Farmer to Get More Say in the Next Bay Diet?

Ken Blankenship at the Bay Journal, Ag to get greater voice in Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort

State and federal Bay Program leaders are poised in December to create a high-level agricultural advisory committee that will report directly to governors and others who set cleanup policy. It remains to be seen whether the new panel can reduce the historic tension between Bay cleanup advocates and those expected to do the bulk of the work.

Science has long established that manure and fertilizer from agriculture is the largest source of water-fouling nutrients to the Bay. There, excess nutrients spur algae blooms that cloud its waters and spur oxygen-starved “dead zones.”

The Bay region as a whole — parts of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware, New York, West Virginia and the entire District of Columbia — is poised to miss its 2025 nutrient reduction goals by a wide margin. States are counting on farmers to achieve the overwhelming majority of future reductions.

 

Those actions often come at a cost to farms, requiring time, money and ongoing maintenance. Yet farmers say the cleanup leadership is quick to cast blame and slow to recognize their efforts.

“I’ve yet to meet a farmer who is anti-conservation, but I have met dozens, if not hundreds, of farmers who have felt left behind in this conversation,” said Kevin Atticks, secretary of the Maryland Department of Agriculture.

In interviews with the Bay Journal, Atticks and the agriculture secretaries from Pennsylvania and Virginia expressed optimism that the 41-year-old Bay effort is ready to reset its relationship with the agricultural community.

Making progress, they say, requires more than setting goals and ramping up spending.

 

The agricultural voice needs a true seat at the table to resolve long-festering concerns about data quality, account for actions by farmers to reduce runoff and promote new approaches.

Equally important, they say, the discussion needs to be about more than Chesapeake water quality. Farms have to produce food, support rural economies, provide open spaces and wildlife habitat — and those goals must be balanced.

“It’s a simple conversation if you want to talk about only water quality,” said Russell Redding, the Pennsylvania agriculture secretary. “It’s a more complicated but rich conversation to talk about the other contributing pieces of what a functioning society looks like.”

 

And, perhaps most importantly, they emphasize, farms have to be profitable. To remain viable, farmers are often faced with the daunting challenge of rearing more animals or growing more crops while trying to reduce runoff.

“That’s the challenge: How do you balance all of that?” said Matthew Lohr, the Virginia agriculture secretary. “One thing people don’t really understand, farming is a business. It’s a very expensive business and profit margins are thinner now than ever.”

In trying to clean up the Bay, and similar systems, regulators need to remember that people need food to eat, and modern agriculture feeds the world because of chemical fertilizers. Without the invention of a way to fix nitrogen from the air, invented by Fritz Haber prior to WWI, there is not enough animal and human waste to support enough agriculture to feed the world's population. Now, the Bay's agriculture may not be terribly important to feeding the US, but farmers are under the same pressure around the world. The Mississippi River system is under the gun over the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In the Netherlands, they're severely cutting back farming, for some extent about eutrophication, but more about the production of greenhouse gases!

The Wombat has Ruke 5 Sunday: Little Mischief Baker (sic) up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.