Perdue

Inside Westminster Abbey, eight 20-foot-tall live trees lined the center aisle during the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William. The trees transformed the space, doing what even the most elaborate floral arrangement could not — providing a natural, living sense of permanence and an air of drama. The move was unexpected, unpretentious and bold. A potted tree on your patio or deck can have the same effect. While not every tree is well-suited for a container, there are a surprising number of options, ranging from crape myrtles to hollies.

Farming advocates are pressing Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski to reverse a little-noticed measure approved by Congress last month that rescinded tough new rules on the poultry industry - a move that has strained the already rocky relationship between mom-and-pop chicken farmers on the Eastern Shore and Salisbury-based Perdue. Under lobbying from the poultry industry, Congress quietly rolled back U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations that required chicken companies to give contract farmers 90 days' notice before yanking their business, mandated independent testing of scales used to weigh certain birds, and prohibited unfair or discriminatory business practices.

When Carole Morison got into poultry farming 23 years ago, she and her husband built chicken houses on their Pocomoke farm to specifications set by their biggest customer — Perdue Inc. — and made upgrades the industry giant required over the years. That relationship abruptly ended two years ago, when Morison refused to spend $150,000 on a permanent enclosure requested by Salisbury-based Perdue, which in her view would be too costly and unhealthy for the chickens. Perdue subsequently dropped Morison as a grower.

Officials in Worcester County are investigating the cause of a fire at a Perdue Farms research facility that destroyed two poultry houses and killed 8,000 chicks. The fire broke out at 3:15 p.m. Wednesday, more than an hour after the four workers on duty to care for the birds had ended their day and left the farm in Pocomoke City, said Julie DeYoung, a Perdue spokeswoman. The fire in the 8-year-old, 22,500-square-foot buildings — two of 15 poultry houses on site — is being investigated by the Worcester County Fire Marshal, DeYoung said.

Behind Perdue's "home sweet home" facade is a vast, multinational corporation that for decades has kept the Chesapeake Bay on life support ("Perdue woos consumers with home, sweet home," Nov. 22). Perdue is an industrial-scale polluter of our cherished waterways. Governments should therefore impose industrial-scale clean-up requirements on Perdue and similar companies. Perdue owns many of the 568 million chickens raised every year on the Delmarva Peninsula. These half-billion birds generate 1.1 billion pounds of manure every year, which contributes to the annual dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay. Unfortunately, Perdue is not alone.

On January 4, 2006, JACK, beloved husband of Betty Perdue (nee Loftis), devoted father of Jack L. Perdue and his wife Denise, Mark Perdue and his wife Mary; dear brother of Bob Perdue, loving grandfather of David, Chuck, Mellisa, Logan and Emma. Friends may call at the CONNELLY FUNERAL HOME OF DUNDALK, P.A., 7110 Sollers Point Road, on Friday, 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 P.M. Funeral Services will be held on Saturday, 9:30 A.M. Interment Oak Lawn Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to Community Hospice of Maryland, 9940 Franklin Square Drive, Baltimore, MD 21236.

The public deserves clean, safe water. Clean water in our food and drinks, clean water in our streams, and clean water in the Chesapeake Bay. Perdue contributes significantly to water pollution in Maryland, and therefore Perdue should pay its fair share to help restore our waterways and the bay ("Perdue: Chicken waste handled in environmentally responsible manner", April 6). The key problem with manure is that there's too much of it. According to a recent analysis by Water Stewardship Inc., the poultry industry in Maryland generates 300,000 tons of surplus manure with 4,000 more tons of phosphorus than needed to grow all the crops in the major poultry producing counties.

For animal rights activists, throwing a pie at a business leader while he is serving the state in a voluntary capacity is a minor piece of mischief, calculated to make headlines and to cause pTC embarrassment. No doubt Frank Perdue, the target of a pie tossed at a University of Maryland Board of Regents meeting Friday, found the incident messy and inconvenient. For the rest of us, the incident was an example of activists who don't bother to distinguish between silly and serious.We have our problems with the animal rights agenda since we believe the life of a human being carries more inherent value than that of a chicken or a pig or a dog. We also believe that vegetarianism, a cardinal tenet of many animal rights groups, should not be forced on people.

Claiming to help farmers, chicken-seller Perdue instead plans to pollute farmers, their families, farms, air, land, water, and food across Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley with toxic emissions from a proposed taxpayer-subsidized industrial soybean crushing factory. Lancaster's local newspapers report the factory would emit such a large quantity of the air pollutant hexane that the company would have to pay for the reduction of smog-producing gases elsewhere. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett has awarded $8.75 million from taxpayers to Perdue for designing this factory to dump hexane, a hazardous neurotoxin, into the air of food-growing and food-buying taxpayers across south-central Pennsylvania for decades known as the Garden Spot of America.

It is about time that people become aware about how secrets hidden by animal agriculture detrimentally affect us all. Animal waste disposal from farms supplying animals for slaughter to large meat factories such as Perdue is not inspected responsibly. At the same time, when the farming operations of their suppliers is questioned, the big company leaves the small farmers alone to fend for themselves. It is appalling how large agribusinesses protect their operations from being open to the public and are allowed to inspect and regulate themselves.

Nobody asked me, but here are my six recommendations in the matter of the highly publicized, closely watched, widely criticized, rift-causing lawsuit brought by the Waterkeeper Alliance against the Hudson family poultry farm over alleged pollution in a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay on Maryland's Eastern Shore: •Everybody calm down, starting with the Maryland General Assembly. Already, the House of Delegates has authorized $300,000 — taxpayer dollars — for the legal fees of Alan Hudson, the farmer.

The lawsuit may be over, but the bitter legal battle continues. Lawyers for poultry producer Perdue and an Eastern Shore farmer are asking a federal judge to award them more than $3 million in attorneys' fees and expenses from the Waterkeeper Alliance, the New York-based environmental group that failed to prove they were polluting a Chesapeake Bay tributary. Pointing to written comments by the deciding judge that were critical of the plaintiffs' motives and the strength of their case, the successful defendants contend they're justified in seeking reimbursement for a case they argued should never have gotten that far. "It's only fair," said Julie DeYoung, spokeswoman for the Salisbury-based company.

Claiming to help farmers, chicken-seller Perdue instead plans to pollute farmers, their families, farms, air, land, water, and food across Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley with toxic emissions from a proposed taxpayer-subsidized industrial soybean crushing factory. Lancaster's local newspapers report the factory would emit such a large quantity of the air pollutant hexane that the company would have to pay for the reduction of smog-producing gases elsewhere. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett has awarded $8.75 million from taxpayers to Perdue for designing this factory to dump hexane, a hazardous neurotoxin, into the air of food-growing and food-buying taxpayers across south-central Pennsylvania for decades known as the Garden Spot of America.

In a widely watched case on the Eastern Shore, federal judge William Nickerson ruled Thursday that Alan and Kristin Hudson's Berlin farm was not in violation of the federal Clean Water Act. The plaintiffs, the Waterkeeper Alliance led by controversial environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had hoped to establish that big food processors, in this case Perdue Inc., could be held liable for the alleged pollution sins of "contract growers" like the Hudson...

Ruling in a bitterly contested case with national ramifications, a federal judge found Thursday that the Waterkeeper Alliance failed to prove that an Eastern Shore farm's chicken houses were polluting a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. U.S. District Court Judge William M. Nickerson declared in a 50-page opinion that the New York-based environmental group had not established in a two-week trial in October that waste from chicken houses owned by...

Lawyers squared off one last time Friday in a packed Baltimore courtroom to wrap up the long-running trial of a bitterly contested pollution lawsuit with ramifications for water cleanup efforts and the poultry industry in Maryland and nationwide. Jane Barrett, the lawyer for the Waterkeeper Alliance, told U.S. District Judge William M. Nickerson that the New York-based environmental group had amassed overwhelming evidence during more than two weeks of testimony in October that chicken manure from Alan and Kristin Hudson's farm near Berlin had washed into a drainage ditch that ultimately empties into the Pocomoke River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. But lawyers for the Hudsons and for Perdue countered that the environmental group had failed to make the case that the high levels of disease-causing bacteria found in the ditch came from chicken manure.

Ruling in a bitterly contested case with national ramifications, a federal judge found Thursday that the Waterkeeper Alliance failed to prove that an Eastern Shore farm's chicken houses were polluting a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. U.S. District Court Judge William M. Nickerson declared in a 50-page opinion that the New York-based environmental group had not established in a two-week trial in October that waste from chicken houses owned by...

Perdue Farms said yesterday that it has completed the acquisition of Eastern Shore-based competitor Showell Farms, creating the nation's third-largest poultry company, processing more than 11 million chickens each week.The acquisition also provides Perdue a bigger presence in Florida, where Showell has operated for 20 years. Perdue, a 75-year-old company with processing plants in six states, has sold its products there only since January 1994."The acquisition provides a tremendous opportunity for all who work for the two companies," said James A. Perdue, chairman of the Salisbury-based firm.

Cows, rather than chickens, caused the pollution for which an Eastern Shore farm couple and Perdue are being sued, contends a witness for the Salisbury-based poultry company. Charles Hagedorn, a microbiology professor from Virginia Tech , told a federal judge Monday that a small herd of cattle grazing on Alan and Kristin Hudson's farm near Berlin were the sole source of high levels of bacteria and nutrients found in drainage ditches there. "These counts - and they are high - came from the cattle," Hagedorn testified.  But a lawyer for the Waterkeeper Alliance pressed Hagedorn to acknowledge that manure blown by large ventilation fans out of the Hudsons' two poultry houses could also have reached the ditches, contributing to the pollution.