How Georgia Residents Hope to Protect Their River From an Industrial Poultry Farm

In late April, a rumor started making its way through Coffee County, Georgia: someone was planning to build a new poultry operation near the Satilla River in the city of Douglas. The rumor was vague at first, but it raised enough concern for local residents to start asking questions. The proposed poultry operation would be the largest in the state — a concentrated animal feeding operation, commonly referred to as a CAFO, to raise up to three million chickens in 60 chicken barns. According to the permit, the facility is planned for 1,000 acres of land butting up against the Satilla’s river banks, and at nearly twice the scale of Georgia’s current largest chicken farm of 32 barns.

Community chatter about the mega poultry farm soon made its way to the Satilla Riverkeeper, an environmental group focused on keeping the river clean and healthy. “These are small towns. So you have word of mouth that is very abundant,” Shannon Gregory, executive director of Satilla Riverkeeper, tells Sentient. “Then you see trucks moving in and out, and land clearing all of a sudden,” Gregory says. She started digging around, “looking for concrete evidence.”

The group’s main concern was the potential for water pollution. “There’s a whole host of different issues that come with those facilities,” Gregory says, chief among them the waste. “What is going to happen to the manure?” Coffee county has already been heavily impacted by Hurricane Helene, Gregory adds, and “putting that on the banks of a river? That’s a really bad idea.”

An industrial poultry operation of this scale could produce millions of pounds of waste, much of it stored in open piles or spread on nearby fields. When it rains, excess waste can wash into nearby waterways — carrying bacteria, nitrogen and other pollutants into the river. This kind of runoff doesn’t just harm fish and wildlife. It can also threaten water and air quality, both critical components of public health.

The size and scope of the proposal has aroused concern from a growing number of residents, many of whom see the Satilla River as a cultural touchstone. “Everybody in this watershed recreates on the river,” Gregory said. “These are places where baptisms are held, you know, right there in the river. This is where people go to teach their children how to swim. This is where kids go and catch their first fish.”

A Community Comes Together

Frank Pridemore, a longtime resident of Coffee County, was on vacation overseas when he first saw a post from a friend on Facebook about the proposed operation. “I got to looking into it. The proposed area is less than two miles from my home,” Pridemore says.

Pridemore and Gregory were among the concerned residents who showed up to attend a Coffee County Commission meeting held on June 2.

“I went, not to rant and rave, because I know better than that,” Pridemore says of the meeting. “But I went, asked a lot of questions trying to learn about this. And the more I learned about it, the more aggravated I got.”

At the meeting, residents voiced their concerns about the environmental threats posed by the facility — from waste and chemical runoff to a sharp increase in heavy truck traffic. Others spoke about the potential health impacts for people living nearby, particularly those reliant on well water or those living downwind of the site.

One of the takeaways from the meeting, Pridemore says, was how little oversight exists for poultry operations in Georgia. “The chicken house industry is essentially self-regulated and self-inspected,” Pridemore says.

After the meeting, Pridemore contacted someone from Georgia’s Department of Natural Resource Environmental Protection Division, or EPD, for information. He says the officials confirmed their role was limited to ensuring the facility meets basic permitting requirements and investigating only if complaints are made. In short: unless something goes wrong, oversight remains minimal.

In an email, a representative from the EPD told Sentient that “chicken houses require coverage under a construction stormwater permit” and that “because the project will disturb more than 50 acres, EPD must approve the plan before any land disturbance occurs.” That permit mandates certain best management practices and limited monitoring to help prevent sediment from washing into nearby waterways during construction. EPD officials have already conducted a site visit, and the agency is currently evaluating its findings and preparing an inspection report.

Meanwhile, Pridemore says that some people visiting the site on June 6 found signs of gopher tortoise habitation, a keystone species in Georgia that had been disturbed by vehicles moving in and out of the property to clear vegetation and prepare the land for construction. He says this discovery also prompted the EPD to revisit the site for further investigation, though when Sentient contacted EPD to discuss the proposed operation, a representative reiterated the information already listed on the permit.

The residents organizing say they are concerned for Coffee County, but also the rest of Georgia and beyond. The pollution could carry downstream, crossing state lines and impacting ecosystems and public health in areas along the way.

Organizers Say Factory Farms Endanger Water, Air and Community Health

“An operation like this proposed 60 chicken house operation could have detrimental effects on things like blueberries, which are big in this county, corn and other edible crops,” Pridemore says. Airborne chicken litter that settles on crops can contain concentrated nitrogen, which, in excess, can harm plant health and potentially lower yields.

For local residents who rely on private wells, clean water is also a concern. “Immediate residents are going to have to deal with the smell anytime the wind changes,” Gregory said. “They’re going to have to deal with potential contamination to their water wells. They’re going to have populations of black flies that pop up. There’s no escaping that. Anybody who has raised chickens will know that.”

Industrial poultry operations like the one planned in Coffee County produce massive amounts of manure. The waste is rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as harmful bacteria like E. coli and salmonella. Crops can and do absorb nitrogen in the right amounts, but there are a number of ways this amount of waste ends up polluting the water.

Farmers can apply too much waste; waste storage can leak or spill or heavy rains or other extreme weather can push the waste into nearby waterways or cause it to seep into groundwater. The waste can then contaminate drinking water sources, especially private wells, which are common in rural Georgia. Even with well-managed manure systems, the increasing frequency of hurricanes and other natural disasters is raising the risk of water contamination.

Nitrates in drinking water are linked to health issues such as “blue baby syndrome” in infants, and long-term exposure has been associated with certain cancers and thyroid problems.

While large cities typically rely on treatment facilities to manage contaminants, spikes in pollution can push these systems to their limits, requiring chemical disinfectants that carry health risks of their own. One byproduct, trihalomethanes, has been linked to increased cancer risk and organ damage, and has been detected above federal limits in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Rural areas, often reliant on untreated well water, face even higher risks from agricultural runoff thanks to the lack of infrastructure.

Air pollution is also a concern. Industrial poultry production creates ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and other particulate matter — all of which can travel miles through the air. Prolonged exposure to these pollutants is associated with chronic respiratory illnesses, like asthma in both children and older adults. In Coffee County, where families live, work and go to school just miles from the proposed site, residents say this is a real concern.

“I mean we’ve all seen pictures of those confined animal operations, and they’re just atrocious,” Gregory says. “You have to think about the human health impacts immediately there, around the community, but it’s a matter of when that waste ends up in the river, that is when everyone will be impacted.”

The Satilla River flows southeast beyond the county line, eventually feeding into the Floridan Aquifer — one of the most important freshwater sources in the region. The aquifer supplies drinking water to nearly 10 million people across the states. A pollution event here could ripple far beyond Coffee County, with long-lasting consequences for communities downstream.

The Fight Continues

In Coffee County, a petition asking county commissioners, Georgia House of Representative and State Senate members to block the poultry operation, or to consider another location, has already gathered over 4,000 signatures. That’s nearly 10 percent of Coffee County’s population, and more than a third of the residents of Douglas — the city closest to the proposed site.

“It may sound like a small, residential area issue, but it’s really a much larger issue right now,” says Gregory, who is hoping to get more residents involved. “We need to start making some noise and use every single angle we can to help fight this problem.”