Farmers brood over lawsuit

Various businesses in poultry industry at risk over litter

— Among farmers raising chickens and turkeys in the Illinois River watershed, perhaps no one has more at stake in the federal lawsuit over poultrylitter spreading than Steve Butler of Siloam Springs.

In February 2004, Butler started Green Country Farms,a company north of Westville that owns 124 chicken houses and leases 30 others from Springdale-based Tyson Foods Inc. He has 45 employees taking care of it all.

"We could be out of business if the lawsuit doesn't go right," said Butler, 40. "I've been in this industry my whole life."

Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson's lawsuit is an unhappy topic in rural Oklahoma, where some poultry farmers think their livelihood is at risk. The lawsuit filed in 2005 blames Tyson Foods and six other defendants for polluting the watershed with bird manure.

Farmers can spread the manure on pastures to help cropsgrow, while others truck it out of the watershed because their land is unable to safely absorb the phosphorus found in the bird droppings.

Oklahoma's lawsuit claims phosphorus and bacteria from the manure harms the Illinois River and the streams that drain those farms.

Attorneys working for Edmondson point to Green Country's operation and its clusters of poultry houses as the example of farming in rural Oklahoma. An aerial photograph of Green Country's silvery poultry houses was used last year during a hearing before U.S. District Judge Greg Frizzell, and Tyson Foods spokesman Gary Mickelson expects the photograph to be brought out again as the lawsuit against the poultry companies goes to trial this week.

"They want the judge to think this is what all poultry farms look like," Mickelson said. "Their use of the photo is intended to mislead the court."

INVESTIGATION

Butler and other farmers figured out long ago that Oklahoma meant business when it came to obtaining evidence against the poultry companies Edmondson sued.

Oklahoma's investigators collected thousands of water, soil, and poultry-litter samples, aiming to prove manure's use as fertilizer pollutes the watershed.

Eight off-duty Tulsa police officers in cars and pickups watched landowners, drawing the ire of farmers who suspected they were thieves ready to steal copper fromchicken houses. Butler, who owns a smaller chicken-raising business in Arkansas called Lost Acres Farms, said he once stopped one of those officers on Bill Young Road and blocked his car so the man couldn't drive away.

"I told him everyone around here thinks you are stealing so I invited him to my farm and he wouldn't come," Butler said.

Pilots in a green helicopter and low-flying planes allowed investigators to snap thousands of photographs to try to show how litter moves from the 400-foot aluminum poultry houses clustered on rural sites in Northwest Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma to pastures and the river.

"It's the kind of stuff you see in the movies with all of the buzzing around," said Jim Pigeon, general manager of Green Country Farms.

Edmondson's office collected aerial photos of Green Country's operations with some of them showing clusters of 10 to 30 chicken houses.

"If you see our operation from the air, we look like bad news," Butler said.

Edmondson in a Sept. 9 interview said he wasn't familiar with Green Country Farms or how it's been portrayed by the private attorneys working on the lawsuit. Edmondson said he doesn't know if Green Country will be mentioned during the federal trial.

Oklahoma's attorneys don't mention that Green Country ships all the manure produced in chicken houses out of the watershed. Neighboring cattle ranchers want the chickenmanure for their pastures, and Butler refuses to sell it to them because he knows about Edmondson's beef with big chicken.

It's been that way since late May or early June 2005, roughly the time Edmondson filed his lawsuit against the companies.

Ed Fite, the director of the Oklahoma Scenic Rivers Commission, said he knows Green Country ships its litter out of the watershed. Litter comprises the wood chips, sawdust or rice hulls on which the manure drops in poultry houses.

"That's a lot of waste that's been managed and utilized well in other areas," Fite said.

POULTRY IMPACT

Thirty people work in a Tyson chicken hatchery at Stilwell, Okla., providing the chicks that go into GreenCountry's houses, Mickelson said.

Another 35 people work at a feed mill adjacent to one of Green Country's locations. The feed fattens the birds to their market weight of about six pounds apiece in 50 days.

When the chickens are plump, the lights in the chicken house are turned off to keep the birds calm and allow a seven-person crew to catch every bird, leaving just a few sick, weak ones behind.

Long socks help protect crew members' arms from bloody scratches. They bend over to snatch birds by their legs and then raise up to fling fistfuls of chickens into cages. The crew takes 40 to 45 minutes to grab the 5,000 birds that go in cages. An entire house stands empty in less than three hours of steady work.

A man driving a front-endloader hauls the cages to a waiting Tyson truck.

Next, a truck driver takes the birds about 45 miles to a Tyson processing plant in Noel, Mo. The 1,100 workers at the Noel plant slaughter and clean the birds, preparing the meat for stores.

Mickelson said workers at the Noel plant can process 1.3 million birds a week, meaning Green Country's 18 million birds a year provide enough work to sustain the plant for almost 14 weeks.

Long after the birds head to Noel, there's work on the farm for the Murray Litter company of Westville.

In 2005, Butler persuaded Mark Murray to go into the litter-hauling business. Murray had hauled cattle around Westville and worked as a contractor cleaning out poultry houses. Butler figured hecould turn litter-hauling into a full-time job.

"I knew his work ethics," Butler said.

After getting a bank to agree to a loan, Murray now has three tractor-trailers and three employees.

During a four-day stretch in August, Murray and his drivers made 32 trips on a 75-mile drive to hay fields near Muskogee, Okla., to dump the litter outside the Illinois River watershed.

The federal lawsuit worries Murray. It threatens his business, he said, and lots of other jobs.

"It's on my mind," said Murray, 28. "It could kill all of us."

"Someone one time wanted me to do the economic impact of my farm, but where would you start?" Butler said.

"It's everybody," Murray told him.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11, 16 on 09/24/2009

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