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MONTH: JAN-FEB 06
U.S. Supreme Court may step into factory-farmed chicken poop
The U.S. Supreme Court, recently reconstituted with two new members including a new chief justice, may hear arguments on the right of states to regulate agricultural pollution.
Arkansas attorney general Mike Beebe in November 2005 asked the Supreme Court to throw out a U.S. District Court lawsuit filed in June 2005 by Oklahoma attorney general Drew Edmondson against eight poultry firms with Arkansas operations that allegedly pollute the Illinois River, upstream from Oklahoma. The eight, among them many poultry industry leaders, include Cargill, Cobb-Vantress, Simmons Foods, Peter-son Farms, Tyson Foods, Willow Brook Foods, George’s, and Cal-Maine Foods.
Beebe claimed to be seeking Supreme Court intervention on behalf of Poultry Partners, an organization purporting to represent 400 farm families in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Some of the same people are involved in the Illinois River Watershed Partner-ship, formed in December 2005 by a group including Poultry Partners spokesperson Bev Saunders and Simmons Foods Chairman Mark Simmons.
Simmons, named vice president of the new group, told Robert J. Smith of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he wants to make sure it doesn’t “look like a front for the poultry industry.”
Edmondson in a January 6, 2006 response to Beebe’s petition to the Supreme Court called it, “nothing more than an attempt by Arkansas to use its status as a state to shield private companies from being liable for their intentional pollution of Oklahoma’s natural resources.”