Environmental Injustice and Industrial Chicken Farming in Delaware.

Potential disparities in the distribution of poultry CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) and meat-processing facilities across Delaware were explored with regards to sociodemographic factors including race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. We conducted buffer analyses of CAFO host census tracts alongside sociodemographic data in order to explore populations in proximity to the Delaware chicken industry. We conducted a hotspot analysis of CAFOs to find areas with large concentrations of poultry operations and applied zero-inflation regression models to determine if there's a relationship between sociodemographic composition and number of CAFOs/meat- processing facilities in Delaware.

Environmental Injustice and Industrial Chicken Farming in Maryland.

Maryland's growing chicken industry, including concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and meat processing plants, raises a number of concerns regarding public health and environmental justice. Using hot spot analysis, we analyzed the totality of Maryland's CAFOs and meat processing plants and those restricted to the Eastern Shore to assess whether communities of color and/or low socioeconomic status communities disproportionately hosted these types of facilities at the census tract level. We used zero-inflated regression modeling to determine the strength of the associations between environmental justice variables and the location of CAFOs and meatpacking facilities at the State level and on the Eastern Shore.