"The state’s uniquely lax regulation permits chicken waste to collect outdoors – but there’s no easy way to complain about it".
"Jefferson Currie II is at war with flies.
Spotted flypaper dangles from the ceiling of his home in North Carolina’s Scotland county. He shows off a two-quart jar trap, marketed as an outdoor pest control solution for farms, full of flies he’s caught indoors. On Zoom meetings for his job as the Lumber Riverkeeper with the non-profit Winyah Rivers Alliance, he mutes himself and goes offscreen to avoid distracting others with the heavy thunk of his pump-action, salt-shooting plastic fly gun.
The flies are here, said Currie, because North Carolina’s poultry industry has given them the perfect feeding grounds: massive piles of feces, urine and sawdust bedding, cleared from industrial-scale chicken barns. These heaps of waste are left exposed to the elements for days on end before being worked into agricultural fields as fertilizer. He lives half a mile from a facility with 16 such barns and within a mile of a dozen more, which grow birds on a contract basis for companies such as Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms and Mountaire Farms."
Advertisement 
