In its final days, the Bush administration is poised to exempt poultry farms from reporting how much ammonia and other noxious pollutants they are releasing into the air from the millions of tons of manure their flocks generate.
The Environmental Protection Agency has asked the federal Office of Management and Budget to give final approval to a rule that would exclude poultry farms from environmental reporting required of other industries. The budget office reviews all proposed federal regulations to see that their benefits justify their costs.
The exemption is being sought by the poultry industry, which argues that farmers shouldn't be saddled with the burden of reporting what it contends are harmless releases of ammonia from their birds' waste.
Ammonia emissions from farms are "extremely low and pose no risk to human health," according to a statement issued by the National Chicken Council.
But environmentalists counter that reporting is warranted because far more ammonia is getting into the air from poultry farms than from sewage treatment plants and other industrial sources - which do have to report their emissions.
What's more, ammonia contains nitrogen, one of the main pollutants fouling the Chesapeake Bay.
"Ammonia has the same health impacts, whether it comes from a steel mill or a chicken house," said Ed Hopkins of the Sierra Club.
"We know that some of these facilities' toxic air emissions vastly exceed the health reporting threshold."
An analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project estimates that chicken farms in Maryland release more than 20 million pounds of the noxious chemical annually - more than 50 times what is reported by the state's industrial facilities.
With 295 million chickens raised last year - mainly on the Eastern Shore - Maryland's multimillion-dollar poultry industry had ammonia emissions that were the eighth-highest among poultry-producing states nationwide, according to the Washington-based environmental group.
The Maryland Department of the Environment estimates an even higher output of ammonia from the state's poultry farms and processing plants - 27 million pounds annually.
Ammonia is a colorless gas with a strong odor that is contained in animal and human waste. It is widely used as a cleaning agent and in various industrial products, and because it is rich in nitrogen it is a common ingredient in fertilizer.
