Environmentalists: Proposed rules on land-applied chicken sludge don't go far enough

Mar. 13—People living near Hidden Valley Farm in southern Morgan County, about 5 miles south of Danville, say something has to change with how the state regulates the application of food-processing and wastewater treatment sludge on Alabama farms.

The waste materials stored by Denali Water Solutions in its lagoons at Hidden Valley Farm and applied to the farmland it owns there have a stench neighbors say drives them into their homes.

"The smell is terrible. Sometimes it just smells like a rotten corpse. It smells like something dead down there," said Cranson Asherbranner, who lives near the farm.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) has proposed stricter regulations for storage and application of waste. Environmental groups say they're better than existing regulations but don't go far enough.

The issues are tangible for Asherbranner and his family. He and his wife recently held an outside birthday party at their home for their young daughter.

"Imagine having to throw a birthday party for a 5-year-old and some of her friends not being able to show up because their parents and the other kids can't handle the smell of this, and others showing up but getting queasy at their stomach," he said. "Imagine having to watch my wife, who worked hard to put this party together, and watching a 5-year-old upset about it."

Like his neighbors, he has little confidence that the proposed revision to existing regulations by ADEM will solve the problem.

"It's like anything in Montgomery. They'll do something to pacify the corporations and they won't do the homework to see who all it will affect," he said.

Public input

The public comment period for the proposed regulations ends Thursday. Comments can be emailed to ADEM at hearing.officer@adem.alabama.gov. On the same day, at 9:30 a.m., ADEM will hold a public hearing on the proposed rules at the main hearing room of its central office, 1400 Coliseum Blvd. in Montgomery.

At issue is what ADEM refers to as "beneficial use byproducts." Some of it is a slurry containing particles of chickens, along with other waste from rendering and processing plants. Some of it is biosolids collected from wastewater treatment plants. The waste that ends up at Hidden Valley Farm comes from Alabama and neighboring states.

Representatives at Denali did not respond to requests for comment.

The waste is deemed "beneficial" because it has nutrient value. Chicken processors and municipal wastewater treatment facilities, using distributors like Denali, provide it free to farmers as a fertilizer substitute. It saves the poultry industry the cost of putting it in the landfill and saves farmers the cost of fertilizer.

But, according to neighbors and as reflected in numerous complaints to ADEM, it stinks.

Until April 2020, Alabama had no regulations on land application of chicken sludge. The existing regulations were ADEM's first attempt to place limits on the practice.

ADEM Director Lance LeFleur said it was a new issue for the department and it proceeded carefully.

"We went out to a lot of the people that are impacted — individuals, agricultural interests and a number of different interests — and developed the framework and basic beneficial use rule. Since that time we've been on the learning curve," he said.

He's confident the new regulations, once adopted, will help reduce the smell.

"These new rules we think tighten it up," he said. "They tighten up reporting, they tighten up buffers that need to be put out there. The plans have to take into account a number of different factors that were previously not necessarily covered under EPA rules or under our rules. We think it's a — I don't want to say quantum leap — but a big leap forward for addressing this.

"We have a big poultry industry in Alabama and that industry has byproducts that need to be dealt with."

Jack West, policy and advocacy director of the Alabama Rivers Alliance, agreed that the proposed rules are a significant improvement over the existing ones. He noted that the existing rules, however, were far stronger when proposed, but after input from the poultry industry they were weakened.

"We want to see the regulations strengthened to the point where Alabama is not a dumping destination for a variety of waste streams coming just across the state line from Georgia or Mississippi or Tennessee, which is what we have been seeing," he said.

Improvements

Among the improvements in the proposed regulations, West said, is a requirement that the sludge be tested for some chemicals before application, increased buffer zones between where the sludge is applied and residences and waterways, some requirements for treatment of food-processing residuals, and specified limits on how much of the waste can be applied per acre.

"There are more requirements in this set of regulations to have generators and distributors of the material show that these materials are actually beneficial," he said, including monitoring of crop yields. "Having to show that there actually is a beneficial use to these materials that outweighs any negative impacts of pollutants that are contained in them is a positive improvement."

The testing required under the proposed regulations is better than no testing, he said, but totally inadequate. Waste distributors like Denali would only have to test for nine toxic pollutants. Hundreds of other toxic chemicals could be in the waste, West said, and nobody would know. He in particular worries that Denali and other waste distributors would not have to test for PFAS — an industrial chemical prevalent in Morgan County that EPA labels a likely carcinogen.

"We know that PFAS gets concentrated in biosolids and gets concentrated in some of these other waste streams, even if they're treated. We could be applying concentrated PFAS in huge volumes to the fields where we grow our food to feed our families," West said.

Limiting testing to the nine pollutants is a mistake for land-applied wastewater treatment sludge, West said, but also for chicken sludge.

"Any chemicals that are used in those facilities to clean them end up in those waste streams. Nobody is testing for that. And of course the same PFAS that's in human sewage is in livestock sewage as well."

The amount of waste shipped to Hidden Valley Farm is significant. In a filing with ADEM for calendar year 2020, Denali predecessor Recyc Systems reported receiving 22,067 tons of industrial byproduct — most from poultry processing plants — and 5,960 tons of municipal wastewater sludge. The industrial byproduct was distributed and land-applied to eight north Alabama farms, including Hidden Valley Farm. Municipal waste was land-applied in eight counties that year, but not in Morgan County.

Jean Bowling lives on Andrew Chapel Road, the main route for most of the tanker trucks entering Hidden Valley Farm. "Lots of trucks pass by my house. About 15-20 pass by here some days," she said. "The odor is terrible."

Neighbors say they began seeing the trucks and dealing with the smell in late 2020.

Asherbranner said he can hear the trucks coming to the farm at night and also hears when the pumps and agitators start up at the lagoon where the slurry is stored.

"You know they're pumping because it's not long after you hear the hum of the pump engines that you get that horrible smell," he said. "At night we used to sleep with our windows open. Everyone out there loves to listen to the crickets. The flies are terrible now, and I have noticed an increase in the coyote population. We used to get the occasional pack of coyotes that would roam in and then roam off. Now almost every night you hear large packs of coyotes being attracted to the smell down there."

'Like something dead'

Barbara Crow, who lives across Crowdabout Creek from Hidden Valley Farm, worries both about what the sludge is doing to the creek and to people who breathe the fumes.

"When it's hot, especially when the wind is coming from that direction, the smell is bad. You have to go back inside," she said. "It's not like something dead, it's actually worse than that. It's just an unidentifiable smell. It's awful."

A creek that runs along Hidden Valley Farm joins Crowdabout Creek, and Crow recently went to look at it.

"Not all of the time but part of the time, the creek coming out of Hidden Valley Farm is darker and it stinks," she said. "That side of the creek had what looked like cotton candy all over the bottom and on the roots of everything, all the way down to the bridge on Hidden Valley Road that you cross to go to Hidden Valley Farm. It's kind of a creamy white color."

She said she reported her finding to ADEM but when inspectors came out last month, nine days after she reported it, there had just been a heavy rain that washed away the odor and cottony material.

Black Warrior Riverkeeper has taken a lead role in challenging land-application of waste, and staff member Nelson Brooke said Crow is right to be worried about what chemicals are in the waste.

"The draft form of the regulations would be better than where we were before, but they're not going to be stringent enough to protect the land and the environment and public health because of the nature of all of these different waste byproducts that are being allowed to be land-applied in Alabama," he said.

"It's kind of a fool's errand to take the worst of the worst out of our waste treatment processes and then put it on the land and pretend like it's fertilizer. Yeah, it has nutritive value, but it carries with it a cocktail of other pollutants. I think we're going to really regret allowing this to be done, however many decades down the road, when more science and health issues are recognized."

LeFleur said ADEM primarily receives complaints about the smell of the land-applied waste, and the subjective nature of those complaints complicates the effort to draft regulations. There is no good way to directly regulate odor, he said.

"People say, 'I love the smell of baking bread,' but if you live across the street from a bakery you get a little tired of it," LeFleur said. "The way we handle (the subjective nature of odor) is we have best management practices. We try to design these best management practices to control those odors to a reasonable degree. You'll never eliminate all of the odors. ... Lord knows I empathize with folks that are around a facility that has a strong odor to it."

He compared it to the smell that comes from paper mills.

"A lot of work has been done not controlling necessarily the odor directly but controlling the practices that contribute to the odor. That's what we're working at doing here," he said.

West sees the proposed regulations as an improvement over existing ones and hopes ADEM does not bow to pressure from corporate agricultural interests to weaken them.

"We hope that ADEM pays as much attention to the folks that are impacted by these practices as they do to the industries that they regulate and that profit from it," West said.

Despite the possibility of regulatory improvements, West believes ADEM should ban land-application of waste altogether.

"There's too much unknown. This practice shouldn't be happening at all," he said.

Brooke agreed.

"There is no way to paint a pretty picture on it," he said. "Nutrients are in a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that we should just blindly apply them to the land and ignore all the other things that are in that product."

— eric@decaturdaily.com or 256-340-2435. Twitter @DD_Fleischauer.