The O’Malley administration is proposing regulations that would for the first time allow the state’s environmental agency to police pollution from the Eastern Shore’s huge poultry industry.
Under draft rules released yesterday, large chicken farms would have to get state permits and follow a list of pollution control requirements or face fines of up to $10,000 per day.
The permits would be required for about 200 farms and would allow the Maryland Department of the Environment to inspect chicken houses and take water samples in streams nearby.
Chicken manure runoff is one of the largest sources of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay.
Administration officials said the rules will help restore the bay’s health, when combined with other state efforts that include improving sewage treatment plants and fixing leaky urban storm water pipes.
“We believe this new permit is very protective of Maryland waters, both surface and groundwater,” said Robert Summers, deputy environment secretary. “It’s a good step forward in terms of dealing with these important animal waste issues.”
But a chicken industry spokesman said new regulations are unnecessary and will be difficult to enforce.
“These type permits are for factories. They should not be required for family farms,” said Bill Satterfield, executive director of Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., a trade organization.
“With Maryland facing a huge budget challenge, where is the state going to get the money and the army of trained personnel to conduct inspections on who-knows-how-many farms?”
Maryland has for years required industrial-style pollution control permits for large dairy and hog farms. But poultry was exempted when the regulations were written more than a decade ago, even though it’s a far larger enterprise in the state, with 272 million chickens a year producing about a billion pounds of manure.
As evidence of water pollution from chicken litter has grown, at least a dozen states, including Pennsylvania and Georgia, have required inspections and regulation of poultry houses.