Poultry + Pollution

This 5-minute PBS video explains how chickens are farmed today. To survive, chicken farmers have few options; the majority wind up signing contracts with Big Chicken corporations like Tyson and Purdue. The corporations own the chickens, and the farmers are left with their “litter” — urine and manure. And therein lies the problem: What to do with tons of manure? In the U.S. south, where tens of millions of chickens are raised, too much of their “litter” winds up in the Chesapeake Bay.

Pew Charitable Trust describes in a series of 2-minute videos how small, family-owned chicken farms are a thing of the past. Demand for chickens has risen in the U.S. To keep up with demand, chickens are raised in mega-industrial farms that produce enormous amounts of manure. Chicken manure winds polluting waterways, oceans and bays.

Pollutants like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide that waft from large-scale chicken farms make it hard for their neighbors to breathe. Rates of asthma in Maryland’s chicken-producing counties are almost twice the rate as in the state as a whole. But elected officials are ignoring the need to regulate the industry.

Farmer Craig Watts spent most of his career under the thumb of Big Chicken. (A 2023 federal rule seeks to force Big Chicken to be more transparent with the farmers that contract with them). Thanks to Mercy for Animals’s Transfarmation program, Watts transitioned his farm from chickens to mushrooms. Meet Craig in this heart-warming video.

Tyson, Cargill, and nine additional poultry producers were found guilty of polluting the Illinois River watershed. Poultry litter, composed of feces, urine, and bedding, leaches into groundwater and streams. The lawsuit took eighteen years to work its way through the courts. In a similar case, dairy farmers in Washington were found guilty of causing a health risk when cow manure wound up in the water supply.