Hot News

11.18.2008

By SEAN CLOUGHERTY
Associate Editor

BALTIMORE — Maryland agriculture — specifically, its poultry industry —found itself under the microscope last week at the University of Baltimore School of Law’s second annual “The Bay in Crisis: Saving the Chesapeake.”
Analyses from speakers throughout the day ranged from showing agriculture’s existing contributions to the Bay cleanup effort to calls for increased regulation on poultry farms and allowing more legal oversight by environmental groups.
Disagreement also emerged about the availability of poultry manure on the Eastern Shore.
Farm group representatives said manure is scarce because it has increased value against the skyrocketed price of commercial fertilizer and environmentalists argued there is an excess of manure on the Eastern Shore and it is being handled improperly.
The symposium was broken up into three groups of speakers; the first focusing on ag’s impact on the Chesapeake Bay, the second on Maryland’s programs to protect the Bay from ag impact and the third on federal and environmental perspectives on ag’s impacts on the Bay. Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler was the keynote speaker.
“I don’t know one farmer who wakes up in the morning and says ‘I wonder how can I pollute the watershed?’” said Thomas Simpson, University of Maryland professor. Simpson said agriculture is a key player in Bay cleanup, but all sources of pollution need to be addressed to reach the goal. Denitrifying septic systems should be used more often and growth in the Bay region needs to be addressed to minimize load increases.
He had a phrase for the idea.
“E-cubed,” Simpson said. “Everything by everyone everywhere, within reason. We all have a role and without recognizing that E-cubed is there, we’re not going to get there.”
“So should the reductions be focused solely on ag?” Simpson asked rhetorically.
“Absolutely not. Nor on any single source in any watershed,” Simpson said. “A sense of equity is very important to get all the partners to play.”
Bill Satterfield, executive director of Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., said agriculture is making strides toward achieving its goals for nutrient reduction and the solutions take several years to show improvement ,just as it took years to get to the Bay’s current levels.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s pollution control summary, Satterfield said agriculture has reached 60 percent of its goal in nitrogen reduction and 40 percent in its phosphorus reduction. Conversely, he said urban and suburban reductions are at negative 90 percent for nitrogen and negative 67 percent for phosphorus.
Advances in feed conversion has led to a 75 percent reduction in nitrogen and phosphorus in the birds’ manure, he said, and the use of phytase in poultry feed makes more phosphorus available for plant uptake rather than leaching out of the soil.
Satterfield added that water moves slowly underground and that the average age of water in channel aquifers in the Bay area is 10 years old, ranging from one to 50 years old, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study.
“It takes awhile for the improved water that is a result of some of the agricultural practices to get down and move laterally in the aquifer to get into the streams and tributaries and the Bay itself,” he said.
Satterfield said the manure on Delmarva is being utilized and not wasted. In 2001, Perdue Farms started its Agricycle plant in Blades, Del. which pelletizes manure and sells it to retailers nationwide. And because fertilizer prices have quadrupled in the last two years, manure is much higher demand.
“Believe it or not, there is a shortage of chicken manure on the Delmarva Peninsula. We are contacted by farmers who want manure for their cropping operations. They cannot find it. Perdue Agricylce cannot get enough manure to operate that plant efficiently,” he said.
In his keynote address, Gansler said he spends more time in his office on bringing a manure-fueled power generation plant to Maryland than any single issue. He said there are 1.2 billion pounds of manure produced annually by the poultry industry.
“There’s plenty of manure here,” Gansler said. “Someone said there isn’t, but they’re wrong.”
He said the challenge so far has been getting a power company in the state to buy the electricity from the manure-fueled plant.
“We’re still trying to work out the details of it and get it to come here in Maryland,” Gansler said.
Gansler said he’s trying to “continue to change the culture involving the environment.”
“We no longer can take the approach, in my view, of voluntarily asking people not to pollute, which is really what we’ve been doing since the 1980s,” Gansler said. “We also need to vigilantly and vigorously prosecute polluters.”
He added that penalties for pollution should be increased because currently it’s in some farmers’ better interests to pollute and risk a small penalty than to not pollute.
Like others who spoke at the symposium, Gansler said most farmers are doing what they can to manage their nutrients and preserving farmland is important because “the alternative to farms is something we don’t want to see.”
Gansler also said he hopes to make it easier for environmental groups to bring citizen lawsuits in the state against Bay polluters.
“In the past, in the environmental world, sort of the block to that has been on us, the office of the attorney general, who has jurisdiction in these types of cases, to bring cases in state court that we can now bring in federal court. And so groups like Riverkeepers and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation ought to be able to bring lawsuits against polluters,” he said. “We’re hopeful to get something passed this year.”
Shari Wilson, Maryland Department of Environment secretary, said she hopes to meet the state’s rules for animal feeding operations, which would bring about 200 farms to the status of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in place by the end of the year. She said the rule would control about half of the poultry manure produced in the state.
“The scientists tell us at this time that what we have proposed is adequate,” Wilson said.
She added the proposed rule was changed from its original form after getting input from farmers.
“It didn’t weaken the rule,” she said. “It just made its implementation much more effective.”
Giving an environmentalist perspective, Joelle Heroic, an attorney who focuses on CAFOs for the Waterkeeper Alliance, said, “our goal is to obtain reductions in nutrients and phosphorus in poultry operations and to make sure that they are effectively permitted.”
Hervic said the Waterkeepers “applauds the proactive approach” taken by Perdue Farms with their Agricycle plant, but all the integrators need to shoulder more of the burden of managing poultry litter.
She said while MDE has made “significant strides” in trying to permit large poultry operations, but more regulations are needed. Growers’ nutrient management plans need to become accessible to the public, all poultry litter must be housed in storage sheds and more regulatory control is necessary once the litter leaves the producer’s farm, Hervic said.
Hervic also the Waterkeepers Alliance is “relying on community involvement, neighbors of CAFOs who are witnessing improper practices with ground and air surveillance all with the goal of establishing compliance and integrator liability.”
Responding to Hervic’s presentation, Satterfield said, “It was interesting and informative to hear what tactics the Waterkeeper Alliance has adopted to harm Delmarva’s chicken industry.”