Gov. Martin O'Malley has been a good friend to the chicken farmer. He famously criticized a pollution lawsuit against one of chicken processor Perdue's contract farmers on the Eastern Shore. Last winter, he went out of his way to threaten a veto of a nickel tax on chicken to fund an anti-pollution effort. And the rules his administration announced last month — to curtail farmers' widespread use of poultry manure as fertilizer, a source of the phosphorous that gets into the bay and causes "dead zones" — were three years in the making and delayed to accommodate the concerns of the poultry industry.