NEW YORK (Reuters) - Turkey leftovers will take on a whole new use after a Minnesota company finishes construction of a power plant fired by the birds' droppings.

It may not be the total answer to relieving the United States' addiction to foreign oil, but the plant will burn 90 percent turkey dung and create clean power for 55,000 homes.

Three poultry litter plants have already been built in England, but the Benson, Minnesota-based facility will be the first large-scale plant of its type in the U.S. and the largest in the world, according to operator Fibrominn, a subsidiary of power plant builder Homeland Renewable Energy, LLC of Boston.

Turkey dung is prized over pig excrement and cow chips.

"Poultry litter is drier material, so it burns better, and there's a lot of it," said Charles Grecco, of HH Media, LLC, an investment bank that helped arrange $202 million in financing for the plant.

The 55-megawatt plant will burn 700,000 tons of dung a year and produce fertilizer as a by-product, a process that will keep phosphorus and nitrates found in the raw litter from seeping into water supplies, said Grecco.

No extra amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide would be emitted than would be naturally emitted as the dung decomposes, said Grecco.

Utility Xcel has agreed to purchase the turkey power, said company spokesman Ed Legge. Under 1994 Minnesota state legislation, Xcel is required to buy a small amount of power made from biomass in exchange for clearance to store spent nuclear fuel outside its Red Wing nuclear plant in Minnesota.

Fibrowatt, LLC, a Philadelphia-based developer, which is mostly owned by Homeland Renewable Energy, is pursing other plants in poultry-growing U.S. states.

Today, chickens are slaughtered at 42 days old in half the time and twice the weight as they once were. In an odd twist of fate, Hurricane Katriana saved these birds. Now, at six months of age, these birds have far outgrown their "slaughter" weight. The females' weight has leveled off, but the males are not so lucky. Many of them have succumbed to a sudden death syndrome common in birds raised for meat. This condition, often called "flip-over" disease by the poultry industry, causes sudden heart attacks in afflicted birds, who often die so suddenly that they just "flip-over" on their backs and die (and we wonder why heart disease and obesity are so rampant in this country).

"Flip-over" disease has been reported across the world in areas that intensively raise and selectively breed "broiler" chickens for rapid weight gain. In fact, because the disease is closely linked to high carbohydrate intake and genetics, it is virtually unheard of among farmers who breed and raise chickens naturally, and who keep their flocks on low-density feeds. Pushed to grow from birth to slaughter weight in only six weeks, an estimated 2-4% of modern-day factory "broilers," like those we rescued from Mississippi, die of "flip-over" disease every year in North America. In flocks with closely-regulated management and disease control, it can be responsible for up to 70% of the flock mortality.

Although the chickens rescued from Mississippi are now on a healthy, low-fat diet, some may still die as a result of "flip-over." Their living environment is now drastically better than it was back at the Tyson warehouse, but sadly, their unnatural breeding cannot be changed.

Other issues we've seen with birds are "rickets" (a vitamin D defiency), septic joints and crop problems, all related to intensive rearing and confinement.  A pre-digestive pouch designed to store and begin breaking down food, the crop must function effectively in order for a bird to be healthy. Sadly, because many of the "broilers" rescued from Mississippi have been genetically altered to eat excessive amounts of food and grow abnormally fast, they will often impulsively eat straw or other materials when no other food is available. These materials then become lodged in the crop or in the digestive tract causing serious blockages and infection.  

Every day, we see these birds doing what chickens are supposed to do. They peck at the earth, flap their wings and dust-bathe in the sun, all natural behaviors denied when kept confined in a massive warehouse. To sit quietly and watch a chicken experience the world around her makes her sentience clear. So often, we cast aside the thought of sentience in animals raised for food.  When animals are allowed to express their natural behaviours, their personalities bloom. We see it with every rescue we've experienced in the past 20 years. Factory farming is institutionalized, wide-spread and downright cruel to the earth, humans AND animals.

Want to end factory farming? Here's our shameless plug...go to www.farmsanctuary.org and find out how you can help.

It's mentioned that some of the chicken litter ends up on other farm fields....if that's the final disposal route for this scale of chicken manure, water resources (surface and ground) are in for big trouble.  If there is no required containment policy, and it sounds like there is not, it's hard to believe that some federal minimum law is not being violated (my assumption is that the states will be very slow to act against a major industry), either air of solid waste disposal - or even direct chemical dumping.  I know national groups have formed task forces to work on these problems; what have they come up with in terms of litigation strategies?

Some clarification please.

William R. Neil Rockville, MD

patrick

The writer from Farm Sanctuary is brilliant.  God bless your work!  I entirely agree that we too easily underestimate the sentience of non-human animals, especially non-mammals.

On another front, we should be aware that pre-cautions against bird flu are leading to the inhumane slaughter of countless chickens and other fowl.  It was reported lately that the Palestinian Authority has buried chickens alive in mass graves.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.