SALISBURY -- Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler called yesterday for higher fines for agricultural polluters and a manure-burning plant to transform chicken litter into electricity.
"I would like to take 500,000 pounds of chicken manure a year and turn it into power," said Gansler, a Democrat. "That would really help make a huge, herculean and dramatic improvement to the watershed."
Gansler spoke to about 200 people at the Eastern Shore Poultry Summit at the Wicomico Civic Center, a meeting of environmentalists and farmers organized by the Waterkeepers Alliance, an environmental group.
Tempers flared between activists and poultry growers at the daylong event, which sought to find solutions for a major source of runoff pollution that causes algae blooms and low-oxygen "dead zones" in the Chesapeake Bay.
The Sun reported on Oct. 4 that the poultry industry on the Eastern Shore produces about a billion pounds of manure a year, but Maryland has been slower than Pennsylvania and at least 11 other states in requiring factory-style pollution-control permits for large poultry feeding businesses.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of the Waterkeepers Alliance, said that Maryland should start holding large poultry companies such as Perdue Farms responsible for the manure produced by the farmers who have contracts to raise Perdue's chickens.
"You have to shift the burdens to the guy who is really at fault, which are the powerful people, the Tysons, the Perdues ... who have engineered the system to make themselves rich by making everybody else in the state poor," Kennedy said.
Kennedy, son of the late senator and presidential candidate, accused Perdue Farms, which is based in Salisbury, of stealing the Chesapeake Bay from the public by polluting it, and having "indentured servants" in the Maryland state government who allow them to foul the waters to make a profit.
"Perdue ... has privatized the fish and waterways of the Chesapeake Bay. It has stolen them from the public," Kennedy said. "And that is not an act of democracy. That is a milestone of tyranny, and we have to recognize that."
Julie DeYoung, spokeswoman for Perdue farms, said Kennedy doesn't understand the poultry industry.
"I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was resorting to hyperbole," said DeYoung. "His comments are patently ridiculous. Perdue has a strong environmental record."
