It’s always chicken grower season (Editorial)

The hammer continues to fall on those who produce the nation’s food, particularly those who farm in the watershed of the Chesapeake Bay — and more particularly, those who grow out chickens.
Even as a chicken costume-clad protestor paraded recently in front of a Baltimore supermarket high-fiving passers-by, Robert McCartney of The Washington Post was putting into his computer a column ultimately entitled “Farm lobby must step aside because the Chesapeake Bay can wait no longer.”
The person in the chicken costume was from Environment America, a group which is demanding that the poultry integrators “take the responsibility for their animals’ manure.”
With the bird were some young people handing out flyers claiming that “too much” chicken manure is applied to farm land and that runoff is “choking the life” out of the Bay.
McCartney writes simply that “farm runoff is the largest single source of pollution” in the Bay and that “for nearly four decades, the farming industry has succeeded in preventing the federal government from extending mandatory measures to stop it from polluting the nation’s waters.”
McCartney does a slight tip of his hat to farmers, writing that they ‘have cut back on pollution to a significant degree. ... (But) it hasn’t been enough.”
Then, the USDA — hey, they’re supposed to be on the farmers’ side — through its Office of Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard issued new proposed rules that “increase fairness for poultry farmers and protect healthy competition in poultry markets,” said a news release from the Campaign for Contract Growers Reform.
“These new rules will help greatly to level the playing field for contract poultry growers,” said Mickey Box, a Berryville, Ark., poultry grower. “For too long, the chicken companies have been able to force farmers to sign unfair contracts that make it nearly impossible for us to make ends meet.”   
The proposed rule, the news release alleged, includes provisions “to prevent growers from being forced to make expensive upgrades on their poultry houses, without adequate protections to safeguard their investments” and would “strengthen contract growers’ right to opt out of binding arbitration provisions in their contracts.”
The National Chicken Council fired back that the regulation appears to be one-sided, unrealistic and not in accordance with court rulings. 
“The likely result will be years of litigation and uncertainty as companies, growers and the government try to sort out the impact on what has been an efficient system for producing an agricultural commodity,” said Dick Lobb, NCC director of communications.
“The regulation was clearly drafted to satisfy a small number of activist growers and will do nothing to enhance the business of the great majority of broiler producers who are satisfied with the current system,” he added.
There are several agendas at work in these continuing assaults on agriculture.
Those activist organizations, and they are multiple, which seek to devoid the Chesapeake Bay watershed of livestock of any kind, would have us believe that the Gulf of Mexico has its oil and we have our chicken manure. And any industry as vast as the broiler industry on Delmarva will always have its whiners.
We are reminded of the visit here a couple of years ago of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the founding father of the Waterkeeper Alliance, who, before delivering a scathing attack on the chicken industry and Perdue Farms in particular, sat down to a luncheon entrée of chicken.
The chickens always have – and will continue – to come home to roost.