Things are heating up again over the state of Oklahoma’s long-running lawsuit against Tyson Foods and other large poultry companies operating in Arkansas and Oklahoma for allegedly polluting the Illinois River Watershed, which covers more than 1 million acres across both states.
The lawsuit, State of Oklahoma v. Tyson Foods Inc., was filed in 2005 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma by the state’s then-Attorney General Drew Edmondson against Tyson, Cargill, George’s, Simmons, Cobb-Vantress, Cal-Maine, Peterson and Willow Brook for violations of the Oklahoma Environmental Quality Code.
The suit sought to stop the poultry companies and hundreds of area poultry farmers under contract with the companies from applying poultry waste generated at the operations to land within the watershed. Oklahoma claims phosphorus and bacteria from the land application of poultry litter contaminated the watershed and get carried into rivers, streams and groundwater supplies…