Chicken plant controversy divides neighbors

The News & Observer has finally weighed in on the controversy over Sanderson Farms' plans to place a chicken processing plant in Nash County near the Wilson County line. The Raleigh paper takes an in-depth look at the Nash vs. Wilson issue in a long Sunday article.

I've found the issue intriguing for several reasons. My father worked for many years in a chicken plant, known in our household and in the community as "the turkey plant." The plant in Marshville was originally locally owned but later went through a series of corporate ownerships. He was a production worker, standing in waterproof boots to shovel ice onto freshly killed chicken carcasses. It was hard work and was seasonal at first as turkey demand peaked before Thanksgiving but declined through much of the year. It was hard, dirty, physical labor for low wages.

In the 1960s, a number of farmers in the area, including some of our neighbors, got into the chicken business. They built the long, straight, shiny-roofed chicken houses and raised tens of thousands of birds at the time. The wood shavings that covered the ground inside the floorless houses became quickly drenched in chicken poop, and the farmers would clean out the old shavings and replace them with fresh shavings after a few generations of chickens had been raised. The excrement-filled shavings would be spread on farm fields as fertilizer, which was apparently pretty effective at boosting crops. The chicken houses also came with a repugnant odor. For a long time, my parents couldn't sit outdoors when the breeze brought the smell from neighbors' chicken houses. About 20 years ago, when I took a ride on a country road in my native county with the top off my car, I nearly gagged on the odor from chicken houses. A friend I met later in the day defended the farmers: "That's the smell of money," she said. People in this area who have dealt with the odor from hog farms know what it's like.

So it should be no surprise that Wilson officials are objecting to the Sanderson Farms plan to spray chicken waste on fields in Wilson's watershed. The plan calls for a pipeline to pump the effluent from Rocky Mount's watershed to Wilson's — a decision particularly galling to Wilson officials, who had supported supplying water to Rocky Mount when the latter city's reservoir ran low during a drought. The city has joined a lawsuit brought by some residents. Some Wilson officials are incensed by the proposal, seeing the plan as a bad economic decision that could harm all of eastern North Carolina and keep this area shackled to factory-scale agriculture and low-wage jobs that could permanently hinder industrial recruitment. Sanderson will need scores of chicken farms to feed its processing plant, and that will mean pungent odors will hamper development and progress in much the same way that the state's hands-off attitude toward hog farms a decade ago left eastern North Carolina freckled with hog waste lagoons.

Some Nash County residents seem just as angry about Wilson's "interference" in the county's effort to provide 1,100 jobs. The acrimony took me by surprise recently when I was in Rocky Mount. Caught in the middle are residents along N.C. 97 and N.C. 58 near the Rocky Mount-Wilson Airport and the Tar River Reservoir. Owners of palatial homes on the reservoir worry about their homes' value and the potential for water pollution and odor. "Stop the chicken plant" signs abound there.