Nutrients
What Does Agribusiness Have to Hide?
(Posted by Scott Edwards.)
When it comes to big agribusiness and access to public information, the Chesapeake region is sadly part of a disturbing pattern that exists all across the country. And signs are it might be getting even worse.
Polluting industries are generally subject to a good amount of public transparency and disclosure about their practices, what types of materials they handle, how they dispose of their wastes, etc. Unfortunately, agribusiness has always enjoyed a level of state-sponsored secrecy that serves to undermine this general right of public access. The poor excuses for concealment offered by state departments of agriculture and environment and industry range from national security to trade secrets or, more often than not, no excuse at all.
Read MoreFertilizer and Waste Are Killing the Chesapeake Bay
(Posted by Tom Fisher.)
For the last 400 years agriculture has been an important component of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Wheat and other grains in the 1700s and 1800s led to widespread clearing of forests, but poor management practices resulted in soil erosion that left a clear signal in the sediments that is still visible in cores retrieved from the bay. The introduction of European soil conservation methods in the 1800s helped stabilize a denuded landscape, and abundant oysters and submerged grasses cleared the waters.
Read MoreThe Bay Is Not Improving
(Posted by Tom Horton.)
In recent weeks there’s been a two-pronged push by agricultural interests to credit farmers with already doing most of what’s needed to reduce pollution; also to discredit federal computer modeling that says farmers need to do a lot more to meet the Chesapeake Bay restoration goals.
The extra credit comes courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service; the challenge to EPA’s modeling effort comes in a lawsuit filed by the American Farm Bureau.
Read MoreD.C. Environmental Film Festival Features Chesapeake Bay Films
(Posted by Jeanne McCann.)
The D.C. Environmental Film Festival is showing four timely films on Wednesday, March 23, from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m., at the Carnegie Institution for Science (Elihu Root Auditorium, 1530 P St., NW; Metro: Dupont Circle, 19th St. exit. Red line, Metrobuses: S1, S2, S4, S9, G2) Elizabeth Buckman, Vice President, Communications, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, will moderate the program, and introduce the filmmakers.
Read MoreAgribusiness Lobby Resorts to Warfare Against Chesapeake Bay
(Posted by Gerald Winegrad.)
Despite repeated scientific analyses and data documenting agriculture as the Chesapeake Bay’s #1 polluter, the giant agribusiness lobby continues to resist better practices to stem the bay-killing nutrients and sediment flowing from farm land.
Read MoreChesapeake Nutrient Trajectories: A New Data Analysis Reveals the Real Story
Posted by Bill Dennison.
Bob Hirsch and co-workers at the U.S. Geological Survey have developed a new method of analyzing long-term trends in nutrients that enter Chesapeake Bay from the rivers or tributaries that flow into the Bay. This method accounts for seasonal changes and year-to-year variation in flow, so that one can see the “forest for the trees.” The difficulty in analyzing flow and nutrients that enter Chesapeake Bay is the high degree of variability (or noise) in the data, making it difficult to discern trends, particularly long-term trends. Bob was able to use daily water flow data over a 31-year period, stretching from 1978 until 2008 from nine sites around Chesapeake Bay. Bob took these 100,000+ daily streamflow measurements and combined them with 13,000+ nutrient measurements to come up with daily nutrient loading estimates at each site. Then he was able to calculate a “flow-normalized daily flux,” which takes out the variations in flow due to weather. In this way, the long-term trends could be distinguished from the short-term variations.
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