Maria-Michael-Payan_11-24-25 
 
 

Erica: Welcome back to another episode of Season three of the North Star Gaze. In the first episode of this season, we introduced Dr. Adrian Hollis of the National Wildlife Federation. If you missed that conversation, I encourage you to go back and listen to more about her work and leadership this quarter. Dr. 
 
 

Hollis is guiding [00:01:00] us through a powerful series focused on GIS and Environmental justice. Today's episode continues that journey. We are joined by Maria and Michael Payan, co-founders of two critical community driven organizations. The Sussex Health and Environmental Network, Shen and the Sentinels of Eastern Shore Health Sesh. 
 
 

Maria is the executive director of Shen and she has spent nearly two decades educating and advocating for environmental justice and healthy communities through forums, films. Community events and even afterschool programs for children. She's worked alongside communities across the Mid-Atlantic to challenge polluting industrial facilities while remaining deeply committed to keeping independent farmers viable and preserving rural heritage and natural resources for future generations. 
 
 

Through coalition building, Maria has helped empower rural and underserved communities that often have little political power, but bear disproportionate environmental [00:02:00] burdens. Michael is the director of operations for Shen, and he focuses on uplifting the voices of overburdened communities and ensuring their meaningful participation in developing sustainable community-oriented solutions. 
 
 

His work spans environmental, public economic and social health initiatives across Sussex County, Delaware, and the lower Eastern shore of Maryland. Michael has contributed to community and science, citizen projects in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Center for Community Engagement, environmental Justice and Health, with a particular focus on air and water quality impacts. 
 
 

Related to industrial poultry farming in the Del Marver region. Together, Shen and Sesh champion community-led research as a cornerstone of environmental justice and they're proud recipients of the regional Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Prize. So without further ado, let's jump in.  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: [00:03:00] Hi Maria and Mike. 
 
 

Thank you so much for being here. Let's start with a general explanation of sesh and Shin. So the audience is aware of how they differ and how they relate.  
 
 

Maria Payan: So Sussex Health and Environmental Network, we are in Sussex County, Delaware, which is the broiler capital of the world. We have the highest number of broilers chickens being raised across the country. 
 
 

And on our Del Marva peninsula, you have Virginia, Sussex County, Delaware, and the lower Eastern shore of Maryland. That is a very high rate of production for chicken, what they call factory farms.  
 
 

We  
 
 

call Cathers concentrated animal Feeding operations because that's one of the top economic drivers in terms of Eastern Shore here and the peninsula. 
 
 

There are often a lot of problems associated [00:04:00] with raising of these chickens in this fashion. So many of 'em in one concentrated area. Sentinels of Eastern Shore Health is our lower Eastern Shore work. When you're talking about advocating for legislation, you're dealing in multiple chambers, right? So Delaware legislation might be different from Maryland legislation we're working on, so hence the Shen and Sesh. 
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: And you guys are 5 0 1 C3, right?  
 
 

Michael Payan: Correct? Yes, that's correct.  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Am I correct in saying that? Maybe a couple years?  
 
 

Michael Payan: 2023.  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Well, congratulations on that. I'm gonna start with Michael because I'm curious as to how he followed his mom's footsteps. Can you tell us a little bit about how you first became interested in issues around the factory farms and how that led to your work in citizen science? 
 
 

And then I'm gonna ask Maria the same thing.  
 
 

Michael Payan: Absolutely. So I started off with tic mates. My parents wanted me to grow up. I [00:05:00] was born in Baltimore, but they wanted me to grow up in the country. We moved out York County, Pennsylvania. When we moved to York County originally, there were family farmers that bordered our property. 
 
 

So when I was a, there were horses in the back pasture I freedom carrots to, and it was, I guess, postcard, idyllic, rural childhood. Eventually that property was sold into Agri Agri business. What was horses on the back pasture. Became a cattle feed lock that had a couple thousand cattle, became four poultry barns that held almost a hundred thousand chickens at the time, and my childhood got quickly flipped on it. 
 
 

That looked like some days you would get off the school bus and you couldn't make it to your door without growing up because you had odors that were sew, looked like when there were, you know, mass dials across 20,000 birds dot, and they were cleaning out the barns with all kinds of chemicals. I was getting outta my bathtub with hand sized blisters all over my body, wondering what was wrong. 
 
 

Erica: Wow.  
 
 

Michael Payan: Under 10 years old, getting rushed to the [00:06:00] emergency room with tightness of the chest, you grow up thinking that these things are normal. They must happen to everybody, but you quickly realize that's not the case wrong. As families health, over the years, this became a very central issue in our lives. I spent a lot of time fighting tree farms. 
 
 

The capital in Pennsylvania, Harrisburg advocate for legislation that would hopefully protect us. That had a big impact on my life when we moved to Delaware because of the health impacts. We continued to work, so we've always,  
 
 

Erica: sorry, Michael, I didn't hear you clearly. You said you were rushed to the emergency room. 
 
 

What was the reason? So  
 
 

Michael Payan: you had a lot of respiratory issues. One of the things we'll talk about later in the podcast is that these have a lot of emissions coming. That's amo, that particular matter. There's actually a video of me hitting this bush that was in my front yard between us and this poultry bar, and every day [00:07:00] when you would come outside, you would see the windshields over our cars covered in this dust. 
 
 

When you're hitting it with a stick, it's just these massive clouds of dust coming out. You know, you're breathing all this stuff in on a daily basis. You'll hear us, just us and a lot of the communities here in Susa County and large shore Maryland. Asthma rates are intense. I would have a lot of experience when I was a kid when they would have events across the street. 
 
 

Pollution events, you're getting tightness of the chest. You can't breathe, you're coughing. I always had a cough as a kid, but you think this stuff is normal growing up. But there were a couple times when I was so intense that I had a emergency room because I couldn't breathe.  
 
 

Erica: Thank you for sharing that with us. 
 
 

So yeah. One of the things I'm personally interested in is agribusiness, right? The consolidation of food production into very small number of producers, but let's keep on going. Adrian,  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Maria, is there anything you'd like to add to that?  
 
 

Maria Payan: I think it's a good time to talk about how [00:08:00] our food is produced, right? 
 
 

When we're talking about ketos, a lot of folks don't really know where our food comes from. What started out being animals on pasture and small farms feeding their community has now been replaced for poultry. We have barns that are now between 600 and 750 feet long. Think about that. That's larger than a football field. 
 
 

And then go anywhere from 60 to 65 feet wide. Each barn holds an average of 50,000 birds. Because of the genetics and the way that they raise animals. Now, they're raised okay genetically so that their breasts are large because that's where the money is in the breast meat, and they're also raised quicker. 
 
 

Everything is about efficiency and profit. So each barn will hold 50,000 birds and they're rotated [00:09:00] 5.5 times a year. So in other words, if a farm has eight barns on it. Each one is producing per year, 250,000 birds. That's 2 million birds on one piece of land.  
 
 

Erica: Wow.  
 
 

Maria Payan: That's one farm. Think about that one. One farm. 
 
 

And now what they've done is there's something called no land farm, which blows me away because. If you know about animal husbandry, the first thing they teach you is that you never put more animals on your farm than your land can support. Right? There's a natural way, you know, it's animals, animal pasture, they poop on pasture. 
 
 

It's just the natural cycle now with what they're doing now, edge to edge of a parcel are the barn with no land to apply any of the waste. In rural areas, these are unincorporated areas, meaning that people are [00:10:00] on well water with the setbacks because they're ag residential communities. It's always been a thing the past couple decades raising poultry, but it used to be maybe one, two houses. 
 
 

That house, they were a lot smaller than maybe 20,000 birds, maybe 400 foot long, and they were surrounded by a ton of feel. This is not what we're seeing today. We're seeing eight houses from one edge to the other, meaning that your neighbor is 200 feet away from these sand blowing out ammonia. There's a gentleman that lived directly next to, and I can remember walking his backyard and there's poultry feathers all in his backyard. 
 
 

I'm sitting there and thinking, oh my gosh. If you have children. You're playing in your yard. Children, they put everything in their mouth and you think these animals, they're raised, they stand on their own poop. So you've had this [00:11:00] stuff in your yard now and kids are touching it. This is too close. The quality of life of a neighbor is just totally disrupted. 
 
 

You can't sit outside in your yard because the odors are so strong you can't enjoy. Your quality of life if you like to garden. I knew people in Pennsylvania had to wear respirators out in their york to garden. This is insanity what we're doing.  
 
 

Erica: I was going to ask about proximity to water. Right? But I wasn't even thinking about water contamination. 
 
 

I remember probably 30 years ago driving from New York down to Virginia Beach and we passed by the Purdue Farms. The odor was overwhelming. So I'm a little bit curious about the people who live next to you and currently live there. Are they just nose blind because the smell was absolutely horrible? Do people not smell it anymore or is it that they feel they [00:12:00] have no choice and they just have to live with it? 
 
 

Michael Payan: Bill, although you do get used to next to these people and they become maybe a little less intense. A lot of people talk about it down. There's the smell of, but this is one of our big economic drivers on the shore. The job providers, they're driving our economy. That smell of UL ultra waste, that's just how people make money here on the Eastern shore. 
 
 

That's their job. That's our way of life. Although that is normal, people shouldn't litter with those others. It is very intense. It never gets to a point where you go to, you're enjoying your this. This stuff is disrupt, but people accept it. After decades.  
 
 

Erica: At some point somebody's going to look and say, maybe this generated jobs, but those jobs on average are paying $50,000 a year. 
 
 

It's not really enough to justify having this in your back yard.  
 
 

Michael Payan: And then even bigger problem, we have two big industries here on the eastern shore. Delmar open up. We have the [00:13:00] beaches and. Everything that revolves around good water quality. People wanna swim in our waters, that fish eat seafood outta our waters and go kayaking and have their kids swimming. 
 
 

And then we have an industrial farming industry spreading so much waste on the fields that we're contaminating all of our water wings. These two industries are not compatible at all, and the one is threatening the up. We can't beach shutdowns regularly because we have bacteria levels in our water that is too high. 
 
 

Delaware, there's a report. 97, 98, 90 9% of the waterways are contaminated unfishable on swivel. Right. So major, major issues with water contamination. Yeah.  
 
 

Maria Payan: I'm gonna paint a picture and add something to it. Where a lot of this industry is located is in often very poor areas and flood crone and her, because where's the cheap land in the flood zones. 
 
 

Right. We did a report where we matched the chicken houses out. Put a line and you could see by the beaches [00:14:00] it was clean. But if you move like a half mile over to the West State in all poultry production, now we have a community that had called upon us. This was part of Mount Air, had a massive lawsuit against it. 
 
 

So we have a family, the Burton family, Gina Burton. Her grandfather was the first sharecropper in Sussex County, Delaware. Now you talk about oppression and pollution and how this continues. This is a a perfect, because when you talk about sharecropping, you show me about oppression. Gina's family lives on a little lane called Herbert. 
 
 

And the grandfather wanted all of the kids and grandkids to grow up near each other. So he left each a parcel of land right next to each other, down this lane. Unfortunately, when he had cancer, uh, [00:15:00] they bought up a lot of the land, so there was this one strip, and when Mount Air took over Townsend, they put spray fields all alongside their houses and behind them. 
 
 

When I'm saying spray fields. We're talking about the poultry processing plant and the waste from there being put through a system and then sprayed onto the field surrounding their homes. They wanted to expand and the community was very upset because they were already dealing with all of this pollution and the odors and their water was already, they were on water systems. 
 
 

When we started looking through the permit, we noticed there was already contamination. I questioned records. And found out, long story short, our state agency ended up writing 26 pages of violation. 26 pages. Wow. They have never, ever met. Their permit requires the entire time they've been [00:16:00] operating. Where the spray fields, the nitrates were supposed to be 19. 
 
 

They were registering 642.  
 
 

Erica: What parts per million? What? What is that number?  
 
 

Michael Payan: Per  
 
 

Speaker 4: million milligrams.  
 
 

Erica: Okay.  
 
 

Maria Payan: If you're  
 
 

on, well water, if your nitrates are over 10, your water is unpotable polluted. You shouldn't be drinking it.  
 
 

Erica: Wow.  
 
 

Maria Payan: The bacteria counts. Were supposed to be under 200. They were 1.1 million. We had next door neighbors having miscarriages. 
 
 

Gina's son. Died at the age of 24 from an asthma attack. We had three first effects all within a very small region. We had animals having seizures. When I went and met with the folks on Herbert Lane to talk to them about what was going [00:17:00] on, the community wanted to put comments in on this permit. I thought I was walking through Walter Reed Medical Center. 
 
 

The first house was Donna and James. Donna had tumors all over her body. Her daughter was pregnant at the time and having seizures. The next house, I believe, is Gina's mother. Gina's mother had all kinds of health problems and heart problems, and then we had Aunt Martha in the next house who had one of her legs amputated because of lack of oxygen. 
 
 

Well, what does nitrates do to your body? It robs your body of oxygen. Think about Blue Vati syndrome, right? Gina's child was developmentally disabled and she showed me the SSI certificate. And you know why this child, this angers me every time I say this. To this day, this child could not learn. And it says right on the port, lack of oxygen to the brain. 
 
 

Think [00:18:00] about this. For these industries, we are sacrificing our children's health,  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: right?  
 
 

Maria Payan: And this is something that can be taken care of. They can be made to follow their planet, right?  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Yeah.  
 
 

Maria Payan: When you have to understand the power of these industries and the influence when you are just a regular person and you live in what they call the rural code, right? 
 
 

Neighbor doesn't speak against neighbor, and you try to get petition signed. If someone had the neighbor that works for the state or for the county, they will not put their name on there because there is retribution for doing that.  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: One of the things, this information is powerful. I immediately thought about how, as you were describing who lived next door, who lived down the street, the peninsula, the, the value of being able to map that [00:19:00] information is phenomenal, and I'm just curious. 
 
 

Michael and Maria about whether you use maps and if so, how? How have you done so? And then I'm gonna ask you what's missing? What would make it better when it comes to utilizing maps?  
 
 

Michael Payan: So almost a decade ago, we started to try to put together, first of all, when you go to your state agencies that regulate these facilities, you would expect that there was some kind of database, some kind of list. 
 
 

Of all these farms are that are producing a quarter of million birds in a barn every year. There is not. That does not exist. So nobody knows where these facilities are. They just pop up. They're out there in order to effectively as your pollution that we're seeing, we need to know where it's coming from. 
 
 

Um, so we started putting their products where we took Google Maps and looked at [00:20:00] satellite imagery. Out where these barns were. There's five poultry bars here, and eight poultry barn here, and 12 over here. We put together a map of the entire Eastern shore, Sussex County, and the lower Eastern shore. That has been incredibly helpful for us with our community science efforts because if I'm trying to figure where people are dealing with the most intense solution at what. 
 
 

I need to know where those facilities are. I need to know where the important community landmarks are. Where are the churches? Where are the schools? Where are the parks? Where are the places that people operate outside? Because those are all places that we wanna make sure that we're not impacting them so that people can't enjoy them and use that has been a burdensome process, right? 
 
 

You wanna be able to that, but we had to create it. But that has been incredibly powerful because now when you can see where the most intense production is going on. Do you know exactly where you want to go do measurements to see what people are dealing with? And that's where we found we've monitored ammo.[00:21:00]  
 
 

Uh, studies are done by industry. Studies are done by community. Obviously they look a little bit different. One of the studies, a white paper from the industry side showed that ammonia levels were around seven parts pavilion that people were dealing with. When we're looking at the places that are the most intense, we're seeing levels that are 700 parts per billion. 
 
 

You talking about a hundred times different. And that's how you can change a narrow.  
 
 

Maria Payan: The state does have lists of where facilities are capes, aros, but are they complete lists? No. Sure. If someone sells a farm, you can't just transfer that permit. Somebody has to apply for a new permit. Does that happen? Not always. 
 
 

Right now we have AV and flu going on, and this is wiping out barns and when one barn gets it, it can go to another farm. You're talking hundreds of thousands of birds getting wiped out. This stuff is spread through air. It is not only affecting birds, but now we're [00:22:00] finding it's affecting some rodents. 
 
 

It's affecting some other species of animals, which is very scary because that's heading up to, you know what I'm gonna say? The mutations end up being, let's go back a couple decades ago with swine flu, right? That reorganized and then was infecting human. I just heard of a matter of fact a former CDCA gentleman on an in interview and he was saying his number one fear was burg lip. 
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Wow.  
 
 

Maria Payan: Because if that comes to a point, and it already is infecting human humans, we just had a case a couple weeks ago in the United States. Reorganize this to that level, it's gonna make COVID look like an amusement park.  
 
 

Speaker 5: Wow.  
 
 

Maria Payan: So this is scary stuff  
 
 

Michael Payan: to talk about. The shortcomings, the mapping, and what we wish we had that was close to a decade ago that we started that process. 
 
 

Can you imagine regularly going through satellite imagery manually and mapping where you see a bar [00:23:00] and where the new one and which one's inactive? We need something that's. Able to keep up with the changes we're seeing all the time. In fact, in North Carolina, I believe North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and some of their partners are working on using to take a look at satellite imagery and identify where barn are, how many bars there are, whether they're active or inactive. 
 
 

So you can have a map that's up to date with these facilities. That's something we really wish.  
 
 

Erica: So is anybody on your team trained to use GIS right now? Do you have access to either RGIS or QGIS or any GIS tools that you're leveraging, or is this all pretty much manually done right now?  
 
 

Maria Payan: This is manual. 
 
 

Do you not have anybody trained up to do that? When we're talking about community science, these were all folks from our communities that literally were getting on Google Earth a couple times a week. Pulling up street by [00:24:00] street. When you talk about how far we've come in terms of science and technology, we had a machine called a bacarra, which can actually measure, uh, pollutants in the parts per billion in real time. 
 
 

You can take this machine, put it in the car and see on a computer screen l be amonia. Goes up when you're coming close to areas where you have a lot of production. And so it's pretty amazing that now we can see this in real time, where before the communities, the residents always had. The feeling that something isn't quite right, but who's gonna do that science? 
 
 

It's not in the industry's best interest to be.  
 
 

Erica: It's kind of funny that you say that because to some degree it would be in their best interest. When you talk about 20,000 birds being wiped out, there's an economic impact [00:25:00] to them as well. Industry creates more risk by being this large. When you talk about no land farming, when they are that large, the degree of risk multiplies profit is high, but risk is high. 
 
 

Also,  
 
 

Maria Payan: industry has a way of taking catastrophes and benefiting from that.  
 
 

Erica: Okay. Tell, tell us  
 
 

more. What do you mean when you say that?  
 
 

Maria Payan: If you look up the amount of money that went to different corporations. We have subsidies, incentives. This is all public money. This is taxpayer money propping up this system. 
 
 

I doubt many people know that building manure lagoons, their taxpayer dollars are financing these lagoons. If you asked the public, they would say, I would rather that money go into. Building up our soils, doing regenerative ag, doing [00:26:00] something that's not hurting communities and extracting the money outta communities because that's what happens when it's a concentration of this system. 
 
 

If you raise animals now in a way that we used to raise animals, some forms have to drive two state to process their animals, how can that possibly be beneficial and profitable? We just. Get big or get out. And here we are subsidizing an dentistry that is destroying lives. These are the invisible I call 'em, right? 
 
 

These are the here.  
 
 

Erica: Michael used the term that the stench was really the smell of money, but it also sounds to me like it is the smell of death, right? The pollutants and the impacts on death. For many years, I have studied and looked at the links between geography and health. There's been a number of studies that show that where you are born can dictate what your health outcomes are going to be, and that [00:27:00] is certainly the story you told about. 
 
 

Gina Burton's family. It's heartbreaking and angering that this is generational impacts on their health. There are things that we can do and tools that we can put into the hands of nonprofit organizations and the communities that you serve. I certainly want to use this podcast as an opportunity to reach out to our audience, to ask for the skillset they have to help support the work you're doing. 
 
 

There's no reason for you to not have access to these tools, so I'm gonna use this as an opportunity to call out to our listeners and say, what can you do to support the work that. She and Sesh are doing.  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Yeah. Thank you. I totally agree with you, Erica. When we talk about what you're doing now, you talked about the history of how hard it was to take a map and plot out the information. 
 
 

We didn't talk about heat maps yet, but Erica's talking about the [00:28:00] tools that are out there and available. I just wonder knowing that it's a challenge, knowing that there's a lot going on. What you working on now? I'd love for you to talk more about that and how you're getting it done and what the impact of that is. 
 
 

So what's happening now in relation to everything you've just told us. So  
 
 

Maria Payan: this is one of the most exciting times that we've had. You talk about planting one C, right? You talk about the North Star buddy. So we had a funder, an angel funder. I don't even know who it is. Who has funded part of community science. 
 
 

The first initiative that got us started there and it was just a very small seed, but I'll tell you what, that seed grew. Let me tell you what we're doing now. Now we are D-N-A-D-N-A fecal fill inside homes that lived next to [00:29:00] Catos factory farms that lived next to Springfield. Think about. Fecal filth in your house, above your refrigerator, where you keep your kid's cereal on the back of your easy chair, where do you put your head and watch tv? 
 
 

Erica: Wait one second. Let me make sure I'm understanding what you're saying. You are finding animal fecal matter in people's homes.  
 
 

Maria Payan: Yes, ma'am.  
 
 

Erica: That's not what I thought you were gonna say. Oh my goodness. Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead.  
 
 

Maria Payan: Groundbreaking. We are the first ones to be doing this kind of research on poultry. 
 
 

They've done it on swine in North Carolina with Dr. Heney. When we talk about community science, we do it with Dr. Heney, who is from Johns Hopkins. He's an associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and we have a project that we call the C-S-I-E-J. Think about Brian's heat investigation. 
 
 

Kind of a [00:30:00] playoff of that, right? Yes, we are DN Aing. And for years, this is what I'm saying, for years, residents have been saying something's wrong. All this odor that we're smelling, it's not just odor, it's health. I can talk about the years that agribusiness came in when 2000, I'm gonna say six, six-ish, around there. 
 
 

And from that time period, like what I watched our family go through. My husband ended up getting cancer. He passed away in 2023. They were testing Michael then, and that is my last point after going through years of rashes, tightness of the chest, blisters on the bodies. I mean, at one point, literally I had the poultry across the street where they kept the mortality. 
 
 

It wasn't closed in so animals could get in there and pull it, and I would have a dead chicken on my patio. At one point I had put it in a [00:31:00] bag and put it in a freezer. Trying to get someone to correlate, like, why is my kid coming outta the tub with Blis? I mean, this is what it does to you, right? You're a mother, you're scared, this is your child, and finally you end up leaving because the agencies aren't regulating the way that they should or enforcing. 
 
 

We're just the sacrifice or just the ones that kind of. Sorry to live here, but there you go. It's devastating. So we have to fight back and to think that now we're DN aing this inside people's homes. We were right all these years. We were right.  
 
 

Michael Payan: You know how frustrating it's to go to decision makers, people that don't live in your community or deal with what you're dealing with on a daily basis and be told that you're concerned, invalid, that your experiences are invalid, that what you're smelling, overreacting, you're crazy, brings a full circle. 
 
 

That's what the dust was that was coming outta the bush and was covering our windshield. It was [00:32:00] waste. That's why we were dealing with asthma and all these respiratory issues. We're starting to make those linkages down. Now we're armed with ammunition. When we go talk to somebody, no, we're not crazy. We have the measurements. 
 
 

It's in our homes. There's waste in our homes. Go in our fridge on the easy chair, on the we remote. It's everywhere. Right? That is really powerful because now you can't be in validated until you start to get some mo. People are listening in state agencies. It's not, you're crazy. Oh, we wanna see your data. 
 
 

When we started doing this science, we had to co-locate our monitors with mdes monitors, industry data out there. They done some research. Funny enough, the research that they did found locations with half of them poultry bar per square mile. With the maps, you can see there's a lot of places that have a lot more than a half a poultry barn per square mile. 
 
 

They have like 60 80 in a square mile in some in many locations. When we look at our monitor, we already have data on online. It's already available. What are you guys doing this for? They wanna see the data that we're coming out with. [00:33:00]  
 
 

Maria Payan: Now  
 
 

Michael Payan: they're  
 
 

Maria Payan: working with us,  
 
 

Michael Payan: they're working.  
 
 

Erica: I often think about legacy and what am I building? 
 
 

What am I leaving for something else. Maria and Michael, you are two generations. So Maria, do you can already see legacy because you've built an activist, but Michael, what is it that you hope to build for somebody else going forward? What do you want your legacy to be?  
 
 

Michael Payan: We just want clean air and clean water for people. 
 
 

Erica: Amazing.  
 
 

Michael Payan: I just want people to go outside and be able to breathe and drink water out. Apparently. That's a big ask. In rural America though,  
 
 

Erica: thank you for saying that. It sounds simple, but it is really impactful the work that you are doing. I can't remember the last time I felt this angry about. An issue that we've discussed on the North Star Gaze. 
 
 

This is important work that you're doing. I am really believing and hoping and praying that our audience is going to rise to the occasion and that members of the North Star community will join [00:34:00] you in this fight. It, it's important. Dr. Hollis,  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: I just wanna thank you all so much for sharing this. If we had time, I wanted to talk about Steve. 
 
 

The use of that machinery, but I know we are close to time. Erica, are we?  
 
 

Maria Payan: What is  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Steve? Yeah. Yeah. You guys are welcome to talk about Steve.  
 
 

Maria Payan: Steve is a trailer. You know the tri trailers that you pulled behind trucks? It's a small trailer and we named the actor Dr. C Wayne, who was passed away. Now, they used to call him the people's professor. 
 
 

Because he was the first start doing this community science in such a meaningful and impacted way to where it was producing results. It was producing research, it was producing studies for folks that they could use. So it was the start. All this. So Steve, is science and technology evolving to validate [00:35:00] exposures? 
 
 

People knew they were being exposed, but. They did not have the technology that we do today, and I'm getting goosebumps. Dr. Heney always says, this is what Dr. Wing wanted to do. The technology was not there. Then  
 
 

Michael Payan: Steve is a mobile science lab that we're able to bring any location, the monitor quality 24 hours a day, seeing what emotion levels people are dealing with second by second for two week periods to be able to. 
 
 

Good grip on the exposure articular matter levels 24 7 for those couple weeks that were there with Steve, but a couple other monitors that we're able to put into this trailer protected from weather that bring to any location that we want. That's instrumental because especially with the ammonia, monitors, these pieces of equipment to be able to monitor ammo at that sensitive of a level, they're expensive. 
 
 

You're talking about $80,000, $70,000 in [00:36:00] monitor. So historically where just. Hopkins will bring down an SUV with all these monitors and you're talking something that carrying $200,000 of equipment in it, and they're here for a day, two days if they're gonna stay overnight. We hope that we're in line with where we're seeing the hotspots that day, get to the right location. 
 
 

But if we can put things in a secure place, protect from the weather, we can hold onto those monitors, put them anywhere we want, move them around the county and really get. A lot more data or what people are being exposed to, and that's what Steve has allowed us.  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Wow.  
 
 

Maria Payan: And 24%, if you're driving around in the car, we would take 10 routes around the site to get a different data point. 
 
 

But if you can put this on someone's property and have second by second data for two weeks, 24 hours a day, that really shows the patient.  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Yep. Mapping to that extent is so impactful, important as needed. The work you've been doing [00:37:00] is hopefully replicable in other communities, and just the larger picture, you know, that that draws for us the, you know what it can lead to. 
 
 

Our audience needs to hear about that, learn about that, and support that kind of work. Thank you for sharing that with us. Maria, did you wanna add something?  
 
 

Maria Payan: I say you're right. It can be replicated like they were doing this and still are in North Carolina with swine. Now we're doing poultry. This is being ated and can be used in communities where there was no sage would coming. 
 
 

Let's put it up then. You know, knowledge is power. Data is power.  
 
 

Dr. Adrienne Hollis: Eric Con gonna turn it over to you to wrap us up.  
 
 

Erica: Yes. There's just one final comment that I wanted to draw out. I don't want our audience to think that you, Maria and you Michael, are opposed to agriculture. You are in favor of agriculture, if I'm reading your articles correctly, but you want it to be safe for the [00:38:00] communities in which agriculture is taking place. 
 
 

Do I have you on record for saying that?  
 
 

Maria Payan: What we're trying to say is when you concentrate. This amount in small areas, it is environmental effects, it's economic effects, it's public health effects. So yes, nobody wants to shut down agriculture at all. This needs to be done in a way that it's managed, that people aren't the sacrifice for efficiency, and  
 
 

Michael Payan: there's a way to do agriculture that is respectful of people. 
 
 

Edibles, which I add, right? I encourage everybody to check out an excellent operation in Georgia, who actually, if you do have the resources, ships meat all over the country. It's called white oak pastures. White Oak pastures is in one of the poorest counties. Enjoyed Bluffton. The man has a couple thousand acres, which is a challenge, land access for something, but he's doing everything regeneratively.[00:39:00]  
 
 

He's got his own processing plant. He's producing food in a way that's not harming communities, but building commuter if you can. Get your feed from a place of producing meat and eggs in a respectful way, protecting people and plants and the animals. You should do that because that's not going to feed into this topic system we're talking about. 
 
 

You vote with your dollars every day  
 
 

Maria Payan: and you can employer in his county, and they're all making living wages. It can be done. It's  
 
 

Erica: a great hopeful note on which to conclude this episode of the North Star Gaze. Maria Michael, Dr. Hollis, thank you so much for your time today. I'm leaving this call energized about the future, so thank you very much. 
 
 

Maria Payan: Thank you. Thank you both.