A death warrant for the Chesapeake Bay?

Opinion by GERALD WINEGRAD

Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of the signing of the first Chesapeake Bay Agreement. As a Maryland state senator at the time, I witnessed this event along with 700 other hopeful activists. Our optimism for a clean bay is being crushed as the harsh reality sinks in: The Environmental Protection Agency is badly failing in its duty to enforce the Clean Water Act and to prod bay states to meet mandatory pollution reductions to restore the Chesapeake. This is despite the states being given 15 years to comply.

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EPA and bay state governors again do nothing to advance the cause of a clean Chesapeake Bay

These top scientists found that reductions in key bay pollutants of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment were likely overestimated from BMPs for agriculture and developed lands. The BMPs were not as effective as thought. “While Chesapeake Bay Program modeling suggests that phosphorus reductions targeted by the TMDL are nearly achieved, analysis of water quality at riverine monitoring stations finds limited evidence of observable reductions in P concentrations.”

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Chicken industry wins again, crippling Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts

In 2022, the industrialized Delmarva chicken industry produced 596 million chickens in 4,889 chicken houses—a record 4.4 billion pounds of chicken and $5 billion in wholesale value. This was a 38% broiler increase in a decade. These chickens produced 1.5 billion pounds of chicken excrement — equal to the weight of two Statues of Liberty! Corn and soybeans grown for feed are highly nitrogen intensive, adding more nitrogen to the bay.

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Agriculture is destroying the Chesapeake Bay

Between 1950 and 1982, the amount of nitrogen from manure and fertilizer applied to bay crop land nearly doubled, reaching 960 million pounds annually, as farmland decreased by nearly half. Alarmingly, the average annual rate of nutrient reductions from bay region farmland has actually decreased since 2009.

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