An environmental group sued the state yesterday for failing to allow public access to records showing how chicken farmers handle more than a billion pounds of manure a year.

The nonprofit Waterkeeper Alliance wants the Maryland Department of Agriculture to let the group review “nutrient management plans” that farms are required to have to curb agricultural runoff.

The 272 million chickens grown every year by the Eastern Shore’s broiler industry produce more than a billion pounds of manure annually, waste that often is used as fertilizer and is one of the largest sources of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. While all farmers are required to have the management plans, the Waterkeeper group is seeking access only to information about poultry operations.

“Maryland has manufactured an illegal curtain of state secrecy to protect corporate polluters,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of the Waterkeeper Alliance. “It’s time state legislators put the health of Maryland citizens and the Chesapeake Bay over the interests of Big Poultry corporate lobbyists.”

State agriculture officials and farm organizations say the plans – summaries of which are kept on file at the Department of Agriculture – should be treated as confidential business records.

“Would you want the public to see your income tax papers?” state Agriculture Secretary Roger L. Richardson asked in an interview last fall. “The farmers are very conservative people, and they don’t want to give out all this information.”

Bill Satterfield, executive director of Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., a trade group, said the plans are none of the public’s business, according to a speech on the group’s Web site.

“A handful of vocal critics of our industry believe farm families should be required to share with the public some of their business and operating plans. Why?” Satterfield asked. “How does the public’s knowledge of that business data improve water quality?”

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