8/15 By MARK POWELL

Maryland’s Department of the Environment has issued draft permits for poultry processing plants on the Eastern Shore which take the controversial step of linking companies with their contract producers.
The so-called “co-permits” call on Perdue Farms, Tysons and Allen Family Foods to guarantee that farmers growing for them follow nutrient management guidelines when dealing with chicken litter.
Among other things, the companies would be required to provide the state with a list of their contract producers and specify the amount of manure generated on each of their farms and where that manure is used. Companies also would be forbidden to contract with producers who do not manage their manure.
Companies could face fines of up to $25,000 a day if their producers do not carefully manage manure.
The draft permits, issued earlier this summer, have to go through a public comment period — probably in September — to become reality. The permits, a requirement from the state for the companies to operate their plants in Maryland, are expected to be challenged in court after they become a reality. That challenge would come from individual poultry companies and perhaps other ag groups.
The legal challenge would question the right of the state to tie companies and farmers together in such a manner.
The co-permits are depicted by environmental groups, state officials and major media as a benefit to small farmers because it would be a tool to make poultry companies responsible for the manure produced on their contract operations.
In fact, though, the state’s Farm Bureau and the Delmarva Poultry Industry’s committee of contract farmers have generally opposed co-permits since they were first forwarded by the Glendening Adminstration more than a year ago.
Maryland Farm Bureau President Stephen Weber said poultry farmers would lose the value of their chicken litter as a commodity under co-permitting. “The state has always been required to prove that pollution has occurred before shutting down someone’s business,” Weber said. “This proposal takes away due process from farmers.”
Producers in Maryland, including poultry farmers, are already preparing to face the mandatory nutrient management mandated by the state’s Water Quality Improvement Act.
Weber pointed that out and said, “a new and different set of standards from the ‘poultry company police’ envisioned under this proposal is unjust.”
Weber also said the state was achieving through regulation what could not be achieved with support from the General Assembly when the Administration’s water quality act passed without a requirement that poultry companies be directly responsible for poultry farmers and the litter produced on their farms.
State Sen. Lowell Stoltzfus, representing Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore, agreed.
“They have circumvented the legislative process,” Stoltzfus said. “This will have a very significant impact on Maryland agriculture. I am very disappointed in this action.”
Stoltzfus said if there is anything that can be done legislatively to deal with the MDE decision, he’ll tackle it in the new session. But, he pointed out, Maryland’s governor has a great deal of power over the legislature, with his ability to fund or not fund projects.
DPI Executive Director Bill Satterfield said the co-permits would not improve water quality in the state, the goal promoted by state officials.
What the co-permits will do, he said, is “force companies to become environmental policeman of the growers.”
Representatives of the poultry companies and the ag community had been meeting with state officials to discuss the issues surrounding co-permits for several months. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation also participated in some of the later meetings with state officials. Some in ag circles point to that involvement as the cause for a short circuit of the negotiations which led away from a cooperative effort in to the issuing of mandatory co-permits.
Last week, the bay foundation’s Teresa Pierno said the primary purpose of the permit is to engage the poultry companies with farmers and the state in finding “non-polluting uses for chicken manure that farmers can’t safely apply to their fields.”
She said, “It provides the farmers with much needed assistance by giving the companies the responsibility for developing and providing alternative uses and disposal options.”
Pierno credited poultry companies for their efforts in the past few years to develop uses for poultry litter, other than strictly a fertilizer in its raw form.
She said, “The companies are already taking positive steps toward finding those solutions. Examples include Perdue’s effort to build a plant that pelletizes manure into a valuable fertilizer; Allen’s exploration into constructing a facility to produce electricity from manure; cooperation with the state’s efforts to transport manure to areas that need it and increasing the use of a feed additve that reduces the amount of phosphorus in the manure.”
Pierno said the companies have indicated a willingness to do each of the things in the permits volutarily.
“We support and encourage their efforts and will also continue our work with Maryland’s agricultural community to find and implement sound economic and environmental solutions to preserve our agricultural heritage and the health of the Chesapeake Bay.”
Kentucky has a proposal for a co-permit, linking contract farmers with their companies. Its draft co-permit was issued in July.