A reader writes:
I understand this seems ridiculous, but the current alternative to this would be to have the poultry farmers continue to use the earth as a toilet. Until there is a serious effort to put monetary value on the benefits of NOT using the earth as a toilet, incentives to keep people from doing this are necessary.
Another writes:
I worked on Energy and Energy Tax policy for a Senate Finance Committee member when Senator Roth was Chairman of the Committee. You and Len Burman only scratched the surface of this (which, for the record, I thought was a decent use of the Tax Code to clean up some serious environmental problems on the Delmarva, the Potomac Highlands, and other chicken raising areas). What Burman didn't seem to appreciate is that Senator Roth didn't push this for the poor downtrodden farmers ("growers" is the term of art); he did it for the giant poultry companies – Tysons, Perdue, etc.
The growers exist in a commercial situation that is reminiscent of the old "company store" system from pre-UMWA coal mining. They have to pay for the baby chickens (peeps), the feed, the veterinary services, and other expenses forced on them by Big Poultry, and are only paid for the peeps they raise to the point where the companies take back from them – there is no payment for a bird that dies on the day the big poultry companies take possession of the mature birds, or any bird that died before that.
Often, growers barely break even, even if they are lucky enough or good enough at what they do to have a high yield. And the way the credit terms work, once you're in the business as a grower you have to build bigger and bigger chicken houses and take more and more birds – at your expense – to stay in the poultry companies' good graces, but they can cut you off at any time for no reason. Before the chickenshit credit, state and federal regulators went after the growers for the massive damage the poultry waste was causing, while poultry companies said, essentially, "hey, those aren't our birds and farms."
After the Roth credit was enacted, and growers thought they might have some incentive to ease the financial burden as well as the environmental degradation, all of a sudden the chicken waste (both manure and dead birds) had a value. What was once their problem to deal with as growers, now became the property of the big poultry companies. The growers didn't benefit much, if at all.
The Dish 