Maryland Department of Agriculture
Clamping down on farm pollution is a necessity for a better Chesapeake Bay
This is the third time a cleanup deadline has been missed without sanctions as Clean Water Act violations by the states are ignored by the EPA and no new regulatory and financial initiatives are required.
At the root of this failure is agricultural pollution. We have allowed agribusiness to lather 25% of the bay watershed with millions of tons of fertilizers and animal excrement from 83,000 farms. Agriculture has become the largest and least-regulated source of bay pollutants: 50% of nitrogen; 45% of phosphorus; and 60% of bay choking sediment.
Read MoreAgriculture 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.
Read MoreHogan’s record as governor a classic case of self-dealing
Seeking reelection in 2018, Hogan released tax returns showing he had made $2.4 million from such deals in his first three years in office. No other governor has earned as much outside income while in office. Paralleling Trump, he has set up a very profitable system whereby he can use his powerful government position to increase his private profits. Last year, he purchased a $1.1 million five-bedroom home on six acres in Davidsonville. This is a striking financial turnaround considering Hogan was forced to file for bankruptcy in April 1994, when lenders called his loans and he liquidated his real-estate business and $750,000 home in Upper Marlboro.
Read MoreAg Certainty: Making Certain that the Bay Remains Polluted
With Ag Certainty, we’ve just thrown a “critical” part of the TMDL out the window; the only real “certainty” that remains is that we’ll all be sitting down in 2025 again and try to come up with the next, great plan to clean up the Bay.
Read MoreThe Fictional War on Family Farmers
One reality is that nobody wants families to be forced to stop farming. A second widely-understood reality is that the single greatest force driving farm families away from their traditional lives is the ever-growing domination of food production by huge companies like Perdue, Inc.
Read MoreSenior Scientists And Policmakers For The Bay Join With Other Conservation Groups In Urging Better Regulation Of Tons Of Raw Animal Manure.
After eight months of negotiations and efforts to strengthen the regulations as we have advocated in our Bay Action Plan, new regulations were proposed and published in the Maryland Register on June 29. These regs are still much too weak and fall well short of the Senior Scientists and Policymakers for the Bay science-based positions. Representatives of our group had discussed our positions in detail with the Bay Cabinet at a meeting last September. We have continued to advocate these common sense positions and members of our group sent detailed letter to the Governor and published an Op-ed in the Baltimore Sun detailing the need for better management of animal manure and other nutrients.
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