Maryland’s Chicken Pollution Highlights Global Issue

To the list of jobs you didn’t know existed, add this one: manure broker.

That’s one of the hats Ray Ellis wears. A poultry and grain farmer in Millsboro, Delaware, Ellis discovered years ago that there’s money to be made from what chickens leave behind.

According to him, the old folks here say the local soil didn’t used to grow much.

“But man," he said, "when they put the poultry manure on there, they just said it would wake the land up. That’s what the old guys always said. It would wake the land up.”

That’s a good thing, because there’s a whole lot of excess chicken manure on the Delmarva Peninsula — so named because the U.S. states of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia share the 5,500-square-mile tongue of land, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Chesapeake Bay on the west.

Delmarva poultry is a $3 billion industry. Farmers raised almost 570 million chickens last year, in giant barns that hold tens of thousands of birds at a time.

Cleaning out those barns is a dirty, smelly job. When Ellis got a small tractor that made the job easier, neighbors started asking him to do theirs. And his business grew from there.

Pretty soon, he had more manure than he needed for his farm.

“So, then we started selling manure to other farmers who didn’t have enough,” he explained. Now, he connects manure from about 600 chicken barns across Delmarva with farmers who want it.

Poultry pollution

But chicken manure has a downside (besides the smell). When it washes off fields and into the Chesapeake Bay, the same nutrients that make crops grow also make algae grow. A bumper crop of corn is good; on the other hand, a bumper crop of algae is mostly bad. Too much of the water weed blocks out light and oxygen to key aquatic plants and animals, triggering dead zones that kill fish, oysters and other life.

New rules aim to keep that manure out of the water. But Ellis says those rules will make it harder to find a place for the chicken waste. And if farmers can’t get rid of the manure, he says, that could throw a monkey wrench in Delmarva’s poultry industry, and the region’s entire economy.

The problem of nutrient pollution from agriculture is global. It’s a leading reason why the number of dead zones worldwide has grown exponentially since the 1960s. A 2008 study counted more than 400, covering a total of more than 9,000 square miles.

And as large-scale animal agriculture expands worldwide, experts say the problem may expand in kind.

Around the world, the demand for meat, milk and eggs is exploding. Growing numbers of people are rising out of poverty and can afford to eat them. That’s driving a global transformation from small, backyard herds and flocks to industrial-scale operations. These large, efficient facilities are bringing affordable animal products to more and more people. But handling the waste they produce without polluting the environment is proving to be a major challenge.

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