North Carolina is the biggest chicken state, but at what cost to the environment? Veils of secrecy make it hard to say

The Charlotte Observer located and mapped almost 4,700 chicken farms in North Carolina.

"North Carolina’s poultry industry has taken flight. Farms now stand near the mountains, the coast and the state’s largest cities," the Charlotte Observer reports. Don’t know much about it? That’s no surprise, even to residents of the Tar Heel State, which cloaks Big Poultry in secrecy, But the newspaper says it "mapped 4,679 farms in 79 counties across the state," in a major revelation.

"Environmental regulators almost never inspect the state’s 4,600-plus poultry farms. They can’t monitor where all the waste goes. They don’t even know where most of the farms are. Neighbors complain about the stench and other nuisances," Gavin Off, Adam Wagner, and Ames Alexander report. "But state laws leave courts and local governments nearly powerless to help.. . . So-called dry-litter farms produce billions of pounds of waste with no requirement that they obtain environmental permits or get inspected. The manure isn’t treated. It’s stored in piles, often in sheds, until it’s spread on fields as fertilizer. A tiny fraction fuels power plants. Some washes into North Carolina’s public waterways, evidence shows."

The costs are more than environmental, they write: "Multi-billion dollar companies, critics say, shift financial risk to contract farmers . . . who sometimes live with massive debt and little income. All of that is by design. But what’s the cost?"

Johnny “Van” Garris wonders. He sees how the industry has grown "every time he leaves his driveway," the reporters write. "No matter which way he turns, Garris drives by some of the roughly 50 massive poultry barns that have sprung up within a mile of his Anson County home. He says, “If I didn’t already live here, I wouldn’t buy a piece of land to build a house here — not in the middle of all this.”

"Nearly all the barns were built since 2015 as farmers rushed to join a $4.7 billion North Carolina industry that state officials have allowed to grow with no local control and minimal state regulation," the Observer reports. "With chickens and turkey production increasing by 33% in the past two decades — more than half of that growth coming in the past five years — poultry is North Carolina’s No. 1 agriculture business. By one measure, pounds of meat produced, North Carolina is the nation’s top chicken state."

The state "does not require that neighbors be notified if a poultry farm is planned near their homes. In fact, the state shields the locations of poultry farms. Only state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services staff know the addresses of dry-litter farms, which are nearly all of this state’s large poultry operations. Secrecy here not only blocks the public’s view of what occurs on individual farms, it prevents regulators and researchers from assessing the industry’s collective impact on people and the environment. Reporters polled 10 states, including six among the nation’s top 10 poultry producers, and found all disclosed more information or regulated poultry farming more rigorously than North Carolina."