It has been dubbed “Big Chicken“: the revolution in how poultry
is raised and processed. Chicken that once came from small,
family farm operations is now produced by networks of huge
chicken-growing complexes and sprawling processing plants. Texas
is a major player, ranking sixth in the nation for poultry
production. But with the growth has come concern over how
concentrating the operations could increase pollution: the run-
off from tons of manure and the millions of gallons of
wastewater released by processing plants into streams and
creeks. “We do our dead level best to operate not only in an
environmentally-friendly manner but certainly consistent with
the permits and the rules and the regulations we’ve agreed to
follow,” said Mike Cockrell, CFO of Sanderson Farms. The
Mississippi-based company is one of the nation’s biggest chicken
producers and among several big corporations processing chickens
in Texas. In 1997, Sanderson Farms opened a processing plant in
Bryan. A decade later, it opened another one in