By Karl Blankenship, Chesapeake Bay Journal

In a Pennsylvania county with 5,100 farms, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency visited four this spring to assess any potential for water quality problems locally or for the Chesapeake Bay.

That may seem like a drop in the bucket. Nonetheless, work in Lancaster County constitutes something of a sea change in the agency’s approach to addressing farm runoff.

While pledging to ramp up such oversight, the EPA is also working closely with the county conservation district, Farm Bureau and others to encourage farmers to adopt runoff control measures on their land.

“We think it’s a good concept, but we want to really kick the tires and figure out what works,” said Adam Ortiz, administrator of the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic region, which covers most of the Bay watershed. He described the first farm assessments as “sort of a first testing phase.”

More are likely. Last year, Ortiz said the agency would increase water-related compliance and inspection efforts in Pennsylvania because the state is far behind in its Bay cleanup efforts.

And the EPA recently committed to making such farm assessments under the terms of a settlement agreement for a suit brought against it by environmental groups and other states that want the agency to pressure Pennsylvania to do more for the Bay cleanup.

Most states in the Chesapeake region will miss their 2025 goals for reducing nutrient pollution, which is the main cause of the Bay’s water quality woes.

The majority of it comes from excess manure and fertilizer on farmland. Pennsylvania is furthest behind, primarily because it has more farms in the Bay watershed than any other state — more than 38,000.

It’s unlikely any state will meet its agricultural nutrient reduction goal anytime soon, which has proven far more difficult than once thought. Many believe it could take decades.

Those sentiments were echoed in a recent report from the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee to the state-federal Chesapeake Bay Program. The report also cautioned that existing programs were insufficient to reach the goals.

But Ortiz said he hoped the new multipronged Pennsylvania Conservation Assessment Initiative, which combines increased federal oversight, greater out-reach and record amounts of funding to help farmers put conservation practices on the ground, will help change the trajectory.

“Really, the key we have to unlock is widespread adoption of conservation practices on small– and medium-size farms,” Ortiz said. “I think that this conservation assessment is a step in that direction.”

Tough cleanup goals

Under a 2010 cleanup plan, formally known as the Bay’s total maximum daily load, the EPA assigned all six states in the Chesapeake watershed, along with the District of Columbia, specific goals for reducing nitrogen and phosphorus, the two nutrients largely responsible for the Bay’s poor water quality.

The hope was to have all necessary actions in place by 2025 to meet those goals.

Under the TMDL, Pennsylvania needed to reduce the amount of nitrogen it annually sends to the Bay from 113.2 million pounds to 73.5 million. That’s a decrease of 39.7 million pounds and a greater reduction than any other state.

Through 2021, Pennsylvania had cut 8.7 million pounds, with just 2.1 million pounds credited to farms, according to computer models. About 93% of its remaining reductions needs to come from agriculture.

Most other Bay states have not fared much better in reining in agricultural runoff. In general, most of their nutrient reductions have come from upgrading wastewater treatment plants, and most of that work is complete.

Fewer than 10% of Pennsylvania’s nutrients come from wastewater treatment plants, and those have mostly been upgraded.

Reductions on farms hinge on the use of best management practices or BMPs. Those include things such as planting streamside buffers, adopting no-till farming, planting nutrient-absorbing cover crops, building manure storage facilities, and more than 100 other actions defined by the Bay Program.

Some BMPs, such as no-till, have been widely adopted because they reduce costs to farmers. But many provide little economic benefit, and others can cost money by reducing productivity or taking land out of production.

Government cost-share programs help fund BMPs, but they typically require investments from farmers.

States have struggled to get the level of implementation necessary to meet goals, particularly on small– and medium-size operations that often operate on thin margins.

“Farmers are busy, especially small– and medium-size farms,” Ortiz said. “They don’t always have the capacity to take advantage of these conservation programs.”

The EPA’s new mix of farm assessments and outreach aims to ensure farmers “have the support and guidance to help get practices on the ground that make a difference.”

From leader to lagger

Pennsylvania was an early leader in nutrient control efforts.

In 1993, it enacted the region’s first law requiring its largest farms to have nutrient management plans to guide fertilizer and manure applications.

But that and other farm-related regulations were often unenforced.

“For decades, basically, we just sort of ignored that they were there,” said Matt Ehrhart, former executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Pennsylvania Office and now director of watershed restoration with the Stroud Water Research Center. “So there was sort of a cultural lack of expectation of performance.”

Budget cuts forced the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to slash inspection and enforcement staff. And while half of the state drains into the Chesapeake, most of its population lives elsewhere, with political power based outside of the Bay watershed in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

The Bay was never a priority.

“From a policy standpoint, that was a challenge nobody really had the horsepower to overcome,” Ehrhart said.

Geography further complicates the picture.

Most of Pennsylvania’s portion of the Bay watershed is drained by the Susquehanna River.

It’s the Bay’s largest tributary, and it’s located near the head of the Bay, giving it a much larger impact on the oxygen-starved “dead zone” that plagues the upper Chesapeake each summer.

Pennsylvania, therefore, poses the perfect storm of problems. It contributes the most nutrients, which pound-for-pound have a greater impact on the dead zone than most other areas.

The state doesn’t border the Bay, and political power is concentrated outside its watershed. Its nutrients predominantly come from agriculture, a source that all Bay states struggle to control.

And in Lancaster County, the most intensive agricultural county in the Bay watershed, Plain Sect farmers — Amish and some Mennonites — run half of the operations. They are often reluctant to participate in government farm programs.

While Pennsylvania’s job is hard, its outsized importance to Bay health, coupled with the state’s lack of progress, has fueled frustration among others.

In 2020, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the states of Maryland, Virginia and Delaware, the District of Columbia and others filed suit against the EPA for not taking more aggressive action to force Pennsylvania to do more.

As part of a settlement agreement reached in April, the EPA committed to increased oversight of discharge permits, stormwater runoff and farms.

While the EPA had already pledged to do much of that, the agreement requires it to provide more public accountability about its actions.

“This settlement is about EPA having responsibility to take action to ensure that Pennsylvania … does its part to reduce the pollution flowing into the Bay,” said Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown in a news conference announcing the proposed agreement.       

Changing the narrative

The state’s problems were apparent as far back as 2009 when the EPA made a series of unannounced inspections on mostly Amish farms in Lancaster County’s Watson Run watershed.

Of 24 small farms inspected, 85% did not have the required erosion and sediment plans and manure management plans. The inspections revealed other problems as well.

But the tactics gave the agency a black eye in the farming community and garnered negative press.

The inspections even made the New York Times, which quoted one farmer as saying — with an element of exaggeration — “they came in here with their guns ablazing and really tried to hammer some people hard.”

When the EPA imposed the TMDL the following year, relations with the farm community — which would bear the greatest brunt of the nutrient reduction effort — were further strained.

In its comments on the TMDL, the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau charged the EPA with acting in an “authoritarian manner” and had made little effort to engage farmers. It unsuccessfully sued the EPA.

Now, though, the EPA and Farm Bureau see opportunities to work together.

They successfully partnered to get the state General Assembly to establish an Agriculture Conservation Assistance Program, which provides $154 million over four years to help farmers statewide implement runoff control practices.

The funding, from unspent state COVID relief money, is the first significant funding by the state for agricultural cost-share programs.

The Farm Bureau also helped spread the word about the recent assessments. While the organization has long had concerns about regulations, it has recently stressed the importance of complying with water quality rules and the need to address “ ‘bad actors’ whose lack of attention to environmental quality harms all farmers.”

The EPA is also increasing outreach through a variety of informal networks, including Amish leadership. “It requires a lot of different strategies,” Ortiz said.

With its new approach, Chris Thompson, director of the Lancaster County Conservation District, said the EPA seems to have learned from its missteps.

Now, Thompson said, agency inspectors are still looking for problems but putting more emphasis on helping to solve them.

“It’s not been, ‘we’re going to penalize you for not doing it,’” Thompson said. “It’s ‘let’s work together to get it fixed.’ That’s definitely a different message.”

The four spring inspections were on Plain Sect farms. Instead of showing up without warning, the EPA notified farmers in advance.

Conservation district staff arrived early to explain to the farmer what the inspection is about, Thompson said, and to act as a “translator” between the EPA and the farmer.

EPA officials checked to see if the farmers had state-required conservation plans and were implementing them. They also collected water samples from adjacent streams.

District staff informed the farmers of programs and funding sources that could help resolve problems.

“We’re proving that we can get it done,” Thompson said. “It’s going to just take time.”

Other action possible

Ultimately, if the EPA isn’t convinced that significant progress is likely, it could take further action.

The EPA’s Clean Water Act authority over farms is generally limited to large, concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs. But the agency can bring smaller animal operations under its regulatory oversight if it deems they are leading to water quality impairments.

That’s something some environmental organizations say would prod more progress.

In its comments on the settlement agreement resolving the recent suit against the EPA, the Annapolis-based Chesapeake Legal Alliance said that such actions “could constitute important backstop action of the sort that the EPA should have employed many years ago” and “should most certainly be exercising going forward.”

Ortiz said that authority “is a tool that we have.” But he added that designating a smaller farm as a CAFO is “a complicated and long-term process.”

But, he said, “if we can work with a farmer to voluntarily adopt conservation practices and we can ensure that farm is compliant, that’s a quicker path to the same destination, which is conservation practices on the ground.”

The EPA is expected to complete a report summarizing what it learned from the four assessments later this summer.

Still, no one is under any illusion that Pennsylvania’s goal will be achieved in the foreseeable future.

No plan exists that would fully achieve its goal, and it is unclear whether that could be done without closing large numbers of farms.

The state also has an estimated $325 million annual funding shortfall in what is needed to meet nutrient reduction goals from agriculture and other sources, much more than what’s currently available.

Ortiz, though, said the ramped-up oversight, funding and engagement could help “flip the script” in Pennsylvania and accelerate progress.

But, he added, “this stuff is tough.”

[Visit DEP’s Chesapeake Bay Watershed webpage to learn more about cleaning up rivers and streams in Pennsylvania's portion of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.  Click Here to sign up for regular updates on Pennsylvania’s progress.

[How Clean Is Your Stream?

[Check DEP’s 2022 Water Quality Report to find out how clean streams are near you.]

(Reprinted from the Chesapeake Bay Journal)

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[Posted: July 17, 2023]

7/24/2023