I Know, Let's Blame the Amish!

The Amish and the Chesapeake: Pennsylvania farms threaten the fragile bay

To finish the job and fully realize the bay blueprint by 2025, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is honing in on one of the darkest, muddiest spots of the satellite photo. The area stands out like the center of a bull’s eye, right in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Look closer, and one sees Lancaster County and its vein-like network of small streams, creeks and rivers are turgid with mud. Much of it flows from the county’s 5,000 farms. Half of these are owned and tilled by so-called plain sects — Amish and old order Mennonite.

The very existence of these societies and their people are predicated on the old ways. Tradition runs deep. Trusting the outside world does not.

For many in these communities, farming practices remain rooted in the less environmentally sensitive ways of the past. Fields are tilled and turned over, making the exposed soil vulnerable to runoff. Manure is applied whenever small, inefficient holding tanks are full – even in the middle of winter when the nitrate-rich fertilizer can’t sink into frozen ground and gets washed away with the snowmelt.

Cows are allowed to wander into streams, depleting vegetation, breaking down banks and defecating right into the water. Livestock barnyards are swampy, muddy pits, with much of manure-mashed soil washing off in rainstorms. Even the geometry and placement of the farming fields, which unfold upon high rolling hills, work against proper drainage. Soil seeded with fertilizer is allowed to wash away.

This, all this, is the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s target, as part of an overall goal for sharp agricultural-sector nutrient runoff reductions...

I think the Amish and the Mennonites ought to be excepted from the requirement to maintain modern pollutions standards for the same reason the Eskimos Inuit are allowed to hunt whales the old way (sort of, if, outboard motors are the old way), to show the rest of us what a bitch life was back before the modern era.  In fact, I'd be in favor of making it a law that the Amish and Eskimos have to take on "English" (the Amish term for non-Amish) college interns as an educational experience as the price for allowing them the exemption.  The kids would come back with a real appreciation for modern life.