Hot News

2.05.2008

By STEPHANIE JORDAN
Associate Editor

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The farm community got its opportunity to weigh in on Senate Bill 213 last week, a bill that will alter the Chesapeake Bay 2010 Trust Fund and help redistribute some of the funds to farmers.
Farmers were left out of a meeting two weeks ago before the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee, in which the environmental community talked about its requests for the fund. Sen. Richard Colburn, R-Dist. 37, called it an “oversight” to leave the farm community out of the discussion.
Val Connelly, director of government relations for the Maryland Farm Bureau, discussed the organization’s issues with the bill.
“Generally, farmers are concerned about where things are headed,” she said.
Farm Bureau wants the bill to allow some funds to go to the Maryland Agricultural Cost Share Program so that farmers will have more money to install cover crops, which everyone agrees is the most cost effective way to clean up the Bay.
The bill also wouldn’t allow the money in the Trust Fund to be used for something that is required by law; for example, if new poultry regulations are implemented, Comprehensive Nutrient Management Plans (CNMPs) would be required, and therefore growers would be unable to receive cost-share funding to help pay for the plans.
“It will be detrimental to everyone if (farmers) can’t get cost-share money,” Connelly said. And the cost of CNMPs is very expensive, she added, and along with limited numbers of personnel certified to write the plans, there is concern that “the infrastructure isn’t there.”
Farm Bureau also calls for an agricultural representative on the BayStat program subcommittee. The subcommittee will be in charge of distributing the $50 million in the annual Trust Fund.
Connelly said the organization also wants assurance that there will be base-level funding for the bill.
Nick Manis of Manis, Canning and Associates spoke for the Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc. (DPI) last week.
Manis said that DPI would like for the bill to be expanded to allocate funds to buy trees for the organization’s Vegetative Environmental Buffers Program.
Since last November, there are 50 buffer plans in the works, and DPI is still receiving calls from interested growers.
Manis said DPI also wants some funds to directed to the University of Maryland and the University of Delaware, both of which are currently doing research on poultry manure, trying to determine how much manure is in the watershed and if there is enough for some proposed alternative uses.
Lynne Hoot, executive director of the Maryland Grain Producers Association (MGPA), updated the committee on what grain farmers have done, are doing and will do. She talked about the grants from the MGPA, which are made possible by the organization’s grain checkoff program (grain farmers give one-half of 1 percent of the net value of grain sold to the program).
Many of those grants given recently deal with cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.
Hoot also talked about the last year’s increase in corn acres (due to high commodity prices); there were about 80,000 additional acres of corn in the watershed last year.
She said there will be a decrease in corn acreage this year because soybean and wheat prices are up, and so are inputs for corn crops.
She assured the committee that the one thing farmers aren’t doing is over-applying fertilizer; when costs jump from $200 per ton to $500 per ton, no one is going to just put on unnecessary nutrients.
And farmers also will be heading back to soybeans since it is a more drought-tolerant crop than corn, and much of the agricultural community in the Mid-Atlantic region had low yields due to dry weather last year.
And coming online soon, she added, there will be more varieties of crops that will be more drought tolerant, require fewer pesticides and need less fertilizer, making the plants more efficient and better for the environment.
“There’s nothing like a profitable farmer to help the Chesapeake Bay,” Hoot said. But farmers “can’t clean up the Bay alone. Everyone has to do their part.”
And that’s really the bottom line, Connelly said.
“The farm community is willing to help clean up the Chesapeake Bay,” she said. “If it’s hard to make money on it, it’s difficult to invest in it.”
The next hearing on Senate Bill 213 will be held Feb. 6 in the Miller Senate Building in the Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee room on the second floor at 1 p.m.