Tyson Foods’ announcement it is building a new poultry processing plant in Humboldt, Tenn., and expanding an existing plant in Union City, could do more than provide upwards of 2,000 jobs for the region.

The plants – or, rather, the poultry houses that feed them – could also produce about 175,000 tons of chicken litter annually for west Tennessee row-crop farmers, who like many others, are caught in a cost-price squeeze.

“In some areas, poultry plants are controversial because they place more nutrients in the watershed than there are nutrients taken out with crops,” said Dr. Shawn Hawkins, associate professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science at the University of Tennessee. “That’s not good.

“In west Tennessee, that’s actually not going to be the case,” says Hawkins, a speaker at the University’s Milan No-Till Field Day at the Milan Research and Education Center.

Hawkins displayed a map showing a large percentage of Tennessee’s row crop acres are located in west Tennessee – many of them within a 30-mile radius of the two plants in Gibson and Obion Counties.

“About 42 percent of all the corn that is produced in our state is grown in these counties,” he said. “And the same percentages are true for soybeans, cotton and wheat. What that means is we have a huge export of nutrients from these counties.”

Studies indicate the 175,000 tons of poultry litter will provide about 10 million pounds of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash that will cost about 50 percent as much as commercial fertilizers.

“If you total all of the nutrients in those counties for those crops, this is the amount of P₂O₅ and K₂O removed – 68.4 million and 83 million pounds,” he noted. “The poultry litter from the farms supplying those two plants is estimated to provide about 10.5 million pounds of P₂O₅ and K₂O or about 15 percent of the total nutrient removal.”

What about fertilizer efficiency? Hawkins said studies at the University of Tennessee experiment stations have shown that four tons of poultry litter have provided equivalent yields to the recommended rates of commercial fertilizers in those studies.

Growers should also be aware, however, that, on average about 45 percent of the nitrogen in poultry litter will be plant available.

“Not all of the nitrogen in poultry litter will be available to the crop,” he said. “Some loss to the environment is inevitable. Let’s say you’re shooting for 150 pounds of nitrogen on corn so you’re going to take that 150 pounds and divide it by .45 and multiply the answer by the amount of nitrogen in the litter.”

Other studies have shown poultry litter can provide the benefits of enhancing soil carbon and meeting some of the micronutrient needs of plants for copper, magnesium, sulfur and zinc.

“The other thing that you have that was alluded to in Dr. Virginia Sykes’ research is a little bit of a liming effect,” Hawkins noted. “So you’re going to see a bit of a bump in the pH from applying poultry litter.”

Hawkins listed several considerations for growers using poultry litter: