Pennsylvania Agriculture Consultant Endorses Bill to Clean Up Chesapeake Bay

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts:
Sean Crowley, 202-572-3331, [email protected]
Suzy Friedman, (202) 492-1023, [email protected]

(Washington, DC – November 9, 2009) A bill to reauthorize cleaning up the heavily polluted Chesapeake Bay will offer farmers new economic opportunities for the water quality improvements they implement, according to hearing testimony this afternoon by a Pennsylvania agriculture consultant before the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee.

Communities in Pennsylvania, five other states and Washington, DC around the 64,000-square-mile Chesapeake Bay watershed must meet federally established requirements for reducing pollution to restore the Chesapeake Bay - which has depleted blue crab populations and is plagued by dead zones - by 2025.

“The largest contributor of nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment to the Chesapeake Bay is from agricultural activities,” testified Peter Hughes, president of Red Barn Consulting in Lancaster, which has 650 farm clients within Pennsylvania’s Chesapeake Bay Watershed. “Agriculture does need the technical and educational tools provided under the reauthorization of the Chesapeake Bay Initiative.”

The reauthorization bill, - the Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act of 2009 - includes a provision for water quality trading, which achieves the same water quality improvement as standard regulations would achieve, but at a lower overall cost. Farmers who take steps to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from their fields beyond the pollution reductions required by federal law can sell credits to facilities with higher pollution control costs, such as developments and municipal sewage plants, to help the latter meet their pollution reduction requirements.

Three years ago, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental protection started a nutrient credit trading policy to foster the relationship between point (direct) sources of pollution, such as wastewater plants, and non point (indirect) sources of pollution, such as farms. Red Barn Consulting formed a sister company, Red Barn Trading, to serve as an aggregator and certifier of nutrient credits, or quite simply to aid in the reduction of pounds nitrogen and phosphorous through various farm best management practices.

“Pennsylvania has become a national model for a nutrient cap and trade free market system that the agricultural community has embraced,” added Hughes. “Due to low commodity prices, especially milk prices, farmers are more than ever seeking ecosystem services to bring new revenue streams onto the farm through the acres they own.”

“Absent this legislation, inevitably farmers and local communities will face expanded regulations without federal funding or technical support to meet new regulatory requirements,” said Suzy Friedman, Chesapeake Bay Regional Director for Environmental Defense Fund. “Given how tight state budgets are, it’s unlikely that state funds will be available to help get the job done either.”

In addition to the water quality trading provision, the Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act:

• Creates two new grants programs for local governments to reduce storm water pollution (authorizes a total of more than $1.5 billion).
• Expands and enhances Implementation Grants (authorizes $80 million per year) and Monitoring Grants (authorizes $5 million per year) for Chesapeake Bay state farmers and forest landowners.
• Expands Small Watershed Grants and renames them “Chesapeake Bay Stewardship Grants” (authorizes $15 million annually).

“The bill will help ensure we gather the information needed to track and account for both progress and gaps in implementation,” concluded Friedman. “In addition to water quality data the states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will continue to collect, the bill will help ensure all farmer efforts to improve water quality are counted by encouraging farmers to share their data -voluntarily and in confidence - with government agencies.”
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