Farm meeting to be held in Ohio Wednesday evening

Meeting will surround a potential poultry facility

By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content
Farms.com

The Ohio Department of Agriculture will host a meeting tonight to discuss the possibilty of a poultry facility being built.

Pine Valley Ranch, LLC, wants to build a six-barn, concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) for poultry. The facility would be able to hold about 2.2 million chickens and operated by RB Family Farms LLC and Fleck Poultry LLC.

The meeting, scheduled to being at 6:30 p.m. at the Van Wert County Extension Office’s administration building, will also be attended by Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie (ACLE).

The group believes the western Lake Erie watershed already deals with too much manure created by 11.2 million chickens, 292,000 hogs and 97,000 cows housed at other CAFOs, according to the Toledo Blade.

ACLE has said property values have been reduced and "people think twice about investing in a place with the same reputation as the flaming Cuyahoga River and now Flint, Michigan."

In a May release about the project, the department of agriculture said the CAFO would produce about 18,333 tons of manure annually, and that each barn would have belts under the cages to transport solid manure to two manure storage barns daily.