In the late 1980s, Arkansas was the top broiler chicken-producing state in the country, home to industry giant Tyson Foods and several other vertically integrated chicken companies. The industry and its boosters in the state government claimed that the chicken industry was saving Arkansas’s rural communities, allowing farmers to stay on their land and bringing manufacturing jobs to the state.
But in 1989, a group of residents in rural Madison County, Arkansas began complaining of odor and well water pollution emanating from a pit of chicken “sludge”—a combination of chicken parts and processing waste—operated by Tyson near their homes. Tyson trucked the sludge from plants in Rogers, thirty miles east and slightly south, to rural Clifty, where it dumped the sludge in an unpermitted lagoon and spread it on farmers’ fields as fertilizer—including in weather circumstances which, according to residents, allowed it to leak into groundwater and polluted their wells with fecal coliform, streptococcus, and other bacteria.
This was just one example of consistent alleged groundwater pollution by the chicken industry in Arkansas. As Tyson published ads in the Madison County Record calling itself a “good neighbor, good friend, and good employer” who “does not want to hurt anyone’s water supply” and “will do our best to fix it,” the company and the industry lobbying group had been fighting environmental regulation and permitting in the state capitol for over a decade, insisting that chicken sludge and waste were “not a problem.”
This paper will use the groundwater pollution fight in Clifty as a window into the ways that Arkansas’s chicken industry interacted with different constituencies in state regulatory agencies and local communities, and the language it deployed to portray itself as a good citizen, a good neighbor, and an employer acting in the public interest.