chicken grease, bacteria, and ammonia into nearby Parker Creek, turning this once clean, thriving and beautiful creek into a gray, slimy, stinking mess (Report 37-38). In 1998, Tyson Foods was fined $6 million for pollution of the Kitts Branch waterway in Worcester County, Maryland, which has become loaded with coliform bacteria, phosphorous, and nitrogen dumped by a single poultry slaughter plant in Berlin (James 1A).With dwindling land to absorb the volume of poultry-house litter, dead birds, and slaughterhouse refuse, the industry is touting composting and other countertechnologies as partial solutions. These technologies will be costly, tedious, and time- consuming, and they will not address the root of the problem, including the huge consumption of fossil fuels and the intense cruelty. What Can I Do?
Works Cited
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