Last fall, state and federal leaders admitted that the Chesapeake Bay region will not meet its most fundamental 2025 cleanup goal, aimed at reducing nutrient pollution in the Bay and the rivers that feed it. For 40 years, the region has struggled to meet its goal largely because of an inability to sufficiently reduce nutrient pollution from farms in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

That’s taken from a series of articles in the Bay Journal that dives extensively into the Chesapeake Bay restoration, including its history and where the health of the Bay is today.

The Bay Journal’s Editor-at-Large Karl Blankenship authored the series and was with us on The Spark Monday and said that while nutrients from wasterwater treatment plants and air pollution (nutrients) have largely been controlled, agriculture is a different story,"Agriculture has been difficult for a number of reasons. For one thing. It's not as easily regulated as other sources. And there's ongoing pressure. It's a nutrient intensive activity. You don't grow food without nutrients."

Blankenship wrote that success to reduce nutrient runoff from farms relied on Best management Practices such as planting nutrient-absorbing cover crops in the fall, installing forest buffers along streams, and reducing soil tillage. But at the same time, farmers were under pressure to produce more food for a hungry world. Blankenship quoted Zach Easton, a Viginia Tech agriculture professor who said, "We can't have cheap food and a pristine Bay."

Blankenship says the Environmental Protection Agency tells farmers they need to reduce nutrients but at the same time, grow more corn for ethanol,", EPA for the last like 15 years has been through its reformulated fuel policy, has been incentivizing the production of more corn and corn happens to be a particularly key nitrogen crop. It loses more possibly than anything else. And since around 2007, 2008, thereabouts because of EPA policies it's been estimated that the price of corn is about a third higher than it would be. And something like around a third to 40% of the nation's corn production goes for ethanol. And and so EPA is like basically incentivizing the system that tells everyone, oh, you should grow more of this really nitrogen leaky crop, even as we're telling you to reduce pollution."

What has seemed to work to reduce nutrient runoff is when farmers are focused on a local waterway rather than the entire Bay as Blankenship described," A lot of the Bay reduction goals were established by computer models, model estimates of what needs to happen. Telling farmers to do something that doesn't make economic sense, to clean up a model is a tough sell. But uniformly, when you talk to farmers and you talk to people who work on the ground with farmers, when you can tie actions to an improved stream where you can show an impact on a stream, that's a much different conversation and it's a lot easier to sell. That's not the way these programs have been solved historically."

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