Advocates from northeastern Oklahoma are concerned that the large chicken farms being built in their backyards are affecting the quality of air. Now, researchers at the University of Oklahoma are studying the extent of air pollution from the poultry plants.
Margaret Levin Phillips, chair of the department of occupational and environmental health at the University of Oklahoma, said the environmental group Green Country Guardians reached out to them to do the study out of public health concerns. The organization has been advocating for years for more regulations on the growing poultry plants in the area, and argues that laws haven’t been adapting to the rapidly changing industry.
The study is being funded by a $398,750 federal research grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a part of the National Institutes of Health.
Phillips said while there have been studies about community perception of large scale poultry feeding operations, noair quality studies have been done.
This study will measure ammonia, which is attributed to the foul smell outside of the farms, and dust in the air at 25 households that are within 3,000 feet of a large poultry operation. Residents of the household will also have their noses swabbed.
“For the dust, we'll be looking at what sort of microbes are present in different sizes of dust particles,” Phillips said. “Because that's something that we can then work out based on the size of the dust particles, are these particles inhalable? And if they are inhalable, how far might they penetrate into the respiratory tract?”
Data collection will begin in winter, and will look at how ammonia and dust changes over the poultry growing cycle, when full grown chickens are replaced with chicks.
Pam Kingfisher is the coordinator for the environmental group Green Country Guardians, said her community is concerned about the possible health implications of the farms.
According to public records obtained by the Tulsa World, over the last 20 years, the number of chicken farms in northeast Oklahoma has dropped from nearly 1,100 farms to around 600, but the number of birds each farm is raising has increased from 69,000 to more than 96,000.
According to the Poultry Federation, Oklahoma farmers produced 211.3 million broilers for processing in 2019.
“We're just very concerned, these are public health concerns,” Kingfisher said. “It's not about one family or even one community. We have three communities completely saturated with these new farms. And every regulatory agency, there's no data, there's no concern.”
Right now, neither the Department of Environmental Quality or Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Food and Forestry is required to measure air for contaminants nearby poultry plants.
The Registered Poultry Feeding Operations Act of 1998 requires ODAFF to do an annual inspection with a checklist to ensure requirements are met such as no excess litter is being dumped and review land application records.
Teena Gunter, general counsel for ODAFF and director of Agricultural Environmental Management Services, said her office has no authority to deal with air contaminants because it’s not covered in the law.
“The primary purpose of that statute is to prevent runoff of poultry litter from land application to waters of the state,” Gunter said.
Gunter said if the study came out and showed a public health risk, the legislature would have to act to give ODAFF the authority to act.
The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Food and Forestry passed a new rule last year mandating farms with more than 150,000 birds be a certain distance away from places like schools, houses and streams. Some Oklahoma lawmakers have previously said it’s too soon for more regulation of poultry feeding operations.
Tyler Norvell, a lobbyist for the Poultry Federation in Oklahoma, said if the studies do show negative effects on public health, the industry will respond to mitigate them.
“As studies are done, and technologies develop, and we learn things, we're going to respond to the science, as an industry does continue to be good neighbors,” Norvell said.
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