001239 Delaware Chicken Plants to Help With Waste

Wilmington, DE - Delaware's chicken-processing companies have agreed to shoulder some responsibility for finding cleaner ways to dispose of millions of tons of manure produced by chicken farmers.

In a pact, the processing companies agreed to help farmers through research and technical assistance.

Although the agreement with the state's Nutrient Management Commission is nonbinding, some hope the measure will deter the federal government from imposing stricter regulations on how the chicken waste is handled.

Traditionally, chicken waste has been spread on fields of row crops, like corn, as a fertilizer. But nitrogen and other nutrients in the waste can seep into waterways, where they cause algae blooms that cloud water and kill marine life in the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware's inland bays.

Delaware, home to one of the nation's heaviest concentrations of poultry farmers with an estimated 1,300 farms, has struggled with meeting Clean Water Act standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The chicken processing companies - including Mountaire Farms of Delaware Inc., Maryland-based Perdue Farms Inc., and Allen Family Foods Inc. - have used their substantial political muscle to oppose sharing any responsibility for handling the waste.

Most broiler chickens raised for those companies are grown by farmers under agreements that give the companies total ownership of the bird - and give the farmers total responsibility for other costs, including disposal of chicken house litter.

However, Delaware poultry companies agreed to move toward accepting some role in the manure problem after neighboring Maryland adopted stringent standards similar to those proposed by the EPA.

Maryland also requires processors to pay half of the cost of trucking excess manure from saturated farm fields.

“Delaware has taken a different, more voluntary approach,” said John Hughes of the state's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation. “If the industry does nothing in Delaware and a lot in Maryland, how does that make us look?”

The state's Nutrient Management Commission is in the process of writing the standards and regulations by which Delaware farmers and chicken processors will have to work. Those new rules won't become effective until 2007.

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