The trial, as a result of the Waterkeepers Alliance v. Alan and Kristin Hudson lawsuit, continues to be watched closely as Alan Hudson, the farmer at the center of an environmental law case, took the stand in federal court Wednesday to tell his side of the story.
Hudson testified that, as a 19-year-old, he built the chicken houses at issue in the case, on the Berlin, Maryland farm that has been in his family for at least a century. “That was going to be my contribution to getting my foot in the door farming with them,” the 37-year-old Hudson said, adding that the farm needed a new stream of revenue after its dairy closed down a few years before.
In 2010, Hudson and his wife, Kristin, were sued over allegations that pollution from those chicken houses had drained into a stream that ultimately flows to the Chesapeake Bay. The suit by the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group, also named Salisbury-based poultry firm Perdue Farms, for whom the Hudsons are contract growers.
The Waterkeepers, represented by the University of Maryland environmental law clinic, rested their case Tuesday.
Defense attorneys asked Judge William M. Nickerson on Wednesday morning to throw out the case before they called their first witnesses. Following a line of attack they have taken throughout the case, they argued that the alliance has no real evidence that pollution in the water came from the chicken houses. James L. Shea, one of Perdue’s attorneys, suggested his opponents have tried to fit the circumstantial evidence they have from water samples into a preconceived idea about pollution on the Eastern Shore, calling them “advocates in search of reform.”
The farmer’s testimony came on the heels of a week’s worth of witnesses seeking to prove the farm’s chicken waste fouled a ditch draining the farm.
