How a Poultry Plant Can Ruin an Entire Community

As Change.org previously reported, North Carolina's Nash County plans to let Sanderson Farms build a poultry slaughterhouse, hatchery, and spray field in the region. Nash County officials claim the chicken operation will bring much-needed jobs and breathe life into the local economy. The county's residents aren't quite as enthusiastic.

Nash County citizens banded together together to form the Nash County Landowners Association, an organization designed to look out for the best interests of the community. The group recently began protesting the poultry processing plant through its "Say No to Sanderson" campaign. Examining the toll Sanderson Farms could take on the region reveals just how justified Nash County residents are in their opposition to the proposed plant.

It's strange to think that one poultry slaughterhouse could cripple an entire community, but if built, Sanderson Farms is poised to do just that. For one, the farm wouldn't just be a stand-alone processing plant. The economic viability of the slaughterhouse depends on 500 new chicken houses being built throughout a seven-county region. Those chicken houses — as well as the poultry plant itself — will likely bring all the usual problems associated with factory farms. A quiet, clean community quickly becomes rife with foul odors, waste, noise, flies, rodents, and even dangerous emissions like ammonia. These issues are so disruptive and, well, plain annoying that a University of Missouri report shows that land sited within three miles of a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) loses 6.6 percent of its value. Land within one-tenth of a mile becomes practically worthless, losing a whopping 88.3 percent of its value.

These poultry-produced problems extend way beyond property values, too. Sanderson Farms wants to set up shop in a protected watershed region that's currently experiencing a drought. Not only will the poultry processing plant draw more than one million gallons of water each day from the already-strained local supply, it threatens to pollute the water that hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians rely on for drinking.

Sanderson Farms and the bevy of new chicken houses that crop up because of it will produce about 182 million pounds of chicken waste every year. That's the equivalent of 404 Statue of Libertys'-worth of poop! During rainstorms, all that waste will wash right into nearby streams, eventually making its way into the Tar-Pamlico and Neuse River Basins. Chicken waste already contains bacteria and nitrogen, but because of the feed birds eat, arsenic will also likely be present in this waste. You can bet that both drinking water and aquatic ecosystems will take a heavy hit from that pollution.

Nash County officials claim that the 1,100 jobs Sanderson Farms will bring to the county makes up for the potential problems the operation poses. But let's take a good, hard look at those jobs. Factory farm work is pretty low paying, typically in the $8-an-hour pay range. Despite the low pay, the work can be exceedingly dangerous. According to Nash County Landowners Association, the rates of injury and death in the poultry industry are even higher than those in the manufacturing field. In the past decade, 100 U.S. poultry workers have died and another 300,000 were injured in the workplace. Plus, the repetitive motions involved in poultry processing plant work wreak havoc on the body, with most employees lasting only a year or two before needing to move to a different line of work.

The health, environmental, and quality-of-life costs associated with Sanderson Farms clearly outweigh any potential economic benefits to Nash County. The county's officials may be siding with the slaughterhouse right now, but it's not too late to stop Sanderson Farms from ever seeing the light of day. Sign the Nash County Landowners Association's petition, and help the community Say No to Sanderson Farms.

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Photo credit: Farm Sanctuary via Flickr