Today, a key Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) wastewater discharge permit for animal feeding operations expires, requiring the state to update and renew the guidelines. Although the permit rules are intended to prevent water pollution, they have not proven effective at stemming pollution from factory farms, particularly the state’s enormous poultry industry.

Last week, local, state, and national environmental groups sent a letter urging Governor Moore to seize upon the opportunity to improve water quality protections in the updated 2025 MDE permit guidelines.

Food & Water Watch research details how rapid factory farm industrialization, underpinned by policy incentives and the failure to regulate pollution, harms public health, communities and the environment. In Maryland, Food & Water Watch analysis finds that:

• Industrial farming is huge: At any given point in 2022, Maryland factory farms confined 36 million broiler (meat) chickens. 
• Eastern Shore is a factory farm hub: Eight of nine Eastern Shore counties have high to extremely high broiler chicken density — two counties, Caroline and Somerset, are among the densest in the country.

• Maryland broiler factory farms produce 548 million pounds of waste annually. That poultry litter includes bedding, feathers, and chemical-laden chicken poop. The manure content alone was enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool each day.
• Agriculture is the leading human-caused source of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. These chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects including blue baby syndrome, and harmful algal blooms.

In response to the expiring permit, Food & Water Watch Staff Attorney Dani Replogle issued the following statement:

“This summer, Gov. Moore has the opportunity to finally reign in unchecked factory farm water pollution that has harmed the Bay and Eastern Shore communities for decades. Factory farm pollution sullies our waterways, and poisons the families living closest to these dirty operations. Gov. Moore and MDE must seize this opportunity to improve permitting and provide Marylanders with the protections they desperately need.”

Groups are asking Governor Moore and MDE to require factory farms to: implement Best Management Practices to better control waste pollution; conduct representative monitoring to ensure permit compliance; submit individual National Pollutant Discharge Elimination Systems (NPDES) permits for factory farms with anaerobic digesters and other biorefinery technologies; and reduce risks from manure manifestation/transfers.

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