BURLEY — As California tightens animal welfare laws that may drive the poultry industry to neighboring states, a question has been hatched among locals: Will the chicken industry come to roost in Mini-Cassia?

A bolstered poultry industry could provide new jobs, increase the tax base and diversify agriculture locally. But some question the impact of more animal factory farms, and whether local farmers will be at risk when they contract with the large corporations.

Cassia County officials have been paving the way for the industry for months by establishing new guidelines for poultry confined-animal feeding operations. The new ordinance restricts the number of birds per facility to 4.2 million and implements a four-mile bio-security buffer that would keep such facilities separated by eight miles. The ordinance underwent minor amendments Monday and was unanimously passed by county commissioners.

Across the Snake River in Minidoka County, there is no cap on the number of animals allowed per poultry CAFO, nor any plan to create such cap. Minidoka County Commissioner Robert Moore said government shouldn’t try to regulate businesses as long as the companies meet state guidelines for clean air and water.

“You can’t tell companies they can only have four million birds if they need eight million to be profitable,” said Moore. “You might as well tell them not to come.”

In California, lawmakers may have regulated the entire industry out of the state, he said.

Moore, who also sits on the Burley Urban Renewal District Board, said an unidentified company has proposed a broiler plant in the North Burley urban renewal district project area, which lies west of the city of Heyburn.

Minidoka County Community Development Director Paul Aston said technically Heyburn cannot be impacted by any business that locates within North Burley city limits.

Heyburn City Councilwoman Cleo Gallegos said most Heyburn residents want to see an increase in available jobs and wouldn’t mind having a good, clean processing plant for a neighbor. But Heyburn Mayor George Anderson said he can’t believe a processing plant wouldn’t somehow impact Heyburn, which lies downwind of the proposed site.

Industry-fashioned ordinances?

Hy-Line North America LLC Director of Operations Bill Garr said his company has worked with local officials to develop Cassia County’s new ordinance, which will allow local farmers to build hen houses suitable to produce eggs for Hy-Line’s Burley hatchery.

“Hy-Line North America has a standard operating arrangement with local producers at our other locations in the U.S. and would like to develop those arrangements in Idaho as well,” Garr said.

But Shavone Hasse of Fruitland, a board member for the Idaho Concerned Area Residents for the Environment, said if large corporations pull out they may leave local farmers bankrupted by the burden of paying for costly infrastructure.

“A lot of my concerns stem from people in the industry helping the county write ordinances,” said Hasse. ICARE is a nonprofit with about 200 members, with less than a half dozen members in Mini-Cassia.

Moore said it’s unlikely that farmers will be left high and dry. Any company investing so much in an area business plans to stay, he said.

Garr said Hy-Line first identifies potential producers who want to diversify their operations. It then provides the producers with building specifications and costs.

“We work with them to develop a cash-flow model that allows them to service the debt and earn a living,” Garr said.

The local producer provides the land, facility and labor, while Hy-line provides the chickens and feed.

“Many of our contract producers have been with Hy-Line for over 20 years,” Garr said.

Impact onthe aquifer

According to the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, the nitrate concentration in Cassia County drinking water already exceeds state and federal guidelines, and the county is listed as a nitrate priority area.

Hasse said the scale of CAFOs in Cassia County and the whole region is unsustainable. There are too many animals producing waste and as a result nitrates, she said, for it to all be absorbed into the ground without contaminating the water.

She said Cassia County’s decisions regarding CAFOs will also affect people within hundreds of miles because of the shared aquifer.

A June 26 Washington Post article by Douglas Gansler, Maryland’s attorney general, stated the poultry industry also routinely uses roxarsone, an arsenic feed additive, to fight parasites and increase growth in chickens. Gansler wrote the carcinogen, which can ultimately make its way into drinking water, is linked to heart disease, diabetes and decline in brain function in humans.

Nitrates and arsenic are only part of concerns of a poultry industry expansion, as manure-based phosphorous caught in runoff could also create stinky algae blooms in waterways, which could affect recreation and ultimately tourism.

Smaller footprints

One company aiming for poultry production in Mini-Cassia is Magic Valley Poultry Corp. Company spokesman Bill Bean said the plan is to build a 239,000-square-foot broiler chicken processing plant in Burley, with 430 workers. But it may try to expand to 1,000 workers with a second shift.

Bean didn't respond to Times-News requests for an interview.

During county poultry hearings, Cassia County dairyman Brent Stoker testified that if Magic Valley Poultry stays true to its plan, the chicken waste would be processed through an extruder that will heat it above the boiling point, making it sterile. The waste will then be pelletized and sold as commercial-grade fertilizer.

“In that case, a chicken farm would have less impact and a smaller footprint than any dairy around,” Stoker said.

While a major facility like Magic Valley’s Poultry’s proposal will likely draw the most debate, there’s also concern over the proliferation of smaller facilities that provide chickens or eggs to the larger corporations.

Cassia County’s new poultry CAFO ordinance regulates facilities with more than 50,000 birds, but contract growers may choose to operate below that range. If laws don’t change, farms with fewer than 50,000 birds may slip through the regulatory cracks, Stoker said.

As part of their legwork before making decisions on the county ordinance, Christensen and other county officials visited plants in Arkansas last summer and two plants in California in January.

All the plants had very little odor, he said, and there weren’t rampant feather problems in the towns like he’d heard. Although rogue feathers were noticed, they weren’t more evident than the occasional potato or sugar beet found on Mini-Cassia roadways during harvest, Christensen said.

Christensen said the plants he visited were also older and less technologically advanced than the one proposed by Magic Valley Poultry.

Hy-Line officials declined a request by the Times-News to allow a photographer or reporter inside its Burley facility, citing the bio-security risk it would pose to the baby chicks, although a group of Mini-Cassia officials were given a facility tour in 2009.

Christensen said the industry is basically self-regulating because of its need for bio-security.

According to the National Chicken Council, bio-security in the industry is used as a tool by companies to minimize the effects of disease and infections such as salmonella and avian influenza.

Hasse said any industry that “self regulates” or requires bio-security provisions should be setting off alarm bells for officials.

Animal rights

By adopting Proposition 2, California has set the stage for stricter welfare laws for farm animals in other states as well.

Proposition 2, designed to prevent the cruel confinement of farm animals, passed in November 2008 and is slated to go into effect in 2015. Most poultry companies already operate within industry guidelines set for animal welfare, but opponents say abuses are rampant.

Hy-Line was targeted by the animal-rights group Mercy for Animals in 2009, which released an undercover video on the Internet that showed clips of the company’s plant in Spencer, Iowa, where live male chicks were destroyed in a grinder.

According to the National Chicken Council’s animal-welfare guidelines, that procedure — called maceration — is the recommended practice for destroying unwanted chicks.

Burley Economic Development Director Doug Manning said he toured the Burley Hy-Line hatchery, and said it disposes of male chicks with a suction device.

Male chicks are considered a useless byproduct of the egg industry so millions of them are killed a year, said Heather Carlson, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals communications assistant manager in Washington D.C.

“Some chicks are tossed into trash bags to suffocate or are thrown into high-speed grinders called macerators while they are still alive,” Carlson wrote in ane-mail to the Times-News.

“This is about how we should behave as human beings or producers of food,” Hasse said. “If you are willing to abuse animals you aren’t going to have any qualms about contaminating your neighbor’s groundwater. The way you treat animals is an indication of your moral compass.”

Chicken for dinner

According to the National Chicken Council’s 8.8 billion broiler chickens are processed annually in the U.S., where annual chicken consumption is 81.8 pounds per person.

Stoker said as long as such demand exists, companies will look for places to do business where they can be profitable.

He said an influx of poultry companies into the state may hinge on whether California legislators change the wording of Proposition 2 slightly to prevent the sale of eggs or birds kept in battery cages rather than the current wording that prohibits production.

Currently, the poultry industry is almost entirely based in Arkansas and California. In the industry, there’s a 72-hour window to ship birds, so if producers can’t make money under California’s new law, they’ll seek other locations to do business, Moore said.

Idaho could become a hub for the distribution of poultry to Western states now supplied by California companies.

“We are 24 hours from anywhere on the West Coast,” Moore said.

State laws

State officials are currently eyeing laws regarding poultry so the state won’t be caught off-guard like it was when the dairy industry came to Idaho.

Sen. Tim Corder,R-Mountain Home, chairman of the Senate Agricultural Affairs Committee, has introduced legislation to give the Idaho State Department of Agriculture more power to enforce CAFO rules, including those for poultry.

And the Idaho Supreme Court upheld Gooding County’s regulations on CAFOs earlier this month, affirming the rights of counties to regulate water quality and other concerns beyond what state agencies do. The ruling concluded that Gooding County wasn’t pre-empted from regulating water quality, and its cap on animal units per acre didn’t violate CAFO owners’ due-process rights.

ISDA spokeswoman Pam Juker said poultry CAFOs aren’t currently regulated by the agency, but fall under the jurisdiction of DEQ.

DEQ issues CAFO poultry permits for facilities with more than 200,000 birds, and penalties for poultry permit violations include civil and criminal consequences.

“It comes down to size,” said Stoker. “If you are considered large you have to live by Idaho’s clean-air and water rules.”

Those rules may soon be abided by large poultry companies seeking profitable conditions in Idaho, a scenario some job-seekers and area officials anxiously await.

“This is something I’m really excited about — it’s about our future and the creation of jobs,” Moore said. “Our future lies in agriculture and the future of agriculture lies in diversification.”

Laurie Welch may be reached at lwelch@magicvalley.com or 677-8767.