As Jill Trapp steered her pickup truck down the red dirt roads of southeast Oklahoma, she raised a hand to greet a passing neighbor — a calf roper who once made it to the National Finals Rodeo.

She drove on, passing a modest cowboy church where Sunday sermons share space with country music and the smell of brisket.

Then, rising among the cedar and elm trees, came a familiar and unwelcome sight: a row of long, gray, windowless chicken houses, each longer than two football fields.

“I try not to dwell on it. I pretend they’re not here,” Trapp said.

But soon her truck jolted as it rolled through a pothole — one of many left behind by the constant flow of semitrucks hauling hundreds of thousands of chickens through the area.

In this corner of the state, the poultry industry is hard to ignore.

Within a roughly 25mile radius of the southeast Oklahoma town of Idabel, there are 59 industrial poultry farms — more than half built in the last 15 years, typically larger than older operations. Together, they raise nearly 7.4 million birds at maximum capacity. All but six grow chickens for Tyson Foods, the largest meat company in the country; the other six farms supply Pilgrim’s Pride, a Colorado-based, multinational food company.

Beyond the usual concerns these farms raise — pollution and odors from the massive amounts of waste they generate, problems that have sparked lawsuits in Oklahoma and other states — residents in McCurtain County have another worry: the aquifer.

The region’s rapid growth — driven by poultry farms, marijuana farming and a tourism boom in Hochatown — is putting mounting pressure on local water supplies. And locals are starting to wonder just how much strain the aquifer water can take.

Industry-friendly laws and nominal penalties have allowed companies like Tyson to operate with little accountability. Minimal oversight from state agencies often means residents have little information about whether the industrial poultry farms are polluting or depleting the region’s groundwater.

“I’m concerned that we’re going to overuse our waters and not have sustainability for the future,” said Charlette Hearne, a prominent water rights advocate based in Broken Bow.

Dust, flies and trucks through the night When Trapp and her husband built their home about 20 years ago, they were drawn to the area’s remoteness and lush landscape — the perfect place, they thought, to start a family and raise cattle and backyard chickens.

But five years after settling in, a man knocked on their door.

He told them he had purchased the property next door and planned to build six large chicken houses. He also asked them not to raise any chickens, warning they could infect his flock and jeopardize his business.

“This initial disappointment didn’t compare to what happened in the last 15 years,” Trapp said last month at a community meeting in Idabel, attended by more than 150 people, including officials from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board.

She went on to describe the overpowering smells that fill her backyard whenever one of the farm’s chicken houses is cleaned out, the swarms of flies and layers of dust that settle on the walls of her house, and the noise from trucks hauling birds throughout the night.

“Each contract grower is required to comply with federal, state and local laws, including the Oklahoma law to have a farm-specific Nutrient Management Plan (NMP),” a Tyson Foods spokesperson said in a statement. “The terms of each NMP include requirements for storage and disposition of poultry litter, as required under the Oklahoma Registered Poultry Feeding Operations Act. The NMPs are developed with measures designed to prevent discharge.”

The May 1 meeting primarily focused on a proposed 12-building chicken farm, which, if built, would become the second-largest poultry operation in the area.

The farm’s owners requested a permit from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board to use approximately 86 million gallons of water per year, equivalent to the average water usage of 785 four-person households.

Unlike most other chicken farms in Oklahoma, the cluster of farms in McCurtain County sits atop a regulated aquifer, the Antlers. These farms use water from the aquifer for bird consumption, sanitation and cooling the chicken houses.

The current limit for permitted water withdrawals from the Antlers aquifer is 2.1 acre-feet per acre, or more than 680,000 gallons of water for each acre of land — the highest allocation of any groundwater basin in the state. State officials set that limit in 1995 by dividing the aquifer’s estimated total volume by the acreage above it.

“Our law is designed to deplete the aquifer. It is designed to mine the water for economic purposes,” said Sara Gibson, general counsel for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, during the meeting.

For Hearne, this admission makes one thing clear: Oklahoma’s water laws need to be updated to reflect the state’s growth and protect its natural resources.

She points to the Arbuckle- Simpson aquifer — adjacent to the Antlers — as a success story.

In the 1980s, local advocates pushed for federal recognition of the aquifer as the region’s only viable drinking water source — a designation that later helped residents push for a comprehensive hydrological study and block a plan to export water.

That study led to a significant change: the aquifer’s withdrawal limit dropped from 2.0 acre-feet to just 0.2 — the lowest in the state.

To Hearne, it’s a straightforward lesson of how science should guide water policy.

“You’ve got to know your monthly, daily, seasonal variations before you can issue permits properly,” she said.

But perhaps the biggest shock for those at the meeting came with the revelation that most poultry operations typically don’t apply for water permits at all.

‘Domestic use’ loophole lets industrial farms pump water without permits — and without limits Lobbying by the poultry industry in the 1990s led to a loophole where a permit isn’t required if a property owner claims the water is for “domestic use” rather than a business.

“If the farm is doing business as Bob and Mary Jo Smith, they don’t need a permit. If they’re doing business as Smith Poultry LLC, they do,” Gibson explained.

While the 63 industrial poultry farms in McCurtain County are owned by individual farmers, they raise chickens under contract with corporations like Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride, which tightly control their operations. Only four currently have water permits, with a fifth pending for the planned 12-house chicken facility.

Not only does “domestic use” allow a farm to operate without a water permit, but the operation can pull more than twice the amount of water from the aquifer compared to what is allowed under an agricultural use permit.

In practice, the situation is even murkier. Many farms registered as LLCs — which should have permits — also lack them, a gap that Gibson says she is working with Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry (ODAFF) to address. The few farms that have applied for permits have likely done so to exceed the limits allowed under domestic use.

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