New Regs Could Mean Chicken Litter Business Flies Coop | CNS Maryland

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Starting at 6:30 a.m., five days a week, Ray Ellis sends out a small crew from his local farm in Millsboro, Del., to perform one unique and smelly task: piling up and collecting tons and tons of chicken litter from area farms, to sell.“It’s a pretty good business,” Ellis said. “We go to Delaware, Maryland, basically all over the peninsula.

”Chicken litter is valued by many crop farmers in Delaware and along Maryland’s Eastern Shore for its use as a nutrient-filled fertilizer, and poultry growers in the area often have excess litter from their chickens. Ellis took advantage of that supply and demand and turned it into a business, taking excess chicken litter from growers and selling it to local crop farmers.

But now, he fears that business could fall apart as Maryland prepares to implement new regulations on phosphorus in the soil.Those new regulations come in the form of the Phosphorus Management Tool, a set of measurements and equations developed by the University of Maryland to rate the potential for phosphorus runoff in soil.The new tool will only apply to farms with a Fertility Index Value of 150 or more, meaning they already have excessive nutrients in their soil.

The tool will take a more comprehensive look at how much phosphorus is in the soil and the chance that it could run off and end up in a watershed.Depending on how farms rate with the new tool, they could be more restricted in how much phosphorus they can add in the future, with “high risk” farms forbidden from adding any more of the nutrient until their levels are in check.

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via New Regs Could Mean Chicken Litter Business Flies The Coop | CNS Maryland.

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