allow for easier collection of chicken litter without any ele- ments of it getting lost or spread on the ground. Litter is often composted and applied to fields. The report recognizes the 100 acre farm of Heather and Mike Lewis in Pennsylvania for its land, water and air stewardship, having received a Family Farm Environmental Excellence Award from the US Poultry and Egg Association in 2020. The Lewises windrow or compost chicken litter, leave crop residue on their fields and use cover crops to help improve soil health. During the years they grow corn, they “save some of the fodder and grind it up into new bedding for the chickens. We also use recycled pallets for bedding”. They also have a nutrient management plan written by an outside agronomist. Super says that alongside HUA use, official nutrient manage- ment plans are very common on broiler farms across the US, “especially in areas like the Chesapeake Bay and Mississippi Watershed.”
Chesapeake Bay concerns However, chicken farming is still coming under intense fire in the Chesapeake Bay area of the US east coast. The Eastern Shore of the bay is home to 300 million broilers at any given time. As noted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it’s the largest estuary in the US and the third-largest in
the world. It encompasses the entire District of Columbia, as well as parts of six states: Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Nitrogen and phos- phorus contamination from poultry operations is a major concern in terms of runoff from manure. Algae blooms occur, then as the algae dies oxygen levels in the surrounding water drop drastically, killing off other forms of life, like fish. In March 2021 a Maryland state judge took the unprecedent- ed step of ordering regulators to impose limits on air pollu- tion emanating from broiler farms. The judge stated that the Maryland Department of the Environment must regulate the amount of nitrogen released into the air “because some of it falls into waters protected by the federal Clean Water Act, such as the nearby Chesapeake Bay”. And a new report on water quality released in October 2021 by the Environmental Integrity Project environmental group, is also quite damning. The report’s authors found that between 2017 and 2020, 84% of chicken farms in the area failed water pollution control in- spections with 46% of them also failing a second inspection. Only 4% were fined by the state and just 2% of those fines were paid. The Baltimore Sun reported on the response to this report from the region’s Delmarva Chicken Association. The group stated that over the last 25 years, broiler farmers have steadily reduced the volume nutrients washing into
▶ POULTRY WORLD | No. 2, 2022
Installing so- lar panels on poultry farms offsets part of the energy con- sumption and reduces the in- dustry’s carbon footprint.
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