04/22/24 - 117 New Stories - REAL Environmental & Conservation Leadership In PA: http://tinyurl.com/9bh4zbtr
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Chesapeake Bay Program Working To Improve BMP Reporting
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By Karl Blankenship, Chesapeake Bay Journal
The Bay Program is struggling to resolve a question that has festered for more than two decades: Just how accurate is its information about the tens of thousands of nutrient reduction efforts claimed to be taking place throughout the 64,000-square-mile watershed?
A growing chorus in the agricultural community strongly contends that farmers are not getting credit for all of the conservation strides they've made. Several recent reports seem to back up that claim.
At the same time, even as some of the best management practices, or BMPs, go uncounted, others contend that the benefits of many nutrient control efforts are overestimated. In some cases, practices are poorly installed or managed. In other cases, buffers and stream bank fences that vanished years ago sometimes, along with the farms they were on - remain on the books, delivering phantom nutrient reductions to the Bay.
The problem of accurately knowing what practices are in place and how well they are working has been raised in reports going back at least a decade. But this spring, the National Research Council hammered home the issue in a tersely worded report. "The overall accounting of BMPs in the Bay watershed cannot be viewed as accurate," it said.
The urgency of addressing the problem has never been greater. Under the EPA's new Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load, or pollution diet, states have to write detailed plans - known as watershed implementation plans, or WIPs - showing how they will meet their assigned nutrient reduction goals.
In addition, they have to establish two-year milestones that detail what actions they will take, and the amount of nutrient reductions those actions will achieve, in the coming 24 months. The milestones for 2012-13 are due at the end of 2011. If states fall short of goals, they can face sanctions from the EPA.
Apart from wastewater treatment plants, where nutrient discharges can be directly monitored, measuring progress toward meeting milestones and overall cleanup goals relies on reports about BMP implementation that states file with the EPA.
Ensuring the validity of that information, the National Research Council report said, is of "paramount importance" because that information is used to estimate the status of cleanup efforts.
Here's how the system works. Each year, states report to the EPA the number of practices that were reported to them from county conservation districts, other agencies and sometimes even conservation groups. That information is fed into a computer model that estimates the amount of nutrient reduction progress that should result from those actions.
The National Research Council review team said they could not conclude the magnitude of reporting errors, or the overall direction - whether cleanup efforts were being overestimated or underestimated.
In November, the state-federal Bay Program partnership is scheduled to complete a response to that report, the draft of which pledges ongoing efforts to resolve the problems, but offers little in the way of specifics.
Officials interviewed are adamant about fixing the problem. The EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have signed an agreement committing them to developing a mechanism to improve the reporting, tracking and verification of BMPs by next July.
It's not just an agricultural issue. The new policy will cover other sectors, such as urban lands, where BMPs have not always been tracked. But many urban areas are covered by permits. And the vast majority of BMP implementation has taken place on agricultural lands, so that is where most of the focus is aimed.
But the issue of verifying what is actually on the ground is difficult, and expensive. Eventually, it may mean that trained technicians will need to visit a large percentage of the 84,000 farms in the watershed.
"Farmer-funded" Practices
It's commonly accepted in the agricultural community that farmers are not getting credit for all of the conservation efforts they make.
What's reported to the EPA are primarily BMPs funded through various state or federal cost-share programs that help farmers build manure storage facilities, install buffers, plant cover crops or implement a host of other conservation measures that have been approved by the Bay Program for use in its models.
But many farmers take actions without collecting a cent from the government. A study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service earlier this year indicated that the number of farmers using no-till practices that reduce erosion was far greater than previously reported.
Pilot studies by conservation districts in Pennsylvania's Lancaster and Bradford counties reached similar conclusions.
"We know we have a tremendous amount of BMPs that have never been accounted for," said Don McNutt, district administrator for the Lancaster County Conservation District. "The culture and the background here of the Plain Sect, and even the English here, is they would rather do it themselves."
A recent study in Maryland's Upper Chester River watershed estimated that a third of the 650 conservation practices on 125 farms in the area were implemented without assistance.
Officials in other counties and states have similar stories of farmers installing stream bank fences, switching to no-till management and even building manure storage lagoons without seeking assistance. As a result, local conservation districts often have no knowledge of those actions, and they go unreported to the EPA and uncounted toward nutrient reduction goals.
States have stepped up efforts to get better data; the Virginia General Assembly in 2010 required that the state start collecting such information. Elsewhere, grants have helped several pilot projects around the Bay watershed to better ground-truth BMPs. And the National Association of Conservation Districts is working with the states to develop a common procedure for documenting so-called "farmer-funded" or "voluntary" best management practices.
The most aggressive program may be in Maryland's Howard County, where more than a dozen technicians are being trained with an eye toward visiting each of the county's 335 farms.
They want to inventory everything that is happening on the farms. How many have fenced animals out of streams? How many have buffers, and how wide are they? They even want to know about the practices farmers employ that don't measure up to federal or state standards. For instance, do they have stream buffers that are less than the 35 feet required?
The $80,000 effort is overseen by Bob Ensor, district manager of the Howard Soil Conservation District and Dana York, a 30-year veteran of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, who is now a consultant.
They envision training the technicians to meet with farmers individually and record what they see. A separate verifier will follow up to double-check the data. "There is no question, once it gets entered into our system as a verified practice, it is for real," Ensor said. "Anybody can go out there and find it."
They describe their effort as the "platinum" survey method, but their hope is that it will lead the way to less costly programs elsewhere.
The remainder of the article is available online. It includes sections on: functional equivalent practices, phantom practice, poorly functioning BMPs, Acts of God and verification.
(Written By: Karl Blankenship and Reprinted from the November issue of the Chesapeake Bay Journal.)
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11/14/2011 |
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