NEW YORK TIMES
April 13, 2007

A Plan to Curb Farm-to-Watershed Pollution of Chesapeake Bay

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/us/13bay.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Andy Young’s dairy cows produce a lot of milk. They also produce a lot of manure. How much manure ends up in a nearby creek — and ultimately Chesapeake Bay — is the question at the center of an unusual effort to reinvigorate the bay’s declining grasses, crabs, fish and oysters.

Animal waste that has flowed into Chesapeake Bay tributaries has been cited as a major cause of the diminished stocks of oysters and other wildlife in the bay. One example of the problem is the clogging of Taylor floats, where oysters grow, at the University of Maryland hatchery in Horn Point.

Ben Parks is trying to restore oyster beds in bay waterways, but he says the job requires a healthy bay.

The dairy farms here in Lancaster County, among the top milk-producing counties in the nation, send more manure into the waterways that drain into Chesapeake Bay than any other part of the bay’s 64,000-square-mile watershed. Now the state of Pennsylvania is trying to get farmers like Mr. Young to reduce the damaging runoff by letting them apply for pollution credits that can be sold to developers needing to build sewage treatment plants.

The goal of the experiment is to pump new life into the bay, which was once the showpiece of the Eastern Seaboard but has been in biological decline for three decades, in large part because of manure and other agricultural pollutants.

In March, the Chesapeake Bay Program, a federal-state partnership, reported a 25 percent decline from 2005 to 2006 in the underwater grasses that are the anchor of the bay’s ecosystem. Algae thrives on the nitrogen in manure and other waste products and the phosphorus in fertilizer, becoming so abundant that it blocks sunlight and, by consuming oxygen as it decays, threatens to suffocate the grasses and other underwater life.

“We know what the problems are,” said Kathleen A. McGinty, the Pennsylvania secretary of environmental protection. She added, “We had to figure out a way to get all the farms involved.”

The state wants farmers to do things like build barriers to contain runoff and plant crops year-round so their roots will prevent the soil from washing away in big storms. The state will then estimate how much pollution is eliminated through the changes.

But it has been difficult to track agricultural runoff from specific farms, giving the program, which began in January, a bit of a slow start.

“There is a lot of room to argue,” said Mr. Young, the manager at Red Knob Farm, who has yet to receive a credit despite his family’s varied efforts to keep the farm’s manure out of nearby Little Conowingo Creek.

Virginia, another state in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, also provides credits and allows them to be traded among polluters, mimicking the cap-and-trade approach that has for the last decade been successful in getting electric utilities to cut emissions that lead to acid rain. Another state, Maryland, recently instituted a “flush tax” on sewer bills to pay for measures to clean the bay.

The runoff from those states is largely from urban and suburban sources rather than from farms. It is much easier to track reductions from those sources — for example, filtering out the harmful nutrients at sewage treatment plants — than it is to measure the benefits of a farmer’s planting his crops or grazing his cattle farther from streams.

In Pennsylvania, a state that lists agriculture among its leading industries and whose agriculture is dominated by the dairy business, the value of the credits is figured by a complex equation that combines the impact of the improvement and the distance of the farm from the bay. The World Resources Institute, an environmental organization in Washington, helped devise the system.

A typical credit is worth $2 to $9 for the reduction of 1.6 pounds or so of pollutants. Developers wanting to build a sewage treatment plant would have to buy enough credits each year to offset the pollution from the plant. In the case of a 100-house development, for example, the builder would need about 700 credits annually, according to one estimate.

In the early goings, Pennsylvania’s effort to match farmers and developers is being assisted by a company run out of a small town house in Lancaster by husband-and-wife agricultural engineers, Peter and Molly Hughes. The two grew up in the Northwest in the 1980s but have spent several years working in the rural areas of Southeastern Pennsylvania, helping farmers make the kinds of changes that both improve efficiency and reduce pollution.

Through their company, Red Barn, the Hugheses are hoping to coax naturally conservative farmers into the state program by emphasizing its bottom-line benefits.

“It’s going to catch on because of market forces,” Mr. Hughes said. “Farmers are going to take advantage of the opportunity to make money.”

Red Barn has started a credit-trading business and is encouraging farmers to seek the state credits and join the market. But it has been slow going. In the first three months of the program, there was only one trade between a farmer and a developer in the Susquehanna River watershed.

Many farmers are still trying to figure out the system; many others, in this heavily Amish area, pay it little heed. Mr. Young, who would like to participate, is frustrated. State environmental regulators have rebuffed two of his applications for credits for managing the waste from his 900 cows and 700 calves. “The market is so young, the devil is in the details,” he said. “It’s hard to get a credit certified.”

Still, a lot of eyes are on Pennsylvania. If the state succeeds in reducing pollution from farms, the program would probably be copied in other agriculturally rich watersheds across the country, including the Great Lakes and Puget Sound. More immediately, it would also bring new hope for the plant and animal life in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, including oysters.

More than 100 miles south of here, on the Choptank River near Cambridge, Md., Ben Parks and his son, Ben Parks II, are trying to restore oyster beds in a part of the river that they had abandoned. They monitor the growth of the oyster larvae that, with the help of University of Maryland researchers, attach themselves to the shells of old oysters and are then deposited in the river.

“You don’t just need to get the oysters back, though,” said the elder Mr. Parks, 59. “You need to get the whole bay healthy — the crabs, the grasses, everything.”