Oklahoma AG plays chicken with Arkansas

Star Tribune Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:41:06 GMT
Oklahoma attorney general seeks halt to poultry waste disposal in Illinois River watershed
Land use practices and decisions are not made in isolation.

COLCORD, Okla. - 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 â€" 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 â€" clumped bird droppings, bedding and feathers â€" 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.

[[keywords: LandUse;Legal;]]