BY WILL SCOTT, YADKIN RIVERKEEPER
In the community of Shoals, on the flanks of Pilot Mountain State Park, residents learned the hard way that the state of North Carolina does not give neighbors input into the construction location of an industrial-sized chicken facility, with 100,000 birds. In the spring of 2014, community members saw vast amounts of land being cleared in their community. When they found out the clearings were for industrial poultry production facilities, the upset neighbors went to county and state agencies and elected officials and received the same answer everywhere, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.”
That is, until they came to the Riverkeeper. Our state environmental agency doesn’t require permits for poultry facilities, which means they also don’t track the locations of these facilities. However, Yadkin Riverkeeper had been working to document the location of all poultry facilities in its 7,200 square mile watershed. We were putting them on the map.
When folks from Shoals came to us, we agreed to help them document the impacts these facilities were having on their quality of life. They told us how, at night, the clouds of ammonia blown out of nearby facilities would settle on their houses, so thick in the air that you could see the waste particles in the beam of a flashlight. They couldn’t go out on their back deck to have a barbeque. The stench trapped them inside their homes.
North Carolina continues to let the poultry industry set its own rules. In 2016, the North Carolina Poultry Federation, the organizing body for the large poultry companies, like Tyson and Perdue, changed their industry “guidance” to require 1,500-foot setbacks of new poultry-growing facilities from occupied homes. That’s a long-overdue acknowledgement of the impact these facilities have on neighbors.
It still isn’t law and so can’t be enforced by anyone but the industry. That leaves neighbors and rivers in the same boat, without real protection from one of the largest sources of fecal waste in the entire state. If you look at the map below, you’ll see the areas in purple are where the poultry industry itself says that placing facilities would impact neighbors, but the state of North Carolina refuses to put those protections in law.
