Washington Post | By Anita Huslin | July 7, 2003
SNOW HILL, Md. -- Jeanne Shockley stands with her hands on her hips, squinting in the midday sun as her husband arrives in his pickup truck, the tires kicking up dust clouds as it brakes to a stop.
She called him in from the fields because the electricity went off again in one of the long, low-slung corrugated metal sheds behind her, and inside, the temperature is rising. It won't take long for this to become a problem for the nearly 20,000 growing chicks inside.
Without power on hot summer days, it's nearly impossible to keep chickens from overheating. When they're chicks, giant heat lamps keep the birds at a constant 88 degrees. As they get bigger, industrial-strength fans blow through the chicken houses, and an overhead fogging system intermittently mists them with cool water.
"The whole idea of the situation here is to grow 'em till they're fat," said Virgil Shockley, who raises more than half a million birds each year on Maryland's Eastern Shore for Tyson Foods. After 42 days, the birds will weigh 41/2 pounds and will become rotisserie roasters for supermarkets, one of the many specialized products that have helped the industry combat lagging consumption of chicken, bloated supplies and competition from foreign imports.
This will be one of the last flocks the Shockleys raise for Tyson. The nation's largest poultry company is pulling out of Maryland, starting the process at its Berlin factory over the holiday weekend by reducing the workforce.
Until now, trucks brought an estimated half-million chickens to the plant every day. This week, Wednesday deliveries will cease and the number of birds processed the rest of the week will begin to shrink. Farmers such as the Shockleys, who are hired to raise the chickens, wonder whether the three remaining poultry companies that operate in the state -- Perdue Farms, Allen Family Foods and Mountaire Farms -- will fill the void.
Weighing heavily on their minds is whether, and how, Maryland's new governor will keep his campaign promise to make Maryland once again friendly to business.
Their concern is, of course, poultry. Worth $552 million a year, chickens represent the largest segment of the state's $1.6 billion farming industry. When a giant such as Tyson shuts down a processing plant, it sends ripples across the state.
Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) has said he thinks less regulation and more cooperation is the way to promote business and stimulate the economy. Environmentalists fear he is poised to let the farming community slide on the critical job it needs to do to stop polluting the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
For poultry farmers, the fear is that market forces will prove greater than anything the governor could do to help them, spelling doom to the family farms of Delmarva.
"If you don't have poultry on the Shore, then you don't have farms," said Virgil Shockley, a third-generation crop and poultry farmer.
When he found out that Tyson was leaving, Shockley called the company and asked whether they wanted him to grow chickens for their Temperanceville plant in Virginia. The answer was no.
He started dialing everyone he could think of -- the county economic development board, other commissioners, agriculture specialists, other poultry companies.
By the time he got to state officials, the message was already clear: Something needed to be done to ensure that Tyson's departure wasn't the beginning of the end of the poultry industry in Maryland.
"Who else do I need to call?" Shockley asked Agriculture Secretary Lew Riley.
"Nobody," Riley replied. "You've done enough."
Mountains of Manure
The 6,057 square miles of land that separate the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean is the heart of the broiler belt that hugs the coast from central Pennsylvania through Florida.
National processors produce more than 2.2 billion pounds of ready-to-cook chicken a year on the Delmarva Peninsula, enough to feed 30 million people for a year, according to the National Chicken Council, an industry trade group.
Delmarva chickens leave behind mountains of manure -- an average of 1.6 billion pounds a year. Once it was considered a bonus to farmers, who used it to fertilize their corn, wheat and other crops. But in the past decade, that has changed.
Too much manure spread on farm fields can wash into waterways and promote algae growth, which chokes the oxygen from water. In 1997, agricultural runoff was blamed for fueling a toxic microbe that killed hundreds of thousands of fish in Eastern Shore waterways.
Suddenly, manure was no longer an asset. And poultry companies wanted nothing to do with it.
Three years ago, at the urging of environmentalists, Maryland became the first state to try to force national processors to deal with the problem. It announced that it would link the companies' operating permits to the proper disposal of their birds' manure. It also started requiring farmers to carefully calibrate how much fertilizer their crops need, then apply only that amount.
A report released this year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture reinforced the need for such plans, noting that more than 70 percent of the manure on the Delmarva Peninsula would have to be shipped off the farms where it is generated to avoid polluting waterways.
But on the farm, where growers combine poultry manure and commercial fertilizer, the primary goal is to ensure the highest crop yield.
And in Annapolis, sensing the frustration of poultry farmers and businesses, Ehrlich decided to do something. Last month, the administration announced that it was dropping plans to hold poultry companies liable for the manure. And it said it would create a panel to see what could be done to ensure that poultry stays strong.
Environmentalists agree that a healthy industry is critical, but not at the expense of the bay.
"This problem is going to take an enormous commitment of resources and energy to solve," said Chuck Fox, senior vice president of communications for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "We're afraid that [the Ehrlich administration] is setting this up so the corporations can walk away from the problem. We don't think it's fair to let it fall on the backs of the small farmer."
Discussing the Challenges
Last week, the governor's new Poultry Action Team met for the first time, bringing growers, industry representatives and agriculture officials together to talk about some of the challenges facing the industry and whether Maryland's efforts to protect the environment have created a climate inhospitable to poultry.
Industry analysts and Tyson officials said the company decided to close its only processing plant in Maryland for purely business reasons. The industry is changing, and every company is looking for ways to focus production in ways that maximize profitability.
What the Tyson move probably means is that the company is focusing on growing larger chickens that can be turned into a variety of products, from boneless breasts to precooked chicken tenders and packaged meals. Tyson's Temperanceville plant has newer equipment better suited to such processing, Riley said.
Many Maryland growers say the Ehrlich administration probably will have little impact on such business decisions. Instead, the biggest adjustment may come as growers look at what the remaining companies want and decide whether they can afford to provide it.
Perdue, for example, has told growers that it wants bigger birds than Tyson's, up to six or seven pounds apiece. That would require upgrading many chicken houses in Maryland with better cooling systems. At an investment of up to $30,000 per house, some of the older farmers are not sure if they're able or willing to mortgage the farm again to keep up with the evolving demands of the industry.
"Every single grower has their home tied to their chicken houses," said David Barnes, a farmer and poultry grower in Willards, Md. "The average age of people in this business is 60. . . . It's nearly impossible for them to say 'I'm going to quit and get another job.'
"So you just buckle down and kind of bear it. Or you think about retiring. If you're lucky, maybe you've got a developer who's looking at your land. Any way you go, it's not pretty."
The arrival of Ehrlich and his Poultry Action Team and the departure of Tyson will mean little immediate change in the Shockleys' daily routine. By the end of the year, they'll start raising Perdue's larger chickens.
Because it's just the two of them running the farm, one of them always has to be there.
While Virgil is out in the fields fertilizing, planting or harvesting, Jeanne makes several rounds through the chicken houses. When he has to leave town for a conference or meeting, she sometimes straps a 9mm Glock 17 pistol and hunting knife around her waist or carries a shotgun in case she runs into a marauding snake.
She is hopeful that the change of administration will give poultry farmers a voice in Annapolis, though it will mean that her husband probably won't be around as much to deal with electrical problems, snakes and other issues that might come up on the farm.
Jeanne Shockley stands watching as her husband plays with a circuitry panel and flips a couple of breakers to restore power to the chicken house behind them.
They will get a little break between the last flock they raise for Tyson and the first Perdue birds that arrive.
She is looking forward to that. It will mean the first real vacation the couple will be able to take together in 23 years. The first time in years their days won't be ruled by the birds' schedule: Lights out at 11, up again at dawn.
"I don't have friends," she smiles wryly. "I have chickens."Washington Post:
