ANNAPOLIS – The House and Senate versions of the controversial Poultry Litter Management Act (PLMA) had preliminary hearings in Annapolis this week, as both sides continue to debate whom should be held responsible for the hundreds of millions of tons of waste chickens grown on the Eastern Shore create each year.
The poultry industry and its supporters say the proposed PLMA, which aims to hold companies responsible for the removal of poultry waste out of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, goes too far, and will put a dangerous strain on the industry that creates more jobs than any other on the shore.
“Environmentalists keep saying that our growers are getting stuck with poultry litter that they can’t use,” said Steven Levitsky, Perdue’s new Vice President of Sustainability. “Our growers say there is no excess. We are doing what needs to be done, so why do we need yet another law?”
The Anti-PLMA Side
Levitsky points to the “ahead of its time” Perdue Agri-Recycle plant in Delaware and the “huge amounts” of litter that Perdue already transports out of the watershed for its growers. “The farmers want to use that litter to spread back onto their fields because it’s valuable fertilizer,” said Levitsky. “This regulation and the PMT [Phosphorous Management Tool, which was passed last year] further hurts growers more than it will hurt integrators like Perdue.”
Levitsky says an indirect consequence of new regulations like the PLMA could end up impacting the cost of chicken for consumers and could impact the contracts the growers have with the poultry companies.
“They say the PLMA is supposed to help the growers, but this could literally take tens of thousands of dollars out of their pockets,” he said. “When I testified in Annapolis [on Tuesday], environmental groups didn’t produce one farmer who says the PLMA would be beneficial. There were more people testifying in opposition to it.”
Others, like Maryland Farm Bureau President Chuck Fry, call the PLMA, also known as House Bill 599 and Senate Bill 496, a “withdrawal from the agreed framework and a major disappointment to those who negotiated in good faith in 2015.”
What Fry is referring to is the “coming together” of farmers, poultry companies, environmental advocates, and legislators last year to find compromise in the even more controversial PMT. That compromise included a six-year phase-in of the new law with the first two years focusing on data collection.
Whenever regulations that may adversely impact the poultry industry are brought forward, some are quick to speculate whether one more regulation could make the entire industry decide to leave the area.
Sen. Jim Mathias took that stance this week, claiming that his farmer constituents on the shore were “scared to death” of the PLMA.
“I’m afraid at some point they’re going to walk away,” he said. “If we think we have destitute areas on the lower shore now, wait until we see what happens if the farming and poultry industries start to disappear.”
Mathias testified in opposition of the PLMA at the Senate hearing this week.
Levitsky believes Perdue is on the cutting edge when it comes to handling poultry matters in an environmentally friendly way.
“We don’t believe that using the rhetoric that claims we are going to leave Maryland is the best way to handle it,” said Levitsky. “We are ahead of any integrator in the world when it comes to our duty to the environment and creating the healthiest product, as we are the largest organic poultry supplier in the world. Financially, we have paid more than our fair share. Perdue paid more than $94 million in taxes in 2014.”
The Pro-PLMA Side
Dozens of protestors and supporters of the house and senate bills chanted “P-L-M-A-help the farmers save the bay” in Annapolis prior to the house bill’s hearing on Tuesday. Proponents say the PLMA doesn’t just help the environment, it will help the growers.
“For far too long, Maryland’s big chicken industry has reaped massive profits while leaving taxpayers and farmers to clean up its massive piles of excess manure,” said Michele Merkel of Food and Water Watch, a DC-based global non-profit focused on healthy food and clean water. “What the PLMA does makes simple common sense.”
However, Assateague Coastkeeper and Assateague Coastal Trust Executive Director Kathy Phillips says the PLMA is not aiming to further regulate or handcuff small family farmers as the poultry industry claims.
“The PLMA is not directed at the family farmer that once made up the largest group of poultry growers on the shore,” she said. “The PLMA is directed at this new model of farming that we are seeing on the Eastern Shore, and that is the mega-farms or CAFOs.”
CAFOs, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, have been called “poultry prisons” by some environmental groups pointing to the practice of cramming tens of thousands of birds into often less than a square foot of living space per chicken throughout the 7-week growing process.
Phillips believes CAFOs shouldn’t even be considered farms.
“These are businessmen, not farmers,” said Phillips. “This is the new model. They are building as many of these massive chicken houses on a property as possible, so that means there aren’t any fields on this CAFOs to spread the manure on.”
Phillips says that changing model from the traditional small family farm operation to these large corporate mega-farms is the driving reason behind the recent swell of discontent coming from local citizens who are upset with these CAFO’s being in their communities.
“They aren’t good neighbors, and people in these communities are taking a stand, and that’s something that the poultry industry has never had to deal with before”, said Phillips. “The PMT showed us that we have a problem with excess manure, and if we put the burden on the big poultry companies, real solutions will start to be found. We have reached a tipping point in this discussion, and those companies can certainly afford it.”