The Dark Side of Kentucky: Krishtine de Leon Reports on Tyson Chicken Houses

NOTE: We sent members of the I'm From Rolling Stone cast into the field to document America's eco-disasters. The result is a series of four reports from around the country. See a full-index of their work and tell us what you think here.

E legant country homes stand alongside the fields of tobacco, corn and soybean that surround Owensboro, Kentucky. But as gently as the breeze ruffles the lush carpet of bluegrass, it also wafts fumes of ammonia and fecal dust from nearby industrial chicken farms. Standing on her front porch, Leesa Webster can see eight poultry houses that stand in the fields across from the property where her ancestors have lived for 150 years. Each house is huge -- longer than a football field -- and contains as many as 25,000 chickens. And outside each house is a set of five large fans that blow air polluted with chicken waste toward Webster's home. Studies have shown that each day the average chicken house can emit up to ten pounds of ammonia, a chemical that can induces nausea or worse. The houses also release hydrogen sulfide -- another toxic chemical that can cause dizziness, nausea and even fluid in the lungs after high concentrations of exposure.

The stench is overpowering. Think of the bird section in a pet store -- a pungent combination of dirty feathers, urine and sawdust -- magnified a thousandfold. "I used to have a pool for my daughter to swim in," says Webster, a vivacious woman whose hearty smile fades momentarily. "But then the pool started developing a film because of the air pollution from the chicken houses next door."

The chicken houses have cropped up like weeds since Tyson Foods, the world's largest processor of pork, beef and poultry, brought its industrial farming system to Owensboro in the 1990s. Kentucky is now home to at least 2,000 chicken houses and raises an estimated 297 million birds each year -- seventy-one times the state's human population. (And those are only the broilers, chickens raised strictly for consumption. The numbers do not include the egg-layers and the roasters -- older chickens that usually end up in your pot pie.) The high concentration of so many animals has contaminated drinking water and fouled the air throughout Kentucky. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, concentrated animal feeding operations, known as CAFOs, are now the principal source of pollution in twenty-nine states; they produce an estimated 200 million tons of waste nationwide each year. And the Arkansas-based Tyson is among the country's most toxic offenders: In 2003 the company pled guilty to more than twenty violations of the Clean Water Act and was fined over more than $7 million by the EPA.

Despite the dangers to human health posed by the massive flow of poultry waste, chicken farms are not considered an industrial source of pollution, and are thus excluded from federal and state regulations designed to ensure the safety of drinking water. The state of Kentucky, claiming it has no authority to take enforcement action against CAFOs, routinely dispenses "no discharge" permits to poultry operations. But environmental activists who have investigated industrial chicken outfits, including Tyson's farmers in Kentucky, say that the runoff from chicken manure may have contaminated streams and rivers used for drinking water.