TRR photo by Tom Kane Workers at Murray's Poultry in South Fallsburg process chickens. (Click for larger image)

By TOM KANE

HARRIS & SOUTH FALLSBURG - Out of nearly 92 chicken farms that existed some 20 years ago, only two large farms and about 25 small ones have survived. The large ones are Bella Poultry, owned by Herman Lee of Harris, and Murray's Poultry, owned by Murray Breskey of South Fallsburg.

Lee, 45, started in 1986 by producing 200 broilers a week. Now he processes about 15,000 chickens a week.

Lee, who employs 10 workers, gets his chickens from farmers in Sullivan County who contract with him to use his feed and send the chickens back at maturity. Lee then transports the chickens to his brother's slaughterhouse in New York City.

Lee says he doesn't use antibiotics as a general practice unless he has a health problem among the birds. He also gives the chickens more coop room to range in, he said.

A much larger operation is Murray's Chickens in South Fallsburg. Murray's trucks mature chickens from farms in Pennsylvania to South Fallsburg . It slaughters and processes 150,000 chickens a week and employs 160 workers.

Murray's chickens are sold at Peck's Market in Callicoon and are labeled "free range" chickens.

"The so-called free-range chicken is impossible to raise in the Northeast where the weather is severe in the winter and too hot in the summer," Lee said.

"It's a marketing gimmick by the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture)," said Murray's vice president Dean Koplik. "The regs say that if you have a door open in the coop you can call your chickens free-range," he said.

"It's much more important to us that the chickens eat vegetarian feed and are not injected with antibiotics," Koplik said. "That's far more important than free ranging."

"It's really ludicrous of USDA to have such a regulation," said James McLaughlin, farm management technician with Resource Conservation and Development of Norwich, NY, a group that supports small farmers in 12 New York counties including Sullivan by assisting them with production and marketing methods."

Strictly confining chickens in large coops isn't healthy for the chickens and isn't healthy for the environment, McLaughlin said.

His group works to encourage a method of raising chickens that is called "pastured poultry." Using this method, coops with four wire mesh sides and a roof are moved to different positions everyday so the chickens can eat grass and bugs," he said. "Also the manure gets spread gradually and isn't so injurious to the environment."

"I'm not familiar with this method but I don't see how any sizeable chicken farm will be able to survive and compete if they use it," Koplik said.

"Admittedly, this is not going to fly with the mega farms like Purdue that handle millions of chickens a day," he said. "The confinement of large numbers of birds in a small location can have a devastating effect on the groundwater when the farmer spreads the manure. This problem is growing into a serious one that must be faced," McLaughlin said.

In the future, the industry is either going to be regulated or will regulate itself in controlling the environmentally harmful practice of large, confining coops with large quantities of manure, he said.