Heavily regulated farmers are doing their part to clean up the Chesapeake

In Maryland, more than 350,000 people earn a living from agriculture. All of them – and, really, Marylanders of all walks of life — deserve fair, thoughtful coverage of their livelihood.

But it has become clear to members of the Delmarva Chicken Association, Maryland Farm Bureau, and Maryland Grain Producers that Gerald Winegrad’s long streak of columns focused on criticizing farms and the Chesapeake Bay don’t rise to that standard.

Winegrad returns to a frequent assertion in his March 7 column – that Maryland farms are unregulated or under-regulated. That’s news to farmers who wade through county planning and zoning fine print to site and build farm structures, file and follow detailed nutrient management plans (whether they use chicken litter or commercial fertilizer) and report all fertilizer use through Annual Implementation Plans, or obtain CAFO permits and adhere to stormwater management requirements to build and operate new, energy-efficient chicken houses.

Maryland’s chicken-raising farms are subject to zero-discharge effluent limitations and must report any pollutant discharges the same way urban permitholders are. Their manure storage structures must be engineered to withstand once-every-25-years weather.

Recordkeeping to prove environmental compliance is a constant duty for modern farmers, a reality that was only dimly in view when Winegrad left public office 25 years ago.

Improving the health of the Chesapeake

Bay depends on four key sectors – wastewater treatment plants, farmers, suburban and urban homeowners and businesses, and septic system users – all working in concert to lower the pollutants they send to the bay. The little-noticed truth is that in Maryland only two of those sectors – wastewater plants and agriculture – have reduced their pollutant footprints over the long haul.

Since 1985, according to the Chesapeake Assessment Scenario Tool, Maryland’s farmers have reduced their annual nitrogen loads to the bay by 12.5 million pounds; cut their phosphorus loads by 1.2 million pounds; and trimmed their sediment loads by 216,000 tons.

Winegrad labels it a myth that “widespread adoption of sound nutrient management” has happened on Maryland farms. But the sizeable pollutant reductions farmers achieved directly follow from those very real changes. (Maryland’s newest Watershed Implementation Plan calls for even more nutrient reductions to come from farmland.) The wastewater sector has contributed striking progress to the cause as well.

While sewer plants and farmers have been turning the nutrient spigot tighter, developed areas — Maryland’s neighborhoods, shopping malls, and office parks — have, unfortunately, become larger contributors of those same pollutants that farmers have reduced.

Since 1985, annual nitrogen loads to the Chesapeake Bay from Maryland’s cities and suburbs have ballooned by 2.9 million pounds, according to CAST — clawing back nearly one-fourth of the water quality gains Maryland farmers have made. Sprawl in urban and suburban areas has resulted in sending nearly 75,000 more pounds of phosphorus a year to the Bay now than in the 1980s, and these areas have increased their sediment loads to the point that developed regions now send more sediment to the Bay than farms do.

Winegrad says the environmental community should stop cooperating with the agricultural community to implement conservation, in favor of advocating for stricter regulations. Yet Maryland farmers are the most regulated in the country. Each time a new regulation has been enacted, admittedly not without consternation, Maryland farmers have stepped up to the plate to get the job done.

There are amazing examples of environmental organizations working with farmers to install best management practices resulting in real environmental benefits as opposed to fighting in Annapolis.

Winegrad writes that there is “no logical reason” to sustain Maryland farms in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. In truth, there are abundant reasons: the millions of Americans our farmers feed, and the hundreds of thousands of Maryland families who earn their livelihoods on or supporting those farms, all while making substantial contributions to a cleaner Chesapeake Bay that Winegrad simply will not acknowledge.

There is no sense in wishing away Maryland’s agricultural sector, and The Capital’s readers deserve more intelligent coverage of these issues than the one-note mantras Winegrad delivers in column after column.