Rivers, Chicken Poo, and You

In the Appalachian foothills of the southeast, the scent of chicken and hog parts can hit you like a warm stench blanket. You could be driving down the highway, passing another big-rig that turns out to have hundreds of live pigs stuffed into it, their whiskered snouts poking through the metal grates as if they too want to get as far from the putrid smell as possible. Or you could be passing an open field behind a Gold Kist sign and surrounded by misplaced ponds that smell like they're full of the chlorine supply for all the nation's water parks. Or you might be paddling down one of Alabama's many river systems after a rain and suddenly the water smells like chicken poo and you're reconsidering jumping in for a swim. Lastly, you could live in the effected areas and have to deal with the coughing, nausea, gastrointestinal disorders, kidney problems, and other medical ailments associated with the excess waste product from industrial farms far too big for their britches.



I spoke with Nelson Brooke, the Black Warrior Riverkeeper, about this issue, which he encounters most days of the week considering his job involves first-hand monitoring of the streams and rivers in the Black Warrior Watershed.

Industrial livestock operations are nothing new - their size and corporate efficiency yield the numbers that keep McNuggets, BK Broilers, Tyson frozen chicken fingers, and KFC poppers at Third World prices. In northern Alabama the problem is especially acute: Alabama ranks third behind Georgia and Arkansas in broiler chicken production and Culman County is the state's largest producer. Nelson and the folks at the Black Warrior Riverkeeper have published a report on the situation within the Black Warrior River Watershed, one of Alabama's most ecologically important river systems. Check out the full report by the Black Warrior Riverkeeper HERE .

Tyson, Gold Kist, and others have large processing operations in this region but the most elusive and challenging production component, from a regulatory standpoint, are the CAFOs spread around the rural countryside. CAFO stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and, frighteningly, they are beginning to stand for the modern American family farm. A large, corporate agricultural producer like Tyson or Gold Kist will develop a privately owned small farm to the point of being able to produce chickens or hogs at the rate required to turn a profit. The farm operation is turned over to the owner. What's left looks like a small family farm (with a jolt of adrenaline, perhaps) but the economic vitality relies on a sound relationship with the corporate chicken/hog buyer. This puts pressure on the individual farmer to a) produce more, more, and then a little more and b) to keep his/her mouth shut and property closed to as little regulation and oversight as possible... because to produce more one must provide more antibiotics and hormones and then dispose of more chicken poo.

The common method of poo disposal is as a fertilizer over crop fields and pastures. Large trucks cross the fields spraying the yellowy dust from its sides. Despite the fact that chicken waste is a “hot” fertilizer, full of nitrogen and phosphorous, this dispersal practice is common and accepted by authorities. However, according to the Riverkeeper report (per Auburn’s College of Agriculture), northeast Alabama alone produces three times more animal waste than the entire state can handle as fertilizer. On the area’s notoriously thin soil, this fertilizer inevitably runs off into the nearest stream.

Kayakers and canoeists in north Alabama know to look for the chicken gauge on the Alabama Whitewater page. 1-3 chickens indicates the relative amount of waste runoff in certain rivers. Most in the north part of the state have a 2 or 3 rating, not that such a formal system is needed; step down to the riverside after any amount of rain and it's like sticking your nose into the soup pot, only its chicken poo, not noodle.

GOOD HOT WINGS, GOOD BACON...
Organizations like the Black Warrior Riverkeeper - blackwarriorriverkeeper.org - (part of the nationwide Waterkeeper Alliance) does a great job monitoring the situation in north Alabama's watersheds with people like Brooke.

Of course, the everyday consumer has the greatest (and easiest) opportunity to help. First, know the source of your chicken and pork. If the label says "Free range" on your eggs, chicken or pork product, you can feel pretty certain you're getting meat that was not a raised in a confinement broiler barn, the practice industrial farms have used since the late '60s when they put the then-popular free-range method out of business (withdrawal of growers' contracts led to a collapse of free-range techniques within a few years).

See factoryfarm.org, sustainabletable.org, locallygrown.net, and eatkind.net for more information and sources of healthy meat near you. Also see the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network at http://www.asanonline.org


The following pictures were taken two weeks ago at the Locust River and Graves Creek in northern Alabama.

Pond in front of Tyson plant



Algae bloom in wetland between Tyson plant and Graves Creek



Spectator at Locust River Invitational Races, a few miles below the Tyson plant's effluence into Graves Creek