Area residents worry about environmental impacts, water quality

By Sheila Harris [email protected]

According to Tim Bull, with the Water Pollution Control Branch of the DNR, there are no state regulations that limit the number of poultry broiler houses that can be built on a specific amount of acreage. 

Nor, stated Bull, in a recent email to the Cassville Democrat, are there specific setbacks or separation requirements between one poultry operation and another.

The lack of state regulations governing the density of poultry operations came as a surprise to a group of neighbors who live on the Sarcoxie Prairie, west of Wentworth. When a handful of them received “neighbor notices” in the mail in 2024, informing them that the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) planned to approve permits for four new poultry broiler operations within 3,000 feet of their addresses, they began to research.

“We learned that broiler operations, including 28 barns with a total of 1.3 million birds, would be located within the same square mile, two miles from our farm,” said Leah Heidlage, who along with her husband, Dennis, lives on and operates a cattle farm that has been in the Heidlage family for five generations.

The Heidlages and several of their neighbors, including the couple’s two daughters and their families, formed a neighborhood group called Protect Our Water and Environmental Resources (P.O.W.E.R.), and are working to effect relevant legislative changes.

“We’re not against farming; we’re all farmers out here,” Leah Heidlage said. “But we believe in responsible farming — a way of life that takes our neighbors’ interests into consideration, as well as our own.”

Heidlage doesn’t believe current Missouri laws governing CAFOs encourage responsible farming.

CAFOs and their smaller cousins, Animal Feeding Operations (AFOs), are classified by the DNR according to the number of animals units they support, and how the waste from those animals is disposed of. Using a complicated formula that (for example) categorizes one half of a horse as one animal unit and 125 broiler chickens as one animal unit, computations are made that limit the total number of individual animals that can be confined within a certain class. More information may be found here: https://tinyurl.com/2hjm78yu.

Permits from the DNR are required for CAFOs; no permits are required for AFOs. Regulations for CAFOs are stringent in some areas, but could be considered lax in others.

All of the broiler house now permitted by the DNR to operate near the P.O.W.E.R. neighbors are categorized as Class 1C, operations that can house up to 374,999 chickens, if they don’t use water to dispose of their manure. A “wet-handling” manure system, or the addition of just one more chicken, would elevate the farm to a higher classification, where more exacting regulations would apply.

A key difference between classifications is the greater amount of buffering distance required from a neighboring residence for higher classifications.

According to the DNR’s website, Class 1C broiler operations require that broiler houses cannot be built closer than 1,000 feet from a neighbor’s house without that neighbor’s written consent. A Class 1B farm requires a buffering distance of 2,000 feet, while a Class 1A — the largest category — calls for a separation of 3,000 feet from a neighbor’s house.

The smaller buffering distance that a Class 1C operation requires can spell the difference in the number of broiler houses that can be constructed on a particular piece of property.

According to Bull, property limitations do exist for CAFOs, although they’re not based on the number of barns on a property. Rather, they’re centered around ensuring that the correct number of animals for a CAFO’s permitted class size are present at a single operating location.

“An operating location includes all continuous lands owned, operated, or controlled by one person or by two or more persons jointly or as tenants in common,” Bull said.

Based on the disposition of waste, exceptions to that rule exist.

Waste disposition aside, according to current regulations, the owner of one piece of property is limited to operating one Class 1C broiler farm with a total of 374,999 chickens, even though the size of his farm might be able to accommodate a second operation.

P.O.W.E.R. neighbor, Braden Warner, alleges that poultry growers are working around the single-owner rule.

“They’re trying to hide their common control of multiple CAFOs in order to maintain their Class 1C operating status,” Warner said. “We’re seeing some land-shuffling oddities, like an owner buying a large parcel, then dividing it up between family members on paper, so that the CAFOs they construct will appear to have separate owners.”

Warner’s father, Brett Warner, voices additional concerns.

“The density of broiler houses within a relatively small area will contribute to the spread of diseases like Avian Flu,” he said.

P.O.W.E.R.’s concern is not just for the surface inconveniences that living near poultry houses present: the odors, the dust, and the possible loss in property value. The neighbors are worried about the poultry operations’ effects on their groundwater, including the increased draw from the water table itself.

Based on information gathered from the Mississippi State University Extension, Leah Heidlage assembled a chart showing that, during one grow-out phase, 1.3 million chickens in 28 poultry barns would consume over 4 million gallons of water.

“That’s almost 25 million gallons a year for six grow-out phases,” Heidlage said.

Contamination of groundwater from surface infiltration is also a concern for the P.O.W.E.R. neighbors.

“We have karst below us, here,” Leah Heidlage said. “Geohydrologic surveys were conducted for each of the properties where permits were pending. They all indicated the presence of nearby sinkholes and losing streams.”

According to hydrologists, both sinkholes and losing streams provide direct access to groundwater.

Mineshafts, too, present the opportunity for groundwater infiltration on the Sarcoxie Prairie. Lead and zinc mining operations once flourished in Jasper and Newton Counties, and remnants of those operations — in the form of boreholes and mineshafts — still exist.

One P.O.W.E.R. member, Brian Long, said that in 1942, on a property near his own, 52 test boreholes had been drilled, before two mine shafts were eventually dropped into the ground for production purposes. That property, Long says, is now the site of poultry barns.

“One barn is situated right over one of the mine shafts,” Long said.

The Class 1C broiler operations near Wentworth are considered “No-discharge operations,” as are the majority of broiler operation in southwest Missouri, for which contact with Waters of The State is prohibited. Dead birds are composted, and, along with litter (a combination of manure and bedding materials removed from barns), are kept in dry storage sheds, protected from rain and other external water sources.

Regulations for the final disposition of the dry waste, however, leave many questions unanswered.

As opposed to land-applying their own waste as fertilizer, which requires the use of a detailed Nutrient Management Technical Standard (NMTS), growers for the Class 1C broiler operations near Wentworth indicated on permit applications that their waste would be for “Export Only.” That phrase, Leah Heidlage believes, is deliberately vague.

“’Export Only’ means it can be hauled anywhere off their farm — even next door — and there will be no record of where it goes or what happens to it,” she said.

The disposition of poultry waste in northwest Arkansas has been the focal point of a 20-year lawsuit, in which the State of Oklahoma sued multiple poultry giants — including Tyson’s and George’s — for polluting the Illinois River Watershed, which runs between Arkansas and Oklahoma. The defendants recently settled out of court, and were told to find a spot for their waste where the soil wasn’t banked with phosphorus.

In Missouri, most of the litter exported from broiler operations is sold and land applied, Bull said.

According to recent permit applications, between 2,000 and 3,000 tons of litter are collected and exported annually from Class 1C broiler CAFOs, with most of it intended for land-application. Those totals have risen sharply from the year 2000, when an August 20 article in the Cassville Democrat reported that a typical poultry operation produced about 430 tons of litter per year.

Bull said when manure from a CAFO is applied to land not under the CAFO-owner’s direct control, the waste is considered a “manure transfer,” and beyond the scope of the CAFO permit and permit decision.

“The party conducting the land application is [then] responsible for ensuring its land application activities comply with all relevant laws,” Bull said.

The exportation of all waste from a CAFO is one method of manure management that meets regulatory requirements, Bull says.

Where that waste ends up, however, appears to be loosely-regulated.

According to DNR requirements, CAFO operators are required to submit an annual report to the department which includes the total amount of waste generated and land-applied or exported. If exported, the CAFO owner is instructed to include the hydrologic unit code (HUC) indicating the watershed where the waste was land-applied. (A note on the permit-application, however, indicates that the name of the receiving landowner in that watershed does not need to be included in the CAFO-owner’s annual report submitted to the DNR.)

The CAFO owner is required to maintain records on their farm for five years, with the names, addresses and watershed codes of exported manure and litter recipients. After five years, those records can be discarded, a note on the permit application states.

When asked where files could be accessed with information about the quantity of litter land-applied in various Missouri watersheds, Tim Bull replied that “the data is available but not in an easily queried or searchable format.”

Meanwhile, more CAFO poultry barns are being constructed in Barry County, where, according to the DNR’s own mapping tool, the Shoal Creek watershed, along the western edge of the county, faces Total Maximum Daily Limits, due to elevated levels of bacteria and fecal coliform from major non-point source contributors.

Pending land-application permits for poultry-processing waste will add more not-easily-traceable non-point source of water pollution to an already burdened watershed over fractured karst hydrogeology.