Chesapeake Bay
The farm bill triples the amount of funding available for a program that helps farmers reduce how much fertilizer and sediment is washed off their fields by rain, into waterways and eventually into the bay. The Regional Conservation Partnership Program will receive at least $300 million a year under the latest farm bill, including $50 million more than was previously available for Maryland and other Chesapeake Bay watershed states.
The program helps pay for efforts to address flooding or drought, degradation in water or soil quality, and loss of wildlife habitat, including projects to create or preserve forest buffers between farmland and waterways, to plant cover crops and to rotate crops in a way that helps trap carbon in soil.
Joel Dunn, CEO of the Chesapeake Conservancy, said those sorts of projects are important to continue bay cleanup progress.
“The first 50 years of the Chesapeake Bay movement appropriately focused primarily on ‘point sources’ of pollution, such as sewage treatment plants, which produced great results. The next 50 years will undoubtedly focus in part on ‘non-point source’ pollution, such as runoff from farms and urban landscapes,” he said in a statement.
Food stamp recipients
Republicans, including Trump, had pressed for tighter work requirements on recipients of food stamps. But that provision was a sticking point in negotiations on Capitol Hill and was not included in the final version of the bill.
About 341,000 Maryland households participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program, or SNAP, receiving about $75 million in benefits in September, according to USDA data. That is about 7 percent fewer households and 3 percent less spending than a year earlier. The spending translated to $1.32 per person per meal in fiscal year 2017, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Advocates for food stamp recipients had warned that work requirements proposed in the House would have prevented many working poor from using the program, and conflicted with Maryland policies that gradually phase down food stamp benefits as earnings increase.
Renewable energy