Chesapeake "Zone of Death" Expected to Be Small This Year

 WBOC, Chesapeake Bay’s annual “dead zone” expected to be relatively mild in summer 2026

The Chesapeake Bay’s “dead zone” is expected to be relatively mild this summer, according to a forecast published this week by various Maryland and Virginia institutions. The Below-average nutrient runoff is expected to mean better conditions for Bay marine life.

Scientists at William & Mary’s Batten School & VIMS, FlowWest and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science shared their findings this week.

If you're reading this, I'll give you credit for basic knowledge of what the "zone of death" is, and what causes it. 

The forecasted dead zone is expected to be one of the smallest on record — ranking in the bottom 10% since monitoring began in 1985 and roughly a third smaller than average.

“This year’s forecast suggests that the Chesapeake Bay may experience one of its milder dead zones in recent decades,” said Aaron Bever, senior managing scientist with FlowWest. “Lower nitrogen loads entering the Bay this spring are expected to translate into better oxygen conditions for fish, crabs, oysters and other Bay life this summer.”

According to this forecast, this year’s mild outlook is largely due to low river flows and reduced nitrogen pollution entering the Bay from earlier in the year. According to the Chesapeake Bay Program, when heavy rainfall does occur, rainwater travels to rivers and streams and picks up nutrients, which can fuel algal blooms.

Well, according to real scientists, too. 

Summer weather could still affect the dead zone's size and duration. Scientists note that heavy rain, heat waves or prolonged calm periods are hard to predict and could shift the size and duration of the dead zone.

Well, we are in a drought. 

Where Did the Swans Go?

From the Bay Journal, Where did the Chesapeake’s elegant tundra swans go?

Tundra swans breed in the Arctic during warmer months. In North America, they are grouped into Eastern and Western populations. The Eastern band travels more than 4,000 miles to winter in coastal areas from Maryland to North Carolina — mostly the latter nowadays.

Annual surveys conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service typically count 90,000-100,000 birds in the Eastern population, but their numbers unexpectedly dropped from a record high of 137,000 in 2023 to a 45-year low of 64,000 in 2024. Wildlife officials chalk up that decline to normal annual variation and not to any specific factors or threats.

As recently as the 1960s, the tundra swan population in North Carolina only numbered in the low thousands. In recent decades, the state has averaged approximately 65,000-75,000 wintering tundra swans, mostly in and immediately around the neck of land between the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds, Morris said. He suspects that the birds found the region more hospitable after many of its forests were plowed under for cropland, offering them a ready food source. “We had swans, but nothing anywhere near like it is now,” he said.

But that influx might not have happened if not for concurrent changes in the Chesapeake Bay’s fragile ecosystem, according to Morris and other experts.

 

The Bay’s water quality had been on the decline for many years largely because of increasing nutrient and sediment pollution flowing off city streets, suburban yards and farm fields during heavy rain. The biggest turning point came in 1972, when the remnants of Hurricane Agnes triggered widespread flooding and a multi-decade downturn in the Bay’s health.

The cloudy water in the Bay and its tributaries smothered much of the underwater grasses that had fed and nourished generations of tundra swans, said Kayla Harvey, waterfowl program manager for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. As their preferred food dwindled, tundra swans began feeding in farm fields on waste grains, such as corn and soybeans.

By the 1980s and ’90s, North Carolina surpassed the Chesapeake as the population’s most important wintering ground.

Hunting pressure doesn’t appear to have impeded that trend. While Maryland legislators tried to legalize hunting the birds, arguing that it would bring in permit revenue, the bill died in committee. North Carolina, though, is among 10 states (including Delaware and Virginia in the Bay watershed) where tundra swan hunting is allowed. Because North Carolina has the largest population, the state receives the lion’s share of the federally allocated permits for the Eastern region — usually around 4,800 of the 5,600 total.

Bringing more tundra swans back to the Chesapeake will require continued efforts to revive its ecosystem, Harvey said. The biggest determinant will be increasing underwater grasses through actions such as direct seeding and improving water quality to support more growth, she added.

There used to be a pretty reliable small flock of Tundra Swans that occupied the shallow bar area between Matoaka Cottages and Western Shores to the north of us for the winter season. In the the last few years, I would say 5 or so, there have been only the occasional swan up there. I think I only saw a couple of them up there once this winter.

It's curious that they seem to be blaming a recent decline in the swans in the Bay region to water quality, which the Bay program would insist has seen a measurable, if small improvement due to the $25 billion or so spent to clean up the bay. 

The emphasis on SAV seems misplaced too. In North Carolina, their increase is credited to more farming, Could it be the decline here could due to a decrease in farming, and an increase in suburbs

Speaking of SAV, also at the Bay Journal, Goal for restoring Chesapeake’s underwater grasses might be increased

Meeting the Chesapeake Bay’s underwater grass restoration goal could soon get more difficult.

The state-federal Bay Program partnership may increase its goal for underwater grasses, an important habitat for blue crabs and many other species, from 185,000 to 196,000 acres.

Even the smaller of those numbers is more than double what’s been observed in the Bay in recent years, and the region has never come close to the 185,000-acre figure since Baywide measurements of the grass beds — officially called submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV — began in the early 1980s.

Nonetheless, scientists and state officials say the goal should be updated to better reflect the amount of potential SAV habitat if the region meets its pollution reduction goals in the future.

The Bay Program established the 185,000 figure in 2003 using photographs from aerial surveys conducted during the 1900s — mostly old agricultural surveys — to map the location of all grass beds that could be seen in different parts of the Bay at some point in time.

Brooke Landry, a biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and chair of the Bay Program’s Submerged Aquatic Vegetation Workgroup, said that when the original maps were drawn, portions of some shoreline grass beds were inadvertently cut off in the mapping process, resulting in an underestimation of the observed amount.

Also, grass beds have been observed in recent years in some locations where they had not been previously mapped.

When those areas are included, the extent of Bay bottom that supports SAV, or is known to have done so at some point in the last century, increased to about 196,000 acres.

That updated figure is being proposed as a goal for the revised Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, the policy document that guides Bay restoration efforts, which is being updated this year.

Landry acknowledged that meeting the goal will be difficult. While 196,000 acres of the Bay may have supported SAV at some point in time, it’s unclear whether that much ever existed in any single year during the past century.

The greatest extent of grass beds observed in recent decades was about 108,000 acres in 2018. Since then, the amount observed in annual aerial surveys has ranged from roughly 63,000 to 83,000 acres.

 So we're nowhere near the current goal, and they're proposing to increase the goals for the next go around. Seems like a pretty sure way to achieve failure the next time around. And do we really have any specific mechanism proposed to increase SAV, beyond further restricting nutrients?

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: The Last Champion of Cracker Barrel up at the Other McCain.

Professor Ground Truthing Bay Diet Ag Runoff

 From the Bay Journal, Study aims for reality check on nutrient runoff from farms

At a farm in Prince George’s County, MD, Gurpal Toor and his students have been gathering water samples for more than three years. Their goal is to figure out how much nutrient pollution is running off a six-acre field — toward waterways and the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a question he still can’t answer with precision. There is too much year-to-year variation: changes in temperature, changes in rainfall, changes in what’s planted.

Providing an exact number for the amount of runoff — or advice about how to reduce it — would be “irresponsible” at this point, said Toor, a professor and agricultural extension specialist with the University of Maryland. “I don’t want to take a couple of years of data and tell everyone, ‘Here is the conclusion,’” he said.

 

Toor’s uncertainty starkly contrasts with figures used to guide Chesapeake Bay cleanup actions. While Toor struggles to understand what comes off a single field, figures from the state-federal Bay Program tell you with seeming precision the amount of nitrogen — a key nutrient — that comes off all 80,000 farms in the Bay watershed: 116,372,907.49 pounds in 2024.

That the Bay Program can determine what comes off all farmland to the hundredth of a pound seems a bit unlikely to Toor, who is in the fourth year of an effort that he views as something of a reality check.

Of course, as a professor, he knows the truth; the models used to estimate ag runoff spit out numbers to the limit of precision of the computer, probably several digits to the right of the decimal point, and whoever assembles the report simply rounds them off to the nearest even pound, without thinking very much about the how accurate the data that go into programming the model really are, or even what the error estimates of the results are.  And, if there are actually error bars on the estimates, they will be well hidden, because they are huge. We see this in the fish catch data too, where recreational fishing mortality is estimated from a chain of assumptions based on a pretty small sample size.

Toor is closely monitoring 15 small agricultural catchments in Maryland — essentially fields that drain to a specific point — ranging from 6 to 140 acres.

Funded by the Maryland Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Agriculture, it may be the largest detailed study ever attempted of how nutrients actually leave Bay-region farm fields in multiple settings. The goal is to better understand not only how many, but under what circumstances, nutrients are leaving actively managed fields and how that amount might be reduced.

Sounds like a worthwhile study, but unless it produces results that differ dramatically from model estimates, it will be difficult with a small number of sites to actually say the model is producing results at odds with reality.

The answer, as always, will be we need more money for a larger study.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Doughnut Dolly up on time and under budget.

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.

He Has a Point

At the Capital Gazette, Gerald Winegrad: The Chesapeake Bay deteriorates into a quagmire full of broken promises 

After 40 years and $10 billion spent to restore the Chesapeake Bay’s polluted waters to meet basic Clean Water Act requirements, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and bay states have failed to do so.

EPA data document that 71.9% of Chesapeake’s tidal waters remain impaired (polluted) — an improvement of just 1.6% since 1985 when 73.5% of bay waters were impaired.

Despite repeated agreements and mandatory reductions ordered by a court, the EPA has refused to impose meaningful penalties to force states to fulfill their commitments to reduce bay-choking nutrients and sediment. Instead, EPA leaders have punted, wrongfully alleging they are partners not enforcers of the Clean Water Act. Who then shall enforce the law?

Bay states, including Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, have gladly joined the EPA in postponing the 2025 deadline to take necessary actions to clean up the degraded Chesapeake.

This occurs despite the states being allowed 15 years from 2010 to achieve mandated pollution reductions. A court settlement forced the EPA to impose these reductions after voluntary agreements repeatedly failed to do so. The EPA refused to impose any sanctions on bay states to ensure the attainment of commitments despite two subsequent lawsuits.

Nearly all states failed to meet 60% of their nutrient reductions by 2017. Now, EPA and the states acknowledge the 2025 deadline will not be met to attain 100% of the reductions. Once again, the EPA failed to impose sanctions to prod compliance.

Instead, the EPA and bay states gladly agreed to a “recalibration” of bay restoration plans in 2022. Instead of the states adopting new initiatives to curb agricultural and developed land pollutants, the major reason for the failure, EPA and the states decided to take until the end of 2025 to adopt a new plan.

An EPA Inspector General’s report of July 18, 2023, castigated EPA’s failure to embrace its leadership role to steer states toward addressing the most significant sources of remaining pollution. The IG report noted that the EPA knew how off-track bay restoration was in 2018 and still failed to act.

A Beyond 2025 Steering Committee was formed last summer to look at the 2014 Bay Agreement goals to achieve the necessary pollution reductions. The draft report came out on July 1 and it’s a giant nothing burger.

There are no specific actions to meet mandated pollutant reductions, to curb farm and development nutrients or to strengthen terms of the clean-up plans. The only reference to agriculture is an inaccurate claim of significant nitrogen reductions.

The EPA Bay Program recently concluded that such nitrogen reductions from all sources have been grossly overstated by nearly 50%. This is partly linked to increased farm fertilizer use, more farm animals and their excrement, and the ineffectiveness of farm best management practices despite $2 billion in grants to farmers since 2010.

The report fails to note the failure to achieve the most important overall goal of the 2014 Bay Agreement: Having all practices and controls installed to restore the bay’s water quality by 2025.Record amounts of chicken manure from 600 million chickens grown on the Eastern Shore are disposed of on land, jolting creeks with Bay choking excess nutrients. (Edwin Remsberg/VWPics/Newscom)

In classic greenwashing typical of EPA and others regarding the Bay Program, the draft delivers a self-congratulatory message of how the Bay Program and the 2014 Agreement “continue to deliver valuable progress, locally, throughout the watershed and for the Chesapeake Bay itself.”

In a May 2023 report, 50 top bay scientists on the Bay Program’s scientific advisory committee reported the best that can be said is at least the bay has not gotten worse over the last 40 years.

They also found that Bay Program claims that phosphorus reductions were nearly achieved is contradicted by river monitoring stations finding limited evidence of reductions in phosphorous concentrations. The scientists also disputed significant gains in nitrogen reductions particularly from agriculture and other nonpoint sources.

The Beyond 2025 draft plan ignores these scientific conclusions and dismisses the need for a new Bay Agreement to meet the many challenges facing bay restoration, nor does it provide any details for what specific measures must be taken to achieve restoration.

This is a recognition that the EPA and states lack the commitment to implement necessary measures to curb agricultural and developed land pollutants. The plan is replete with suggested structural changes in the Bay Program that have little to do with reducing pollutants.

The chief recommendation is that EPA and bay states affirm their commitment to meet the goals of the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Agreement and adopt amendments to achieve the goals. However, the plan opens the door to reducing or replacing commitments not met. This tactic has been repeatedly employed in the past when critical goals are not met.

I agree with Gerald that the 'Bay Diet' basically failed. But where I differ is that I think the original menu was grab bag of environmental wishes, with very little chance in the real world, where people actually have to work. I also think the recent Chevron decision from the Supreme Court is going make EPA's approach to regulating the Bay much more circumspect in the future. 

Well, You Can Always Be a Bad Example

The Lens, Could the Mississippi River benefit from Chesapeake Bay’s strategy to improve water quality?

As environmental groups and policy analysts in the Mississippi River basin seek solutions to shrink a massive “dead zone” that forms off the coast of Louisiana each year, they have looked to a regional clean-up program in the Chesapeake Bay as a model.

A key component of that effort, known as the Chesapeake Bay Program, is regulation.

For nearly 15 years, it’s included a legally enforceable, multi-state pollution quota — one of a select few in the nation. This “total maximum daily load” aims to reduce the amount of nutrients, like phosphorus and nitrogen, that run off into the Bay’s waters.

Too much of chemicals that derive from these elements, commonly used to grow crops and fertilize lawns, can cause algae blooms and die-offs that rob waters of oxygen and suffocate aquatic life.

But the Bay program’s scientific advisors recently noted the strategy is imperfect.

After two missed deadlines to reduce nutrient runoff, and a third looming, Mid-Atlantic state and federal officials are reevaluating their options. . . .

So what would you learn from a program that spent the $25 Billion or so (and likely more associated costs), and achieved about 25% of its goals?  I think you'd chose a different path, almost any other.

On the other hand, the Bay Diet did succeed in the only way that matters in government. It fed a huge bureaucracy of federal, state and local government officials, who also funded a small army of academics and NGOs, who desperately need some successor program to continue the waterfall of money. 

I don't know the answer for the Mississippi, but it's a much larger, complicated system than the Bay, and I know it won't be easy. If you learn one thing from the Bay Program, it should be not to imitate it.

Are We Ready For a New Bay Diet Plan?

WTIF, Could there be a reset of Chesapeake Bay restoration goals in 2025? "Some previous goals won't be met"

Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, along with the federal government entered into an agreement in 1983 to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. The states of Delaware, New York and West Virginia joined the partnership years later. 

During the past 41 years, strategies and plans have been implemented to reduce pollution and restore the health of the Bay. Some have been successful while others have fallen short of their goals. Next year – 2025 – was set as a deadline to meet several of those goals in the restoration plans.

It has the states and the federal government thinking about what comes next.

The pollution in the form of nutrients came from wastewater, agricultural practices and storm water runoffs from sources like parking lots, streets and chemicals on lawns. 

Harry Campbell, Director of Science Policy and Advocacy with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Pennsylvania, was on The Spark Wednesday and talked about the goals for Pennsylvania,”We agreed to a reduction of pollution in the form of nitrogen and phosphorus and sediment of 40%, based on baseline numbers in the from the early 1980s, based on monitoring and things of that nature. So that was one of the primary goals. And then the secondary goals were more protection and management activities around those living resources, like the striped bass, like the oysters, like the crabs, so as to help provide a a more stable and healthy population for reproduction and growth of the economy and in the living resource.”

Some have suggested there has been too much attention to nutrients running into local streams, creeks and rivers and eventually into the Bay.

Campbell indicated that maybe the numbers have gotten too much of the focus during the Bay clean-up,” One of the things that has occurred over the course of time during the these efforts is that we’ve kind of started to fixate on bean counting. And what I mean by that is how much of this, how much of that, how much did we do? An acre of that. How many linear feet of that and lost sight of the outcomes. So one of the five pillars we have are to focus on the outcomes, meaning the not just did we reduce a pound of nitrogen based on what a computer model tells us or based on how much linear feet of this or that we’ve installed, but focusing on the outcome in terms of like, what is the living resource response? Did it improve trout habitat? Did it create a situation where we have more young of the year, striped bass or other types of living resource responses? Then of course we have to promote innovation and focus in on people, and do a number of other things, like even building those partnerships, but by looking at the outcome instead of the widget or the bean counting, we can then really start to measure and I think improve and focus in on the things and the places and practices that improve water quality, but also the ecosystem at large.”

I believe too much attention has been paid to nutrients as a path to curing the hypoxia/anoxia issues in the deep channels of the main bay. Nutrients have been reduced, and a little improvement may have been seen in deep hypoxia, but by and large those are not the problems that most people encounter or are affected by. The bay's physical system, with fresh water coming in at the upper end and overriding saltier water coming in from the bottom, is a natural set up for bottom hypoxia. Most of the easy nutrient reduction has been achieved, and the progress has been marginal at best. To pursue more will be to face higher costs with diminishing returns.

It’s been suggested that more attention to making sure local streams, creeks and rivers are clean and healthy would be more a more tangible result for those who live in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

I agree, but wonder what the specifics would be. Clearly, they would vary from place to place. In some places, storm water and sediment control would yield the best results for the least cost, in others, in might be sewage and nutrients, in others, toxic substances.

Another discussion has centered on making climate change a priority over the Bay restoration. Campbell said the two are closely linked, ”The effort to try to mitigate climate change, as well as save the Bay and our local rivers and streams and watersheds. You can’t separate the two. The climate change and the responses to it, regardless of what you believe are the causes there, it’s causing and contributing and increasing the amount of runoff and the pollution that enters our local rivers and streams in the Chesapeake Bay. By focusing in on the types of practices that build that resiliency, tree plantings, cover crops on our agricultural areas, forested riparian buffers and tree canopy in our suburban and urban areas. Not only does that actually help mitigate the impacts of climate change, but simultaneously is improving our local rivers and streams, as well as the Chesapeake Bay as well. It’s all tied together.”

I strongly disagree. Climate change is the basket into which activists jam their preferred solutions, regardless of whether the problems the purport to solve. Tree guys want more trees, fish guys want more fish, and extremists want to ban cars and fossil fuels, even though their impact on the Bay is likely to be quite minor. Fix the bad spots first, and the OK spots will improve on their own.

Farmers Question Bay Models

At the Bay Journal, Farmers question whether Chesapeake Bay model reflects reality, as they should. 

Actually, a pretty good, but long article on the use of models in the Chesapeake Bay diet. They are enormously complex, which raises the specter that modelers have modeled their own prejudices in to the mix.

Efforts to understand the Chesapeake ecosystem through models date to the late 1970s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began designing and building an 8-acre, three-dimensional model of the Bay.

Carved from concrete and filled with water pouring in from simulated rivers, it helped provide an understanding of complex water movements within an estuary where rivers and ocean water mix.

Since then, modeling has become an indispensable part of the Bay cleanup effort. The 8-acre model has long since been replaced by sophisticated computer simulations that drive decisions about how billions of dollars are spent.

The Bay Program relies on four models:An airshed model, which estimates the amount of nitrogen (a nutrient) deposited directly on the Bay and its watershed from air pollution

• A land use model, which predicts the nutrient impact of development, human population and changes in agricultural land use, such as shifts from pasture to crops
• A watershed model, which estimates the amount of nutrients that reach the Bay from all of the activities in its 64,000-square-mile drainage basin
• An estuarine model, which estimates the impact that changes in nutrient inputs will have on Bay water quality

. . .
When the EPA established its Chesapeake Bay total maximum daily load, or “pollution diet,” in 2010, it relied on models to estimate the amount of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) that must be reduced to clear the water and eliminate dead zones.

The modeled answer: The amount of nitrogen reaching the Bay needs to be slashed from 270.8 million pounds a year, measured from a 2009 baseline, to 199.3 million pounds. Phosphorus needs to be cut from 17.17 million pounds to 12.86 million pounds.

The models were then used to divide the needed nutrient reductions among the states and major rivers.

States used the models to write cleanup plans outlining the number of wastewater treatment plants that needed to be upgraded and the amount of nutrient-reducing best management practices, or BMPs, that were needed to meet the goals. In agriculture, BMPs include things like nutrient-absorbing cover crops, stream buffers and no-till farming.

Each year, states report on their actions, and the models use that data to estimate cleanup progress, which is then publicly reported. It is hard, therefore, to overstate the region’s reliance on models to drive cleanup efforts and evaluate results.

“You absolutely need a model to be able to do those things,” said Zach Easton, a Virginia Tech computer modeler who has participated in several reviews of Bay Program models. “But we have put all our eggs in the watershed model basket, and we don’t at this point have a way around that.”

There's an old saying the "all models are wrong, but some are useful." I suspect the jury is still out on whether this one is useful. 

MD Supreme Court Makes Chicken Shit Decision

From the Balmer Sun, Maryland Supreme Court says ammonia rules for chicken farms are sufficient. Environmental groups disagree.

The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Maryland is doing enough to regulate gaseous ammonia emitted by the state’s poultry houses, overturning a lower court ruling.

The 6-1 decision reversed a 2021 ruling from the Montgomery County Circuit Court that would have required the Maryland Department of the Environment to regulate the smelly, harmful gas under a water pollution permit issued to chicken farms and other animal feeding operations, since the gas can pollute state waterways. The majority of the state Supreme Court justices felt that Maryland’s original water pollution permit, issued in 2019 under Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, was sufficient, since it called on animal feeding operations to adopt “best management practices” to curtail ammonia pollution.

The case began in 2020, when the Assateague Coastal Trust, an environmental group, challenged the Maryland permit. The Trust also had challenged previous iterations of the permit for chicken farms, to no avail. In the 2020 case, the group found success as the Montgomery County court agreed that Maryland would have to reconsider the permit and add restrictions on the amount of ammonia released.

But MDE appealed in 2021, and the state Supreme Court sided with the agency. “The Legislature has given broad discretion to the Department to establish permit terms and conditions as the Department determines are necessary,” the decision released Wednesday said. “The text of the statute does not instruct the Department as to how it must make these determinations or the water quality controls that must be included.”

In a statement Wednesday, Maryland Environment Secretary Serena McIlwain, who serves under Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, called the court’s decision “a win for the Chesapeake Bay.”
. . .
The Delmarva Chicken Association, which represents poultry farmers in the region and has supported the agency’s original permit in court, also cheered Wednesday’s decision. “We’re glad the Maryland Supreme Court recognized this challenge to the 2019 permit lacked merit and mischaracterized the law‚” Holly Porter, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. “This is the third consecutive time these activists have tried and failed to persuade courts to overrule science-based, legally sound water quality regulations.”
. . .
But environmental advocates, who have long pushed for tighter controls on the chicken houses that dot the Eastern Shore, argued the ruling deals a blow to the state’s effort to clean up the Chesapeake. “We have a substantial source of unregulated pollution and the agency has chosen to do nothing about it,” said Brenda Davis, the Coastal Trust’s executive director, in a statement Wednesday. Part of why environmental groups have sought regulation under the Clean Water permit process is because Maryland animal feeding operations, as a category, aren’t required to get Clean Air Act permits.

Can Acid Mines Save the Bay?

Bear with me a little, the logic train is a little tortured. At the Bay Journal, Dammed-up soil could help heal abandoned mine land

Fertile sediment bottled up behind old mill dams in Pennsylvania is a relentless source of nutrient and sediment pollution in local waterways that flow toward the Chesapeake Bay. But it could become a prime ingredient in restoring another scourge in the state: abandoned mine land.

Documented as a sediment and nutrient pollution problem for the Bay about 15 years ago, legacy sediment is topsoil that ran off the land long ago from farm fields and logging areas throughout the Bay region and piled up behind mill dams, many of which date back to colonial times.

As the dams have been torn down or abandoned, the now-elevated streams seek their original course, cutting through the soft earth that buried them and sending the soil and attached nutrients into the water. Also, the gantlet of mill ponds buried and altered healthy stream channels that once were a braid of connected streams with floodplains buffering nearby land from rising water.

In Pennsylvania, the 126-square-mile Chiques Creek watershed is one of the largest sediment and nutrient polluters in Lancaster County, itself one of the Bay’s top sources of such pollutants with one of the highest concentrations of easily erodible legacy sediment. More than 400 old mill dams have been mapped in Lancaster County alone.

Primarily surrounded by farmland and urban development with scant forest cover, the Chiques watershed has 48 dam sites that have been identified through satellite imagery.

All but nine of the dams are gone, resulting in slow but persistent pollution from the easily erodible soil in the former mill ponds. About 70 million pounds of sediment from banks up to 8 feet high erode each year, washing toward the Susquehanna River and on to the Bay, according to the Susquehanna River Basin Commission.

Sediment makes the water murky, smothering fish habitat and blocking sunlight for underwater grasses. It also carries nutrients, which contribute to harmful algae blooms and the Bay’s oxygen-starved “dead zone.”

Partners in the Chiques Creek Legacy Sediment Removal Project would like to turn that problem into a solution. If the project secures enough funding, as much as 283,000 cubic yards of legacy sediment stranded on streamside terraces would be dug up at 10 sites. The nutrient-rich soil would be trucked or taken by train to spread on abandoned mine land, where vegetation struggles to grow in the acidic soil.

With an estimated price tag of about $10 million, the project is being assembled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, the nonprofit Water Science Institute, and the Lancaster County commissioners and soil conservation district. NRCS has already provided $800,000 from its small watershed improvement program to study the idea’s potential.

So, by moving dirt out of the the old damn basins, you not only benefit the Bay by removing potential nutrient source, you also help heal the environmental scars from old mining. Sounds win win to me. Possible caveats include actually causing more sediments to move down the stream in the the course of trying to excavate it, and that sediments placed on the old acid mine sites will also continue to bleed nutrients.

Of course, another possible source for sediments to place on the acid mines is the legacy sediment that has built up behind Conowingo Dam (which come from the old dams, and farm fields). By taking sediments from behind the dam, they could restore the function of the dam as a nutrient trap, a function that has been lost as the pool behind the dam filled up with sediments. It certainly makes the whole process more simple. The problem is that dirt is cheap, dirt cheap, and moving it is expensive.

Try It, It Might Work

 At the Bay Journal, Should new Chesapeake cleanup goals have a greater dose of reality?

As far as the Chesapeake Bay cleanup is concerned, Kenn Pattison was given a job in 2010 that might be labeled Mission Impossible. He had to design a plan that met Pennsylvania’s nutrient reduction goal.

Time and again, the state Department of Environmental Protection employee drafted strategies that called for an increasingly unrealistic amount of pollution controls on farmland. Time and again, his plans fell short.

Ultimately, Pattison got the job done — “on paper,” he noted. It called for farmers to voluntarily implement high-priority runoff control practices on 92% of farmland and take large tracts out of production.

“It was no longer a matter of ‘will we hit the mark?’” recalled Pattison, who retired in 2013. “It was a matter of just writing a plan.”

That plan was part of the regional effort to produce a realistic, accountable strategy for reducing nutrient pollution in the Bay that could be completed by 2025. But, as with earlier goals set for 2000 and 2010, the region will miss its 2025 goal — and by a large margin.

In large part, that is because the goal-setting process failed to fully appreciate the difficulty of reducing nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus — from the region’s 83,000 farms, which are by far the largest source of water-fouling nutrients to the Bay.

Now, as the region stands on the brink of missing a third deadline in a quarter century, it faces questions about what comes next.

In dozens of Bay Journal interviews with current and former government officials, researchers, farmers, conservation district staff, environmentalists and others, most suggest that meeting goals on the region’s farmlands will likely take decades.

The need for patience was bolstered by a recent report from the Bay’s scientific community that said current efforts are unlikely to achieve nutrient reduction goals without significant changes.

Nearly everyone believes that goals and deadlines are essential to making progress. But many also say that seemingly unachievable objectives can have the opposite effect: They can create unrealistic public expectations, diminish participation if goals are seen as unattainable, and result in inefficient use of funding. They can also stymie innovation and alternative cleanup approaches.

Perhaps most importantly, unrealistic deadlines don’t allow enough time to build the personal engagement and connections critical to earning trust from the farmers who manage a quarter of the Bay’s water-shed and will bear the bulk of future Bay-related nutrient reductions.

So, do you want a clean Bay, or do you want to eat? Ultimately, our civilization depends on food produced in excess (great excess) of that which could be produced without added fertilizer. Use of fertilizer means that some of those nutrients are going to get wash off into streams and make their way to the rivers, estuaries and oceans downstream. On could argue that the Bay is so special that no fertilizer should be used. That would simply make farming in the Bay watershed uncompetitive, taking millions of acres out of production. What would become of the farmers? Welfare?

The problem with that is that other places in the US and world have similar issues. Nutrients from the great American heartland are causing problems in the Gulf of Mexico, and nutrients from the farms of California's Central Valley cause problems in the San Francisco Bay. We cannot fix them all and remain the breadbasket of the world. We can make them better, marginally, but major improvements will require major reductions in our overall agricultural output. The whole world can't do that and continue to eat.

As for having realistic goals, if you set realistic goals, and then attain them, there would be no need for the whole 'Bay Diet' industry, the web of government agencies, NGOs and academics whose livelihood depend on the continuation of the Bay Program (not just the EPA Bay program, but the whole shebang), and that would not be acceptable. Better set those goals to the moon, and keep the jobs.

The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same

 Lancaster Farming, Report: Chesapeake Bay Isn’t Improving as Expected

Farm-generated water pollution in the Chesapeake Bay watershed isn’t decreasing as fast as authorities predicted, so new approaches may be needed, a new report says.

The region has only achieved “the mid-30% range” of its water quality goals, a rise of maybe 10 percentage points over four decades, the Chesapeake Bay Program said in a review released Tuesday.

The issue is not merely that farm-rich Pennsylvania was slow to commit the recommended funding to the bay cleanup, a concern bay groups have raised for years.

The report says conservation programs do not provide sufficient incentives to adopt practices with the largest pollution reduction potential.

Increasing livestock production has also produced a net growth in nutrients in the region. Ever more nutrients have been imported in the form of animal feed, but there has not been a corresponding uptick in nutrients being exported as manure, the document says.

In addition, ag conservation practices might not be as effective at reducing pollution as scientists thought.

The computer model that estimates pollution loads suggests the bay’s phosphorus goals are nearly met, but water monitoring stations have recorded little decline in phosphorus levels.

So the model isn't working, and it must be the farmers fault. 

The reasons for this discrepancy could include incomplete data and a long lag time for cleanup actions to show results, the report says.

Speeding up progress is not just a matter of increasing funding for existing programs. New tactics are needed, such as a pay-for-performance program that could spur interest in highly effective practices, the report says.

To address nutrient surpluses, farmers could use technologies that reduce inputs and export manure from the bay watershed.

Hilary Harp Falk, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the report should be required reading for anyone involved in the bay cleanup.

“While additional investment is still needed, we must drastically change and accelerate our approach to reducing the pollution running off the land,” she said.

We've spent about $25 billion (with a "b"), and not made a substantial dent in the problem (although, to be fair, at least it didn't get worse).

If only we could get the people in Washington DC to stop eating food. 

Walt Speaks on Bay Health

Walter Boynton

 Southern Maryland News, Lab professor reflects on state of the Chesapeake Bay

Professor Emeritus Walter Boynton of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Chesapeake Biological Laboratory spoke about the bay during a presentation titled “Chesapeake Reflections: What We’ve Learned During the Past 50 Years and Where We Need To Go in the Future” at the laboratory’s offices in Solomons.

“It’s a fascinating, responsive ecosystem,” Boynton said of the Chesapeake Bay, which is about 200 miles long and has more than 11,000 miles of shoreline. “It’s not a brontosaurus where you pushed on it and nothing happened [except that] it roared. It’s much more like a greyhound where responses can be quick.”

Boynton spoke about how change is a common theme in the Chesapeake Bay, related a bit of history, shared several stories of loss and how environmental science unravels causes and cures, ad climate change.
. . .
Boynton began his 45-minute talk by showing a 1588 painting that presented Indigenous people in a dugout canoe along with various forms of sea life in crystal clear water that also showed the bottom of the water column.

He also shared a quote from 1859’s “The Old Plantation” that reads, “So transparent are its waters that far out from shore you may see, in the openings of the weed forest, on its bottom the flashing sides of the finny tribe they glide over the pearly sands.”

“The water quality was bad in the 1970s and 1980s,” Perez said, “but it’s a little bit better. And there’s forward momentum.”

“I think we can get back to the days where the water is much clearer than it is now,” Boynton said.

I know Walt. Good guy, a real fixture in the community, and well liked. But how is the Bay really doing? Chesapeake Bay Program,  Experts find 2022 dead zone to be 10th smallest since 1985, "Cool temperatures and strong winds in September shortened duration."

The Chesapeake Bay dead zone—an area of low oxygen that forms in deep Bay waters when excess nutrients enter through polluted runoff and feed naturally-occurring algae—was the 10th smallest since 1985 according to experts from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

“It is always welcome news to see improved Chesapeake Bay dissolved oxygen conditions that are so vital for the health of fish, crabs, oysters and other aquatic life,” remarked Mark Trice, water quality informatics program manager with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

Hypoxic, or low-oxygen, conditions form when nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment pollution enter waterways in greater amounts than the ecosystem can handle. It causes naturally-occurring algae to grow and bloom in large quantities and then die off. When the algae blooms decompose, they remove oxygen from the surrounding water faster than it can be replenished. It can suffocate the marine life that live in that region and cause others to seek new habitat.

Each year, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Old Dominion University conduct water quality monitoring cruises from May—October to measure the amount of hypoxia in the Bay. Results from these cruises can be found on Maryland’s Eyes on the Bay and Virginia’s VECOS websites, respectively.

In addition, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and Anchor QEA use a sophisticated computer model, combined with local weather information, to estimate how much nitrogen and phosphorus enters the Bay from its surrounding watershed. This information produces daily, real-time estimates of the dead zone size throughout the summer. These forecasts, along with other daily estimates of environmental conditions throughout the Bay, are available to view on the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Forecast System.

Weather conditions are primarily responsible for dictating how large the annual dead zone will be, and how long it will last, into the fall. In June, experts predicted that the 2022 dead zone would be 13% smaller than those in the past, due to less winter and spring precipitation. Lower amounts of precipitation bring about smaller river flows, meaning lower amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment pollutants entering the Bay. The U.S. Geological Survey reported that the 2022 water year (measured from October 1, 2021—September 30, 2022) had river flows entering the Chesapeake at an average of 73,000 cubic feet per second, which is below the long-term average of 79,000 cubic feet per second.

Hypoxia appeared later than normal this year—in June—due to cool and windy conditions in the spring. The dead zone was more typical in size until mid-August due to moderate river flows, temperatures and winds throughout the region. It was still observed in mid-September, but cooler temperatures and stronger winds in the early fall caused it to disappear soon after. In fact, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science model found that the 2022 dead zone duration was likely 95% shorter than any since 1985.

Tenth best of of 37 years? If the $25 billion (with a "B") we've spent on the Bay in the since 1985 (the year we arrived in Maryland) were doing much good we'd be entitled to hope for more progress than that.

Scientists Predict a Better than Average Year for the 'Dead Zone'

 Bay Journal, Chesapeake Bay ‘dead zone’ expected to have another below-average year

Researchers from the Chesapeake Bay Program, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, University of Michigan and U.S. Geological Survey have predicted that the Bay’s summertime “dead zone” will be about 13% smaller in 2022 than the average size of the dead zone recorded between 1985 and 2021.

According to the state-federal Chesapeake Bay Program, which leads the restoration effort, this is due to less water entering the Bay from its rivers this spring, as well as a decrease in nutrient pollution from some areas of the Bay’s six-state watershed.

The Bay’s dead zone is a deepwater area with low levels of dissolved oxygen that are hostile to marine life, including fish, blue crabs and oysters. The dead zone is mostly caused by nutrient pollution from human wastewater, animal manure and fertilizer.

Even so, it's not a particularly good year for stripers and blue crabs. Stripers are in a persistent pattern of low recruitment, for causes that are largely unknown, but is thought to be weather/climate related, while crabs have had a couple of bad years of recruitment as well and are facing new harvesting restrictions. Oysters, while above recent years lows, have not rebounded to their historic levels. 

The amount of pollution reaching the Bay each year varies and is based on the amount of rainfall, which flushes nutrients and sediment into rivers that flow into the Bay. The load is also impacted by the number and effectiveness of conservation practices that reduce and manage those pollutants.

The 2021 dead zone was approximately 14% lower than the long-term average.

An assessment of the 2022 dead zone will be available this fall.

13% doesn't strike me as particularly significant. If they told me that the dead zone was half as large as the long term average, I'd be more impressed. On the other hand, I haven't detected the telltale signs of anoxia near our shores so far this year; fish and crabs crowded into the shallow water, pushed up by the anoxic water, which is, in turn, pushed into shallow water by a particular combination of winds.

It certainly does not look like the "Bay Diet" is on track to beat anoxia by 2025 as hoped.

Finally They Notice

 Bay Journal, As 2025 approaches, Chesapeake cleanup goal grows more elusive

The Chesapeake Bay region reduced the estimated annual amount of nitrogen pollution reaching the Bay by about 1 million pounds in 2021, according to computer model estimates released Wednesday.

That leaves the region with 41 million pounds of nitrogen reductions left to achieve its 2025 cleanup goal. But if progress continues at the 2021 rate, it will take Bay states another 40 years to reach that goal.

The figures, part of the annual update from the state-federal Bay Program partnership, is the latest indication that the region is unlikely to meet its nutrient reduction goal on time — or anytime in the near future.

Overall, the figures show that since the new Bay cleanup plan was established in 2010, the region has achieved about 42% of its nitrogen reduction goal, leaving just four years to do the bulk of the work.

An overload of the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus are the main cause of poor water quality in the Bay.

The progress report is better for phosphorus, with the region achieving 64% of its goal to date.

But nitrogen is the most problematic nutrient to control and plays a larger role in fouling the Bay. And the region also faces even greater headwinds in meeting its nitrogen goals than the new figures indicate.

The 2021 figures show that since 2009, the District of Columbia and West Virginia have achieved their nutrient reduction goals. Among other states:

• Maryland has achieved 58% of its nitrogen goal.
• Virginia has achieved 75% of its nitrogen goal.
• Pennsylvania has achieved 22% of its nitrogen goal.
• Delaware has achieved 20% of its nitrogen goal.
• New York has achieved 69% of its nitrogen goal.

According to the model, most nutrient reductions in the watershed last year came from agriculture, with pollution from wastewater treatment plants and runoff from developed lands edging up a bit.

Baywide, the figures show that since 2009, the amount of nitrogen reaching the Bay annually has been reduced from 270.8 million pounds to 240.5 million pounds. The 2025 goal is to have implemented all of the actions needed to reduce nitrogen to 199.3 million pounds. It could take several years for various runoff control actions to become fully effective, though.

But even if the region were to succeed in meeting those 2025 goals, it won’t be enough to reduce nitrogen in the Bay to acceptable levels. That’s because additional loads of the nutrient are now reaching the Bay due to climate change and problems behind the Conowingo Dam.

I've been pointing out for several years now that when 2025 rolled around, it was very unlikely that they would have achieved their goals. Now that we're on the verge, is the problem that they didn't try hard enough, or spend enough money, or did they set unrealistic goals? I would argue the latter.

I would also like to point out that it is not really in their best interests to declare the problem solved. What then? Declare victory, disband the EPA Bay Program, the assorted state equivalents and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and go home? Never! A large industry in government, academe and NGOs has grown up dependent on the Federal spigot to feed the Bay Restoration.

Look for a new set conferences, meetings, and behind the scene dealing to set a new set of goals to continue the work. Furthermore, if I'm right, the new goals will be set at another implausible target to justify continuing, or perhaps even expanding the current programs.

PA Improves Bay Record

 Bay Journal, Bay Program figures show PA led region in 2020 cleanup progress

Long considered a laggard in Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts, Pennsylvania last year led the watershed in nitrogen reductions reported by the state-federal Bay Program partnership.

The state was recognized with making nearly 4.5 million pounds of nitrogen reductions in 2020, accounting for nearly half of the 10 million pounds attributed to the entire watershed, according to Bay Program computer models.

Still, the recently released figures show that the region as a whole remains far behind the pace needed to meet its 2025 pollution reduction goals for nitrogen, a key nutrient affecting Bay water quality.

From 2009 to 2020, watershed states reduced the amount of nitrogen reaching the Bay by just 29%, leaving more than 70% of the work to be accomplished in just five years.

Much of the shortfall is in Pennsylvania, largely because the great majority of its nutrient runoff comes from the 33,000 farms in its portion of the Bay drainage. All states have struggled to control farm runoff, according to the models.

The nitrogen reduction credited to Pennsylvania for 2020 was more than the state had accomplished in the entire previous decade, according to model estimates. But they show that the state would have to control another 32.5 million pounds to meet its 2025 goal.

The 2020 progress did not represent a dramatic ramp-up in effort, though. About 75% of the credited reductions resulted from improved reporting of nutrient discharges from wastewater plants that had previously been upgraded. Similarly, much of the reduced agricultural runoff stemmed from better accounting for actions previously taken by farmers.

So, despite all the screaming about Pennsylvania falling short of it Bay Diet goals, it had been doing better, and just failed to account for an report the improvements? Whoday thunk? 

They'll never reach the 2025 nutrient reduction goal. Then what would they do, disband the EPA Bay Program and the Bay Foundation?

It's Hard to Disagree

 A letter to the editor at PennLive, Cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay seems to be a losing cause 

My sewer bill, every three months, has an additional added charge that is supposed to go toward cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay. At the same time, according to a recent TV report, the city of Baltimore is dumping raw sewage into the Bay. Now I read in the local newspaper that the city of Harrisburg is doing the same thing and has been for a long time.

Ah, yes, the infamous "flush tax," for which virtually every house in Maryland is charged $5 a month (or $15 a quarter) to help build the infrastructure to help fix the Bay's nutrient problem. Most of it, indeed, goes to upgrading the sewage systems for the major urban areas, but some does go to rural houses in the form of support for denitrifying "mound" septic systems for critical areas.

There apparently is no penalty for doing this even though there are considerable environmental consequences such as drugs, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc. that kill fish make people sick and make the water unsafe to swim and fish. Now I see there is no easy fix to the problem.

Do you imagine the people of Baltimore (who control the state's politics) would long support a system that penalized them in anything more than a nominal way?

I initially was not happy about this $27 assessment to help clean up the Bay but resigned myself to believe it would help. Now it appears to be a losing cause. I do not live near water and all the rain water at my house is absorbed into the ground and is filtered before going anywhere. I am told I am still contributing to the Bay pollution, but I simply can’t see it especially compared to Harrisburg.

Al Lewis, Silver Spring Township, Cumberland County

I'm not quite as concerned as Al, I think we have started to see slow improvement. but I do believe that the Bay scientists and authorities way oversold the benefits, and undersold what it will really cost to make a big difference. 

Bay Farmers Seek Sweet Federal Funding

Or perhaps more accurately, Bay politicians seek federal funds in the name of farmers. The Virginia Mercury, Bay states seek new federal funding initiative for farm cleanup

Virginia Agriculture and Forestry Secretary Bettina Ring and her counterparts from the five other Chesapeake Bay states are seeking a sit-down with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to discuss a proposal to pump extra federal funding into a concerted effort to clean up the Bay.

Ring and the other state agriculture officials are embracing a proposal from the Chesapeake Bay Commission to create a Chesapeake Resilient Farms Initiative, which would tap $737 million in federal funding over the next decade to help clean up nutrient and sediment pollution from farms in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Three quarters of a billion dollars? Why not? They estimated the total cost of the bay clean up at around $25 billion way back when. If less than a billion would actually take care of of agricultures' contributions, they have been remiss in not spending it already.

In their letter to Vilsack, dated Aug. 25, the state leaders noted that federal cleanup mandates for the Bay, which provide goals for each state in the watershed, must be met by 2025, and that 80 percent of the remaining pollution reductions the federal government is seeking are being imposed on the agricultural sector. The officials said states would find it easier to meet their cleanup goals with dedicated federal funding that aids farmers.

“We know we have a receptive audience for voluntary cost-share programs designed to achieve these restoration goals,” Ring and her counterparts from West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania wrote. “What we lack is the necessary capacity, both human and financial.”

Almost everybody is receptive to someone else's money.

The officials said new sources of funding would be needed to meet Chesapeake Bay cleanup goals, and suggested that the U.S. Agriculture Department was uniquely equipped to help them find it.

Earlier this year, representatives from the Chesapeake Bay Commission including current commission Chair David Bulova, a Democratic state delegate from Fairfax, wrote Vilsack that “without additional resources from our federal partners to assist farmers in the bay watershed, we will not meet our goals.”

Modeled after the Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative, which Vilsack created in 2009, the Chesapeake Resilient Farms Initiative would pool various federal agricultural funding programs and target them for Bay cleanup.

I would hurry to point out that the Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative has not, in fact, reduced the nutrient driven "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, which was above the long term average for 2021.

“This funding would primarily target those sub-watersheds — particularly the Susquehanna River — known to have the greatest influence on the Chesapeake Bay and offer the most cost-effective solutions,” the agriculture leaders wrote to Vilsack in their Aug. 25 letter. “This is particularly true in Pennsylvania, where agriculture is heavily concentrated and the rural nature of the Susquehanna River watershed means agriculture is the dominant source of excess nutrients in the commonwealth’s waters.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) endorsed the idea on Tuesday. He said a regional initiative would help farmers and regulators create more sustainable agriculture practices that reduce nitrogen output, improve water quality, and would mitigate the impacts of climate change on agriculture.

But my guess is that a whole lot of the money would be siphoned off into administrative BS before it ever gets to the farmer in a way that might actually impact pollution entering the Bay. Can you say diversity and environmental justice?

“Last week, we all saw the devastating and deadly impacts of climate change as Hurricane Ida swept across our nation,” Wolf said.

“Farmers are waiting to jump into action,” he added. “We just need support, as was provided to the Mississippi River Basin, to get moving.”

Of course, he had to interject climate change, even though there's no evidence that climate change is actually contributing to stronger or more frequent tropical storms and hurricanes.

The Wombat has both Rule 5 Sunday: Rabbit Season! posted at The Other McCain on time and under budget.

Bay Journal, $13 million wastewater grant to private company spurs debate in Maryland

Maryland regulators want to give nearly $13 million to a private company to help it clean up nutrient pollution from an Eastern Shore chicken rendering plant it owns that has a history of discharge violations.

Officials with the Maryland Department of the Environment say the grant to Valley Proteins, Inc., will help it achieve an extraordinary level of wastewater treatment for such a facility and improve the health of the Transquaking River, a 23-mile-long Chesapeake Bay tributary into which the plant discharges. The river has been classified since 1996 as impaired by nutrients.

But environmentalists and some Democratic lawmakers object to the state grant, saying that a for-profit firm shouldn’t get public money to clean up its act. State Sen. Sarah Elfreth, a Democrat representing Anne Arundel County, said the proposal “doesn’t pass the smell test.”

“I think they should be paying for it themselves,” Elfreth said, adding that at the very least, the company should borrow the money from the state and pledge to pay it back. “I appreciate that ultimately it will reduce pollution, but I’d like private industry to be paying their fair share.”

Each year, millions of dollars in grants flow out of the Bay Restoration Fund to support projects that curb sewage overflows, retire septic systems and modernize wastewater treatment plants. The recipients are typically cities, towns, counties and their utilities.

Democratic Sen. Paul Pinsky, chair of the chamber’s environmental committee, criticized the proposal on the Senate floor March 9, but the Republican who represents Dorchester County, where the plant is located, defended the allocation.

“The reduction of nutrients that we get is very much worth it,” Sen. Addie Eckardt said. “Be careful pointing a finger at some of our businesses. Wastewater treatment is wastewater treatment.”

Well, do you you want the Bay clean or not?

Chickenshit: There's an App for That

New 'littr' app connects chicken litter suppliers and customers

There is a new app on the market, connecting chicken litter suppliers and customers in Delaware.

The Delmarva Chicken Association (DCA) launched the new, free mobile app.

“It’s called Littr. Since it’s an app we had to spell it a little funny - it’s LITTR. And the elevator pitch for this I think is - it’s a Craigslist or a Match.com for people who have chicken litter and people who need it,” said the Association’s communications manager James Fisher.

He says the app connects First State chicken growers who have litter from their chicken houses and farmers who want it to fertilize their fields. There are 1,300 chicken farmers on Delmarva and they produce hundreds of tons of litter every year.

 

“There’s 1,300 chicken farmers on Delmarva. That’s the size of the chicken community - the family farms that raise chickens that are produced for restaurants and grocery stores everywhere. The number of amount of litter is kind of hard to get a handle on because it varies from year to year. It’s in the hundreds of tons across the whole of Delmarva,” said Fisher.

Fisher says the nitrogen and phosphorus in chicken litter make a highly effective fertilizer for crops like corn, wheat and soybeans. He adds that 95% of all poultry litter is recycled to fertilize crops.

He adds that improved litter management over the years has allowed farmers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to reduce agricultural nitrogen entering the Bay by 39% and agricultural phosphorus reaching the Bay by 25%.
. . .
Farmers can download the app from Google Play or Apple’s App Store.

So, if you just happen to have some extra chickenshit on hand, or, if for some reason you want some more chickenshit, now you know. 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Julie Strain, RIP ready for your digital amusement.