“Yikes! Of All the Things to Put in Chicken Feed, Arsenic?!”

The above quote is from MCA’s Executive Director Caroline Taylor at the Food and Water Watch press conference this past week on banning arsenic in chicken feed .Read MCA’s press conference statement here.

Perhaps, like Caroline you were also surprised to learn this, but over the last 60 years arsenic has become a routine part of a chicken’s diet. Originally it was used to treat intestinal disease in broiler chickens, but now it is added to feed to promote growth and improve meat pigmentation.

Arsenic is a serious toxin. Elevated levels of exposure can lead to a number of different kinds of cancers and also neurological effects. The posion does not just stay in the chicken’s body however, it ends up in chicken waste and subsequently in groundwater and eventually in the Chesapeake Bay.

According to Scripps news service, the EPA has baned arsenic in pesticides and wood perservatives and drastically reduced the “safe” levels of arsenic in drinking water to protect human health.  Despite this, a bill in the Maryland Legislature that would ban arsenic in livestock feed has been tabled until next session. Poultry producers continue to say that the arsenic compound in feed is safe. However, the independent Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has found that detectable arsenic levels exist not only in all fast food chicken samples tested, but many supermarket samples as well, even organic chicken, even in higher end health food grocery stores. Two children in Utah that eat a lot of eggs from their backyard chickens were sickened with high arsenic levels.

Yikes is right.

Click Here to Sign the Food and Water Watch Petition.

This petition will be delivered to Maryland lawmakers in an effort to move this common sense ban along.

Until arsenic is banned in livestock feed, local eaters do have other options. There are farmers in our area who are committed to feeding their animals a poison free diet. We contacted Shannon Varley of Bella Terra Family Farm on Old Hundred Road in the Ag Reserve to see what her chickens were eating:

“We used to feed our chickens conventional feed but we have moved over to a diet with a base of soaked organic

wheat and corn (soaking makes it easier to absorb the nutrients from the grain), then we add in pulverized oyster shells, kelp meal and fish meal. We want to make sure good food is going into our chickens so they make the best eggs possible for the people who consume them.”

Want eggs or meat from chickens with a diet full of things you can pronounce? Check out our local food page or visit localharvest.org.

For More information, see the Food and Water Watch Report.