http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125721391914624061.htmlRetired Marine officer Rick Dove boarded the four-seat Cessna armed with cameras, binoculars and global positioning devices for his latest mission: chicken farmers. Or, more precisely, aerial reconnaissance of poultry droppings.
"Oh, man, that looks like a hot site," Mr. Dove said as the plane soared 1,000 feet over farms near the Chesapeake Bay. Peering through binoculars, he said, "That pile is at least two stories high." He whipped out his camera and started snapping pictures.
Mr. Dove, 70 years old, suspected the brown mound was chicken manure -- a potential pollutant of the Chesapeake Bay, the huge estuary nestled between the shores of Maryland and Virginia. Mr. Dove, a former military judge whose subsequent fishing business he believes was ruined by pollution, is among the activists who, along with federal regulators, are ratcheting up pressure on poultry farmers to clean up their litter.
Livestock and poultry operations generate about 500 million tons of manure each year, or about three times the amount of human waste in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Much of that waste goes untreated and sometimes can make its way into public waterways. Among other contaminants, manure contains nitrogen and phosphorus that in large quantities can cause algae blooms -- green, gooey splotches on the water surface that can deplete the water's oxygen, killing fish and other organisms. And in some cases, the runoff, which can contain E. coli and other bacteria, can threaten human health.
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He assembled an "air force," as he calls it, of volunteer pilots to search for piles of manure. His photographs and observations became the basis of lawsuits against the hog industry, including Smithfield Foods Inc., one of the nation's largest hog producers.
In 2006, a Waterkeeper lawsuit alleging violations of the Clean Water Act against Smithfield resulted in a settlement in which the company agreed to implement millions of dollars in environmental safeguards at 275 hog farms in North Carolina. The following year, the state passed a law permanently banning the construction of new hog waste "lagoons," large ponds used to store manure, which have been known to overflow and pollute water.
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On a recent day, Mr. Dove, Waterkeeper attorney Liane Curtis and a LightHawk pilot sailed through a clear sky talking to each other over headsets. The silver, corrugated metal roofs of chicken houses made the poultry farms below easy to spot. But Mr. Dove was seeking something that looked more like dirt.
"There's one over here, about 11 o'clock," he said. The plane flew circles over a farm that appeared to have giant brown heaps piled in a pond next to a row of chicken houses.
The next day, he and Ms. Curtis drove to the GPS coordinates they marked in flight. Toting sample bottles, the two walked up to the suspect farm to gather water samples, but balked at a "No Trespassing" sign. They settled for scooping dingy water samples from a ditch adjacent to the farm. A lawyer for Waterkeeper says preliminary test results show elevated levels of potentially harmful bacteria, including E. coli.
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thank you Rick Dove and more power to you
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