The Water Information Program

In a region that produces billions of pounds of the nation's poultry, part of doing business for the past half-century was trying to ignore the smelly waste dropped by the birds. Now, the chickens have come to roost, as Oklahoma wants a federal judge to stop 13 Arkansas-based poultry companies from dropping any more chicken litter in a once-pristine watershed. The preliminary injunction request is part of the state's 2005 lawsuit against the $2 billion poultry operation here for polluting with chicken waste, which contains bacteria, antibiotics, growth hormones and harmful metals. At stake is a practice thousands of farmers have employed for years: Taking the stuff and spreading it on their land as cheap fertilizer. However inexpensive, decades of mass-dumping of the litter has wreaked havoc in the 1-million-acre Illinois River watershed, turning it into a murky, sludgy mess, environmentalists say. If a judge orders an end to disposing the waste here, the ruling could lead to similar environmental lawsuits nationwide against the industry, which produced more than 48 billion pounds of chicken in 2006.

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