August 29, 2006

 

US poultry growers in Delaware ignored calls to admit pollution violations

 

 

Poultry growers in the Delmarva Peninsula, a region in the north eastern part of the US shared by three states Delaware, Maryland and Virginia,  have ignored a government settlement offer for air pollution violations.

 

Delaware poultry factories processed more than 280 million broilers last year, and Delmarva Peninsula as a whole produced more than 571 million birds. Broiler growing and processing accounts for the largest share of the region's farm income.

 

None of the region's broiler farms took up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) settlement programme, which would have offered protection from liability for past air pollution offenses.

 

Maryland and Virginia broiler farms were also notably absent from the list of more-than 2,600 agricultural businesses that entered into the agreement.

 

To date, more than 6,000 farms in the US have taken part in the programme, which targets ammonia and other nitrogen compounds, dust and pollutants that emanates from the farms.

 

The poultry industry in the region have often been accused of releasing ammonia and polluting the environment with some officials saying that a number of farms already exceed the 100 pounds of ammonia daily threshold allowed by federal permits and regulation.

 

Michael D. Fiorentino, who directs the Mid-Atlantic Envi-ronmental Law Centre at Widener University, believes many operations would qualify as major polluters under the definition of the Clean Air Act.

 

However, the EPA by choosing to allow poultry producers to admit their own guilt, has chosen the wrong way of policing emission standards, Fiorentino said.

 

The Clean Air Council and Mid-Atlantic Environmental Law Centre said current efforts are inadequate. Representatives of the two groups said the plan failed to go far enough and would produce only general and inaccurate estimates of farm air emissions.

 

The programme however, has producers in Delaware and Maryland scratching their heads over why they had to admit to polluting when the boundaries has not even been defined, Delaware Agriculture Secretary Michael Scuse said.

 

Meanwhile, the EPA is set to conduct a two-year study of ammonia and other air pollutant releases from large-scale animal farms.

 

Stephen Pretnak, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council in Washington, said Tyson Foods and Foster Farms both have offered sites for EPA air quality testing.

 

Pretnak said, as an industry, farms have to go through with the checks to be sure they are not over polluting.

 

Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., the broiler industry's regional trade group, earlier this month implemented a vegetative buffer programme to help poultry growers use vegetative cover to capture dust, odors and gases from poultry houses.

 

Other farmers are also using trees to screen out pollutants from the poultry houses, with some believing that the pollution should not be as bad as what the EPA thinks because if it had been so, it would have affected chickens diets and affected their eyes.

 

Scuse said the EPA's guage of pollution and its plan of action still needs to be improved as it had failed to take into account differences such as climate, bird size and materials used for poultry house bedding.