WASHINGTON — The two senators in charge of crafting water-quality legislation both come from states heavily dotted with hen houses and poultry plants.
Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, is the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Water Subcommittee, and Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas was named the panel’s ranking Republican on Thursday.
Both represent states where the poultry industry has come under intense scrutiny for the amount of chicken waste that farming operations discharge, in Cardin’s case into the Chesapeake Bay and in Boozman’s case into the Illinois River.
Boozman called Environmental Protection Agency regulations “draconian” last week and pledged to rein them in. Poultry farmers in Arkansas, he said, have made strides in cleaning up their act but are being hampered by “aggressive” federal regulators.
“Nobody’s worked harder than the poultry industry,” Boozman said. “The EPA refuses to give us any credit for that.”
Cardin said he did not expect to take up big changes in the Clean Water Act as subcommittee chairman.
“We want to make sure poultry can not only thrive, but expand in our state,” Cardin said. “I try to avoid an adversarial relationship. I want to work with the industry and the regulatory agencies.”
Cardin has not pushed to heavily regulate Maryland’s poultry producers, said Scott Edwards, co-director of Food and Water Watch, a Washington environmental group. Edwards said Cardin had attempted to rewrite the Clean Water Act to allow poultry producers to sell pollution credits if they employed certain management practices, such as creating buffer zones between manure fields, and rivers and streams.
Edwards faulted that approach, which is being used at the state level in Maryland, because, he said, it did not require farmers to actually measure phosphorous discharge.
“Cardin generally tiptoes around agriculture when it comes to regulating the industry,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll see any major shifts in the Clean Water Act,” under Cardin’s leadership.
Arkansas is the nation’s third-largest chicken producing state. In 2010, the state’s farmers raised about 974,000 chickens, according to the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association. Maryland ranked 15th in the nation that year, when producers raised about139,000 birds.
The two states are home to industry heavyweights Tyson Foods Inc., the Springdale based industry leader, and Perdue Farms, a Maryland company that was the nation’s third-largest chicken producer in 2010.
A court case involving Arkansas phosphorous discharge into the Illinois River has awaited a judge’s decision for more than two years. In the case, which was argued at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, Oklahoma officials argued that poultry farmers in Arkansas, including Tyson Foods, have exceeded their legal phosphorous limit.
Phosphorus, which is found in chicken and other animal waste, dramatically reduces oxygen levels in rivers and streams when released in high amounts, and in some cases leads to fish kills.
Tyson and other poultry companies have provided the EPA with data as the agency works on the phosphorous survey, said Gary Mickelson, a company spokesman.
“We’re hopeful the EPA will use good science and accurate information as it proceeds with this process,” he said.
In the meantime, the EPA in 2010 began working on a Total Maximum Daily Load study to determine how much phosphorus can be safely discharged into the Illinois River. If the agency finds that the phosphorous load is too high when it completes its study in the summer of 2014, it can force “implementation plans” to reduce the load.
The announcement of EPA’s study came as a surprise, said Brian Haggard, director of the Arkansas Water Resources Center and president-elect of the National Institutes for Water Resources, because over the past decade, phosphorous levels have decreased.
Each year between 2002 and 2009, the phosphorous levels in the river dropped 1 percent. In November and December of 2012, the average phosphorous levels in the river were 0.06 milligrams per liter. That’s higher than the 0.037 milligrams per liter allowed by Oklahoma law, Haggard said, but is still an improvement.
Haggard said it is impossible to determine exactly how much of the decrease came from more stringent requirements on chicken-litter management that were mandated by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, but there is “no doubt” that changes in poultry production contributed to the decrease.
Boozman’s new title worries Tom McKinney, the chairman of the Arkansas chapter of the Sierra Club, a national environmental group.
McKinney said that when a politician such as Boozman calls the EPA aggressive, “it probably just means that they are doing their job.”
He said the poultry industry has improved how it deals with chicken waste, but only because regulators were vigilant.
“They saw the handwriting on the wall,” he said. “They made changes because they were forced to.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/17/2013