Bruce Ivins is no snowflake. He’s a 62-year-old welder and lifelong farmer who grew up amid the chickens and tractors on his family’s farm near Centreville on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
But then his neighbor built two industrial-sized chicken houses next door, and he filed a complaint with the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) because he could not tolerate the clouds of ammonia, dust, and feathers from the operation’s exhaust fans. But MDE took no action against the poultry operation. He is not alone in being concerned about the lack of enforcement or oversight of the poultry industry by MDE. An investigation by the Environmental Integrity Project of more than 5,000 pages of MDE inspection reports shows that 84 percent of Maryland poultry farms inspected by the state between 2017 and 2020 failed pollution control permit requirements. But only about two percent of the poultry operations – or four total facilities, out of the 153 that failed inspections – were ever penalized by the state. All this research – and proposed solutions to the problem – are detailed in EIP’s new reports, “Stagnant Waters,” and “Blind Eye to Big Chicken.”
