Today PennFuture released a report finding that the amount of liquid manure applied to farms in Pennsylvania’s Octoraro watershed has increased by 40 percent over the past five years to 108 million gallons annually. The amount of nitrogen produced by livestock in the watershed is equal to the amount generated by approximately 370,000 people each year.
Unlike Las Vegas, what happens in the Octoraro watershed doesn’t stay in the watershed. The watershed, which includes parts of Lancaster and Chester counties, drains into the Susquehanna River, the Chesapeake Bay’s largest tributary. According to the report, 99 percent of all liquid manure produced in the Octoraro watershed is applied on fields within the watershed.
Everyone who follows Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts knows that the federal and state partners in the Bay Program make promises they don’t intend to keep because, ultimately, the states will not hold their citizens accountable for the pollution they create. When it comes to dealing with agriculture, the states have only had the stomach for voluntary approaches. And when the states do regulate, their inspection and enforcement programs are anemic at best. PennFuture’s report provides even more evidence for this dynamic.
For example, according to the report, 43 percent of livestock operations in the Octoraro watershed were not in compliance with their state nutrient management plans, yet the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is nowhere in sight. As Bill Andreen discussed recently, a huge problem with protecting water quality in this country is that the Clean Water Act does not directly regulate runoff from farms and other “nonpoint sources.” It's time for Congress to require states to establish credible enforcement programs for nonpoint sources and give EPA the authority and resources to reinforce these enforcement efforts.
In the same vein, of the 23 of the 54 livestock operations in the watershed large enough to be regulated as CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), the DEP has inspected only 13 of them in the past five years. These 23 CAFOs generate more than 60% of the total manure and more than 70 percent of the nitrogen in the Octoraro watershed. Given the impact these CAFOs have on the Chesapeake Bay’s health, both the state – and EPA – should be doing more than inspecting about half of them every five years.
Promises to protect the Bay have been piling up for years. So, apparently, has the poop. It’s not a happy trend.
See also our previous: EPA's Chesapeake Bay Reports: A First Look, The Chesapeake Bay and Beyond: Pollution Targets Met, Not Just Set, and Saving the Chesapeake Bay: Time to Hold the States Accountable.
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Shana Campbell Jones | September 29, 2009
Today PennFuture released a report finding that the amount of liquid manure applied to farms in Pennsylvania’s Octoraro watershed has increased by 40 percent over the past five years to 108 million gallons annually. The amount of nitrogen produced by livestock in the watershed is equal to the amount generated by approximately 370,000 people each […]
Ben Somberg | September 29, 2009
Much of the battle to preserve and protect water resources happens at the state and local levels – in any number of policy choices advocated and made by individuals, organizations, companies, and governments. In recent years, water activists have begun to deploy a new tool geared to shape these decisions. Long-established in legal jurisprudence, the […]
Ben Somberg | September 28, 2009
This just in: trying to stop climate change will cost the world about $50 trillion a year, but the impacts of climate change will only cost about $1 trillion a year, so the choice is clear! That’s the thesis of Bjorn Lomborg’s op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post. Presumably the flooding of much of Bangladesh doesn’t […]
James Goodwin | September 25, 2009
Issues of national security have always enjoyed a free pass when it comes to the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as the primary form of making decisions. For example, no military official or politician interested in keeping his job would ever dare publicly question whether the additional money spent on extra armor for tanks to […]
Ben Somberg | September 25, 2009
The Chemical Safety Board released its report Thursday on the 2008 explosion at the Imperial Sugar plant in Georgia, finding that the incident was “entirely preventable” (Reuters article, full report). Ken Ward Jr. gave helpful context for the announcement and followed up afterward with the criticism from unions for the Chemical Safety Board’s “decision to […]
Christine Klein | September 24, 2009
The interstate water wars have gone underground. For more than a century, the U.S. Supreme Court has been the arbiter of last resort to settle fights between states over the right to use surface streams that cross state lines. But now, the high Court may be asked to settle a long-standing feud between Mississippi and […]
Alice Kaswan | September 23, 2009
The Second Circuit’s ruling Monday in State of Connecticut, et al. v. American Electric Power Company Inc., et al. revived a public nuisance lawsuit against the nation’s five largest electric power companies. The case opens the door to a potential judicial remedy for the alleged harm and increases the pressure on Congress and the Executive […]
Holly Doremus | September 23, 2009
Cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet. Federal Judge Donald Molloy in Montana has ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to restore grizzly bears in the Yellowstone area to the list of endangered and threatened species. Judge Molloy refused to allow FWS to delist the grizzly on the basis of unsupported wishful thinking about the bear’s […]
Amy Sinden | September 22, 2009
Imagine if the end of the world were coming and everyone was just too polite to talk about it. That’s been the eerie feeling I’ve gotten over the past eight months listening to the President talk about energy policy. Not wanting to be a downer, he couches his energy talk in positive spin: We’re going […]