Maryland’s chicken farmers have invested heavily to stem environmental issues from their operations, writes Holly Porter. (Photo by Stephen Ausmus/Agricultural Research Service, USDA)
If it rains at your house, do the cereal boxes in your pantry get wet? Of course not – because they’re under cover, protected by roof and shingle.
And when it rains on a chicken farm, the chicken litter, or manure, on the farm stays dry, too. It is also kept dry under cover, whether that’s inside the well-protected chicken house or stored in a manure shed designed to Natural Resources Conservation Service standards.
Maryland chicken farms, in fact, must follow a “zero-discharge” permit which “does not authorize discharges of pollutants, including manure, litter, and process wastewater” in day-to-day operations. (Farmers don’t want their manure to go missing, anyway; as organic, slow-release plant food, chicken manure is too valuable in the crop production cycle to be treated as waste.)
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These basic facts about how chicken farms have been built and operated for decades are well-known. But apparently, Food & Water Watch is oblivious to them.
The group’s July 21 commentary demanding new regulations and burdens be placed on Maryland farmers (insulting these family-owned operations as “insidious polluters”) asserts that farms “spew” chicken manure “directly into waterways.”
It’s frankly astonishing to see a claim so divorced from reality still being made in 2025, when the scientists who study our water quality have documented that nutrient contributions from agriculture to the Chesapeake Bay have declined by 45 million pounds since the 1980s.
That’s the result of conservation practices and technological advances chicken growers, crop farmers and others in agriculture have invested in: manure sheds, pollinator-friendly buffers, stormwater management systems, litter amendments, even tweaks to chicken feed.
It’s a shame Food & Water Watch is so determined to target Eastern Shore farmers, because they are the backbone of Maryland’s biggest industry – agriculture. Maybe that’s because they only see the Shore as a vacationland, its farms as nuisances glimpsed as they speed down Route 50, not as the cherished homes of its proud year-round residents.
Their op-ed trots out a tired, old “farmers versus tourism” trope, trying to imply that the Shore’s agricultural strength puts $19.4 billion a year in tourism spending at risk. Left unsaid: $4.7 billion of those tourism dollars are spent on food that draws tourists here, like seafood, craft beer – and chicken.
Don’t let anyone tell you farming and tourism can’t coexist. 100 years of chicken-growing history here say otherwise. Living on the Eastern Shore for 41 years, being a farmer’s daughter, and teaching my girls to fish on the Choptank River says otherwise.
And don’t let a group virulently opposed to a modern, conservation-minded chicken community – a group that believes it is “time to ban” our farms – deceive you about how farms today actually work.