EASTON - THERE'S fear and loathing in chicken country. Poultry rustlers, if such existed, could have romped Monday evening, with hundreds of farmers across the Eastern Shore gathered at the high school to battle the dreaded, western shore manure-o-crats.
The subject: proposed regulations on chicken manure being presented by the Maryland Department of the Environment.
For decades, the big poultry processors like Tyson and Perdue have controlled how chickens are raised, from the contracts farmers must sign with them to providing each grower with chicks, veterinary care, feed and even the designs for chicken houses.
The farmer alone always owned the manure, which is a valuable fertilizer but also, with hundreds of millions of chickens now being raised on the Shore each year, increasingly a pollution headache.
MDE's proposal tries to get the processors, with their large resources, more involved in helping farmers keep their poultry waste out of the bay.
The proposal would do it by saying that if a farmer, after repeated cleanup attempts with assistance from the Maryland Department of Agriculture, cannot or will not stop polluting - and if further attempts to work things out with MDE's regulators fail - the processors cannot ship any more chickens to that farm.
The poultry community welcomed the idea Monday night about as warmly as it would a plague of foxes. Speakers said it would be one more layer of government policing, would involve the processors in even more aspects of their farming and could squeeze smaller growers out as processors sought to cut liability for pollution.
The testimony was lengthy and heartfelt. You can discount it some, since the processors did their level best to scare the hell out of the farmers, running full-page ads that hinted darkly about pulling out of Maryland or cutting contracts.
But there was more to it than that. Farmers were insulted, they said - sick of being labeled polluters after years of attempts to meet ever-changing environmental standards.
One, Simpson Dunahoo, recounted how he had voluntarily managed his farm to improve wildlife habitat and control soil erosion and pollution runoff, and had put his acreage in permanent open space preservation to boot.
And now this. He wondered where it would end, whether anything would satisfy the state and environmentalists who supported the proposals.
