Industrial Farming and Urban Sprawl Wreak Havoc On Chesapeake Bay

It’s been more than 25 years since the federal government and several states pledged to restore the Chesapeake Bay. Despite those pledges, devastation remains. The nation’s largest estuary is still so polluted that every summer, a stretch dozens of miles long is so starved of oxygen that conditions are not suitable for fish and many other animals. The deterioration of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries could become a severe health hazard for the 17 million people who live within its watershed, according to a report released in July 2009 by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF).

The fish are disappearing, the oysters are almost gone and the crabs that are left are diseased. A lot of long-time residents to the area now try to avoid the waters, and area industrial farming is major cause.

According to an NPR report, Carole Morison quit raising chickens after two decades of farming, in part because she was tired of polluting the Chesapeake Bay. She wishes that other people would own up, quit the denial, roll up their sleeves and fix it together.

Morison still has two inactive chicken houses towering over her house filled with chicken excrement. If you crack the door to one of those houses, you’re so overwhelmed by ammonia it quickly becomes hard to breath. The manure emanating from area farms are often cast into massive ditches, creating what Morison calls “manure tea”, and their gases are blown away by massive fans. The excrement, fertilizer, and chemical products produce a very pointed runoff that is proving poisonous to the bay.

Bob Aman is also featured in NPR’s report. He runs a large dairy farm in the hills of Candor, New York. He acknowledges that everything flowing from his farm will end up in the bay. Aman keeps 500 milk cows in one huge barn, and each day they produce 15,000 gallons of manure. He spends a lot of time and money trying to keep manure out of the stream, including a digester to turn much of the manure into methane gas, which is used to generate electricity.

However, many of his neighbors still spread manure on fields — even when they’re covered with snow and can’t absorb the nitrogen and phosphorus. Aman says that at least farmers know they’re part of the problem, and are doing what they can do to do halt the it. “We as farmers are getting a little tired of everybody pointing their finger at us. I think we’re a little bit of a scapegoat. There’s as much pollution coming from lawns and detergents,” he says.

He’s right. Experts say a big part of the problem is that each of the almost 17 million people living in the Chesapeake’s huge watershed contributes to the bay’s bleak condition. Exhaust from their cars, detergent from their dishwashers, fertilizers from their yards, and waste from their septic and sewage systems are some of the many sources of the nitrogen and phosphorus that plague the bay.

These nutrients stimulate too much algae to grow. Bacteria that eat the algae suck so much oxygen out of parts of the bay that fish and creatures have to swim away to survive. The algae and sediments in the runoff also make the water murky, killing underwater grasses that provide safe nurseries for the bay’s famous crabs and many fish. (The photo at the top is a satellite image showing how bad it’s getting)

In addition to creating algal blooms and feeding bacteria, nitrates can contaminate drinking water and raise risks to cancer, spleen hemorrhaging, and nervous system damage in infants. Standards in the Federal Safe Water Drinking Act do provide for testing and protection of public water systems, but not private wells. About 25 percent of wells sampled in regions of “relatively intense” agricultural land use have nitrate levels above public drinking water standards, compared to four percent nationally, according to a recent USGS study.

Stormwater collects any pesticide or fertilizer from lawns, empties it into storm drains, which will eventually make its way to the bay. Pollution also comes from vehicles that leak gasoline and oil onto roads, which is then washed into waterways. Along with vehicles, factories and power plants also pump exhaust into the air. When it rains, the rainwater brings the pollution into the water. In fact, about a quarter of the nitrogen pollution in the bay comes from the air — much due to this exhaust.

In lots of cities across the bay stormwater flows through the same pipes as the sewage. When it rains hard, sewage treatment plants can’t handle all the volume so they divert the stormwater and the sewage into the rivers.

But in the past year, President Obama issued an executive order calling for an overhaul of the cleanup, and governors resolved to get serious. Recently, Maryland Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger announced nearly $4 million to help farmers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to plan conservation practices to improve water quality, restore wetlands and enhance wildlife habitat. Officials think the new focus on the bay is already producing results.

A new law to cut air pollution from power plants has been introduced. An influx of money in the federal farm bill allowed the state to partially reimburse farmers who tackled pollution. Across the state, government money (well, our money really) has helped buy 55 new sheds to keep manure out of the rain and 22 composters to keep dead chickens out of waste piles. New money has paid for upgrades to about 1,000 of Maryland’s septic systems, but there are about 420,000 septic systems in the state, and most need an upgrade.

Those measures have helped Maryland achieve 34 percent of the overall pollution cuts that it must meet to achieve new short-term goal, set for 2011. Officials in Virginia and Pennsylvania, the other two states that provide most of the bay’s pollution, said they were also on track but have yet to provide specific information about their progress. It will still be a long time before things turn around.