This summer, I visited Flathead Lake in Montana with my family, where I marveled at the water quality. I could open my eyes under water, and while treading, I could see my toes below me. If I got water in my mouth on accident, it tasted the way water is supposed to taste — not the mix of mud, algae and hint of gasoline that typically greeted me when I fell off the tube growing up.
Walking along a dock, my aunt said to me, “Believe it or not, this is how I remember Tenkiller when I was young.”
My mother’s grandparents built a cabin out at Tenkiller Ferry Lake in the late 1950s or early 1960s, depending whom among my grandma and her siblings you ask, and it has remained my family’s favorite gathering place ever since. The lake, which provides drinking water to many in the area, has a reputation for containing Oklahoma’s clearest water. That really isn’t saying a lot, but when I was growing up, you could at least see the ends of your feet as milky shapes in the water while you were treading, which is more than I could say for the lake we frequent on my dad’s side — Lake Altus-Lugert — where foot visibility drops off when you’re about ankle-deep.
Still, my aunt’s assertion seemed hard to believe. I knew about Lake Tenkiller’s ecological problems from my family. We periodically read, discussed and typically ignored warnings about blue-green algal blooms. And I had heard plenty of relatives waxing poetic about how much cleaner the water used to be. But something about seeing how pristine Flathead Lake was and knowing my family once experienced similar waters broke my heart a little. I realized my cousins and I may never know what the old version of Tenkiller was like, and future generations may not, either.
There is an ecological disaster unfolding at Tenkiller. Maybe my family’s observations should have clued me in to that, but I didn’t really understand the breadth of the situation until I read a federal court’s finding of fact for a story I was working on in June. Any aesthetic concerns aside, the darkening waters signify dropping oxygen levels as the lake undergoes eutrophication — a state where oxygen levels have dropped so low that animal life dies off.
We know why this is happening. In the finding of fact issued by U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma Judge Gregory Frizzell last summer, the Oklahoma Water Resources Board and the U.S. Geological Survey confirmed to the court that the Illinois River Watershed contains elevated levels of phosphorous, which lowers the water’s dissolved oxygen content and promotes algal blooms. Ed Fite, the Grand River Dam Authority’s water quality manager who lives on land abutting the Illinois River, summarized the state of the watershed succinctly for the court.
“The old gal is not well,” Fite said.
We know, too, where the excess phosphorous comes from. As Fite pointed out in an interview with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the population in the Illinois River Watershed has nearly quadrupled in the last 40 years, and general increases in pollution have inevitably followed. But one culprit stands head and shoulders above the rest. U.S. District Judge Gregory Frizzell, who is still presiding over a 2005 lawsuit brought by the state of Oklahoma against several large poultry producers, has ruled the principal contributor to the elevated phosphorous levels has been runoff from farmland where poultry waste is produced and applied.
During proceedings, the court heard testimony from Timothy Knight, the owner and operator of Nautical Adventures Scuba, which sells scuba lessons and equipment out of Cookson. Knight testified to observing “a constant reduction in visibility” in Lake Tenkiller over the past decade. Knight said he used to conduct technical scuba lessons in the lake, but now he must go to the Caribbean for clearer water.
My mom’s cousin, who bears the all-important Oklahoman mantle of Cousin With A Boat, would always give a wide berth to anchored boats flying a red flag with a white stripe, a sign of divers being nearby. (If you’re wondering what would compel someone to scuba dive at Lake Tenkiller, its construction displaced various communities.) Call it anecdotal, call it confirmation bias, but reading Knight’s testimony, I realized I’ve seen fewer of those red flags recently.
Here’s what can’t be dismissed as a fallacy, though: In Fiscal Year 2023, 419 poultry houses and 94 poultry feeding operations in the Oklahoma portion of the Illinois River Watershed generated approximately 55,992 tons of chicken shit, according to Frizzell. And that’s before we consider the waste generated in the Arkansas portion of the watershed.
In Benton and Washington counties to Oklahoma’s east, poultry houses produced approximately 307,539 tons of waste in 2023, according to the court. All in all, that’s about 363,531 tons of chicken and turkey scratch. That’s 1,817 blue whales worth of poultry waste, and not the Catoosa kind.
The court found “the majority of the poultry waste generated by each of the defendants’ birds had been land applied in the [watershed], usually on or in close proximity to the growers’ farms.” In other words, most of those 363,531 tons were put back into the soil, along with not only the phosphorus that makes chicken litter such good fertilizer, but also arsenic, according to the court.
The soil onto which so much waste is applied can only absorb so much phosphorus. Gregory Scott, a geomorphologist for the Oklahoma Conservation Commission, explained when there is an excess, phosphorus will leak out of the soil and into water. Hay can be used to suck up some of that extra phosphorus, but Scott opined even if the poultry farms ceased all land application, it would take 30 years of hay production to return their soil’s phosphorus levels back to what is permitted by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry.
Poultry waste mucks up the governor’s race
The long-running lawsuit brought by Oklahoma against poultry giants including Tyson, Cargill, Cal-Maine and Simmons Foods finally received a judgement last month. Frizzell found the companies liable for violation of Title 27A, Section 2-6-105, which prohibits water pollution, and he ordered the defendant companies to pay for remediation measures in the watershed, along with a requirement to provide their contracted farms with a more responsible way to dispose of their chicken scratch.
To carry out the remediation, the court is creating a “watershed monitoring team” to implement water improvement plans and keep an eye on the farms’ scratch disposal methods. Beyond paying $350,000 in penalties, the defendants must fund the watershed monitoring team, starting with an initial payment of $10 million as soon as Attorney General Gentner Drummond appoints a master to oversee the team.
Considering how long this issue has been a problem, I think that’s more than appropriate. When corporations take action that harms the people around them, they must be held accountable, and I don’t think that should be a controversial statement.
But the lawsuit has become yet another point of contention between Drummond and Gov. Kevin Stitt, and as the former runs to replace the latter, it’s becoming a talking point on the campaign trail, too. At the time of the judgment, Drummond released a statement saying “a robust poultry industry and clean water can and must coexist,” and he reaffirmed his desire to reach a settlement agreement with the poultry companies.
Stitt, on the other hand, lambasted the decision.
“These family farmers did everything the right way. They got the permit, followed the rules, and they’re still getting sued,” Stitt said in a press release.
That’s disingenuous. It’s not the contracted family farmers who are getting sued. It’s industry giants worth billions of dollars, none of which is headquartered in Oklahoma. Stitt credited farmers with “protecting the environment” in a meeting where he heard Oklahomans’ concerns about the state’s extended litigation.
“If anyone breaks the rules, we’ll enforce them — but we’re not going to go back 20 years and punish an entire industry that has done things right,” Stitt said.
Unfortunately, that talking point gives too much credit to the industry giants. In Frizzell’s finding of fact released last year, he acknowledged that “historically, defendants had done little, if anything, to provide for or ensure the appropriate handling or management of the poultry waste generated by their birds at their growers’ houses.”
To be clear, I don’t fault local farmers for that, which is why I’m grateful Frizzell ruled that corporate conglomerates are the ones responsible for the lawful disposal of chicken scratch, including its removal from local farms, its storage and its transportation.
But local farmers, too, must play their part by limiting the amount of waste they apply back to their land, and Frizzell’s judgment lowered the soil test phosphorous limit accordingly. That means while farmers may have been following the state’s standards for years, the court found those standards needed to change for water quality to improve. The alternative — allowing the continued poisoning of the Illinois River and Lake Tenkiller — would have been unacceptable.
Former House Speaker Charles McCall, who has joined Drummond as one of the GOP’s gubernatorial frontrunners, made a statement similar to Stitt’s, criticizing the attorney general’s role in the litigation.
“Our poultry producers support thousands of Oklahoma jobs and entire rural economies,” McCall said. “We should be standing with them, not driving them away.”
Certainly, having a robust agriculture economy will always remain in our best interest. But having clean water is in our best interest, too. And what about folks like Knight and others who work in the tourism industry along the river? They rely on safe, clean water for their businesses.
Surely we can have it both ways: With more responsible land management and leveraging the industry giants’ considerable resources, we can reap the benefits of poultry production without ruining the watershed beneath the chickens’ feet. Instead of using the watershed for political grandstanding, I hope our officials will focus on how to balance the concerns of those living in the region.
The evidence is clear — the current practices have caused serious harm to the Illinois River, Lake Tenkiller and the ecosystems they harbor. The runoff poisoning the Illinois River Watershed has to be stemmed, or we will lose something truly special in the Ozark basin.
