[rooster crowing]
I’m April Ferrell and I live in Delmar, Maryland.
I’ve lived in this area for 40 years, pretty much on this road for 40 years.
My parents built chicken houses, I have a brother who has tended to chickens on a farm.
Just about everyone somehow has worked in the poultry industry.
[rooster crowing]
Right here is where I grew up playing.
When I had children and my cousins had their children, they all played here too.
We had the next generation, and we always thought that they would play in our yard.
But it’s going to be a little bit different, because now across the road, instead of open land,
we have four ginormous chicken houses with 64 fans, blowing air across to where
they should be able to play and breathe in clean healthy air.
Because of the concentration of the animals inside the house and the fact that they are
generating manure and urine, this builds up high concentrations of ammonia
inside the poultry house.
Ammonia is an irritant to the lungs, to your throat, to your eyes.
It is a volatile compound, and it does cause respiratory illnesses.
As soon as you turn on the road, you can smell the odor coming from those chicken houses.
You know, it’s chicken waste in the air, particulate matter is being pulled
out of those chicken houses and into the air.
We don’t know exactly what’s coming out.
We know it’s harmful, but the government, whether it is the federal government,
the EPA, the state government, local government, will not support any kind of regulation or
any kind of study that would monitor what is coming out of the chicken houses.
Young chicken hens are called pullets.
They need plenty of green grass in addition to their regular food.
The poultry industry began with these very diverse farms that we had, and people had
their orchards and they were growing vegetables and they were feeding the region, and they
had, you know, a couple of chicken coops.
But around the '40s and into the early '50s, when Tyson discovered that they could begin
this vertical integration method of growing their chickens,
our agricultural system on Delmarva changed.
We now have a system of millions and millions of chickens being grown in this very small
confined area of the Delmarva Peninsula.
They started building last July.
I was told at the very beginning, there’s nothing you can do about it.
If it’s the poultry industry and they’re building chicken houses,
you can’t do anything about it.
As more and more of these large industrial poultry developments are built, people are
beginning to see, "This isn't the family farm that used to be next door to me.
Now I have an industrial facility next to me.
And, is this safe?
What is in the air that I'm breathing?
What's in the water that's getting into my well?"
Communities went to their state legislators and said, “We'd like to introduce a bill
that will at least require the Maryland Department of the Environment to monitor some of these
CAFOs and let us know what is being emitted from these houses.
...the Maryland Department of the Environment with the tools it needs, and the information
it needs to monitor and evaluate air quality of large animal feeding operations.
Currently, air quality of large animal feeding operations is not monitored.
This bill will enable the MDE to do that.
[rooster crowing]
There is now a real conflict occurring, and unfortunately our elected officials,
both at the county level and at the state level, have not kept up with what has changed with
agriculture here on Delmarva.