Oklahoma Fight Over Poultry Waste Escalates
US - In a region that produces billions of pounds of the nation's poultry, part of doing business for the past half-century was trying to ignore the smelly waste dropped by the birds.
3 March 2008
2 minute read
Now, the chickens have come to roost, as Oklahoma wants a federal judge to stop 13 Arkansas-based poultry companies from dropping any more chicken litter in a once-pristine watershed.
The preliminary injunction request is part of the state's 2005 lawsuit against the $2 billion poultry operation here - including Tyson Foods Inc., the world's largest meat producer, Cargill Inc., George's Inc. and Simmons Foods Inc.- for polluting with chicken waste, which contains bacteria, antibiotics, growth hormones and harmful metals.
The Oklahoma-Arkansas region supplies roughly 2 percent of the nation's poultry and is one of several regions nationally where the industry is most concentrated.
Source: CBS8
