Okla. fight over poultry waste escalates

COLCORD, Okla. (AP) - In a region that produces billions of pounds of the nation's poultry, part of doing business for the past half-century was trying to ignore the smelly waste dropped by the birds.

Now, the chickens have come to roost, as Oklahoma wants a federal judge to stop 13 Arkansas-based poultry companies from dropping any more chicken litter in a once-pristine watershed.

The preliminary injunction request is part of the state's 2005 lawsuit against the $2 billion poultry operation here — including Tyson Foods Inc., the world's largest meat producer, Cargill Inc., George's Inc. and Simmons Foods Inc._ for polluting with chicken waste, which contains bacteria, antibiotics, growth hormones and harmful metals.

The Oklahoma-Arkansas region supplies roughly 2 percent of the nation's poultry and is one of several regions nationally where the industry is most concentrated.

At stake is a practice thousands of farmers have employed for years: Taking the ammonia-reeking stuff — clumped bird droppings, bedding and feathers — and spreading it on their land as cheap fertilizer.

However inexpensive, decades of mass-dumping of the litter has wreaked havoc in the 1-million-acre Illinois River watershed, turning it into a murky, sludgy mess, environmentalists say.

If a judge orders an end to disposing the waste here, the ruling could lead to similar environmental lawsuits nationwide against the industry, which produced more than 48 billion pounds of chicken in 2006...

Oklahoma estimates more than 345,000 tons of poultry waste are produced annually in the river valley, with the bulk of that tonnage disposed of in the same area. More than 1,800 poultry houses are in the region, most of them in Arkansas.

Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson said while the industry spends tens of millions of dollars on self-promotion — such as the $75 million "Powered by Tyson" campaign — its decision not to properly dispose of the bird waste is about the bottom line.

"They could burn it as energy, process it and pelletize it, they can even properly compost it until the pathogens are dead," Edmondson said. "And they have chosen economically not to."

(The poultry industry) defends poultry litter's use as an organic fertilizer, and add that Oklahoma and Arkansas state laws already regulate land application of the waste.