Thank you, Joplin Globe, for uncovering the facts about the expanding poultry CAFO industry in Missouri. They are being investigated and regulated in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has never turned down a permit — period. They do what they want, where they want and it all seems to be OK without contamination.

Each farm — if you can call it that (chicken prison camp might be more appropriate) — produces tons of cheap phosphorus waste that is a paper trail monitored by the DNR to be spread as presently permitted only within a few hundred feet from rivers and streams.

Some is trucked farther with taxpayer assistance. Taxpayers pay DNR to monitor wells and streams in those areas as I have seen DNR monitor maps. Oklahoma has changed its laws on phosphorus, and Arkansas has agreed to comply. What about Missouri? Welcome to Missouri.

I suggest anyone truly interested read the lake environmental report from the Oklahoma secretary of environment (www.ose.state.ok.us/

documents/bills/GrandLakeSb408InitialReport.pdf). Oklahoma has been dumped on for the past 10 years. Poultry expansion is now banned near the Pensacola Dam.

The report also concludes that 72 percent of the phosphorus loading at Grand Lake stems from runoffs. Some 81 percent of the source loading is upstream of the lake in Missouri and Kansas.

Larry McIlrath

Joplin