It's About Time

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is finally doing some enforcement work to reduce pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. The EPA has told poultry farmers on Maryland's Eastern Shore that they must now apply for a permit if any of their manure is running off into local waterways.

The federal requirements are even stiffer than what Maryland state officials have proposed. Poultry growers will be required to submit comprehensive reports on how they handle and store the manure produced by their flocks, and list how much they're using as fertilizer on crops and what precautions they're taking to keep it from getting into nearby streams.

The federal regulations also could require many to change their farming practices. The rules sharply restrict the amount of time they can stockpile manure in their fields before working it into the soil and require them to leave much larger swaths of land uncultivated along drainage ditches and waterways.

Agriculture is the largest source of the nutrients degrading the bay's water quality, with runoff of manure and chemical fertilizers responsible for 42 percent of the nitrogen and 46 percent of the phosphorus. Nitrogen and phosphorus runoff each summer results in huge "dead zones" in the bay where fish and other wildlife are unable to survive because of algae blooms that deplete the water's oxygen.

Go here for a full report in the Baltimore Sun.

Ethanol: Obama's Deal with the Devil

Don't look now but the Obama adminstration is making good on our worst fears, ramping up the pressure for NOT less but MORE ethanol.

Obama's agriculture Sec. Tom Vilsack this week announced that he is all in favor a proposal from Midwestern aggies to raise the amount of ethanol that can be blended into a gallon of gasoline from 10 perent to "15 percent or more."

Vilsack, of course, is the former governor of Iowa where they grow a lot of corn. Barack Obama is the former senator from Illinois, the nation's fifth most important corn growing state. Turning corn into ethanol has become quite the cash cow for states like Iowa (which propelled Barack to the Democratic presidential nomination, after all) and Illinois.

It seems like only yesterday we were writing about how the diversion of corn into ethanol had led to a spike in food prices worldwide, causing hunger and even food riots in desperate developing countries as well as a tortilla crisis in Mexico. And we now know how the ethanol process pollutes air and water, to say nothing of the environmental damage caused by all the artificial fertilizers and persticides used to pave so much of the country in corn. Farmers were even taking land out of conservation in the rush to plant more corn.

In our current down economy, however, people are driving their cars less, which means less demand for ethanol. The ethanol industry has fallen on hard times, it seems, and was even begging for its own bailout as part of Obama's stimulus package. Apparently the next best thing is to petition the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to increase the limit on how much ethanol can be blended into gasoline. The EPA has the authority to do that, but it might just be blocked from doing so by a recent Supreme Court ruling that carbon must be regulated as a pollutant.

Until industry finds something more people- and environment-friendly than corn to use as fuel, we hope corn ethanol is seen for what it is: another way to make money for a misguided agriculture system. This is just one more reason for us to not like the idea of a White House kitchen garden. We can't let Obama make nookie with locavores behind the White House while his actual policies are wreaking havoc on the rest of the country. No, Obama should be judged like every other president: on substance, not symoblic gestures.

Why We Stopped Eating Crabs

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation recently published a report that for the first time links the decline of Blue Crabs in Maryland and Virginia waters to poor water quality.

The state of the blue crab has been declared a disaster, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation has filed suit in federal court against the U.S. Environmental Protection agency after decades of empty promises from state and federal officials who claim to support cleaning up the Bay even while it collapses.

Among the report's findings:

* Pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorous create large "dead zones" in the bay that annually wipe out 75,000 tons of clams and worms at the bottom of the Bay where crabs would otherwise feed. That's enough food to support 60 million blue crabs, or about half the Bay's commercial crab harvest.

* Sediment from runoff and algal blooms from pollutants kill the underwater grasses that baby crabs need to hide from predators. More than half the Bay's eelgrass has died since the 1970s.

* Because the Bay supports fewer crabs, overfishing has become an even greater problem. Watermen have caught an average 62 percent of the total blue crab population in the Bay every year for the last decade, far more than the 46 percent that scientists say is sustainable.

"In 2007, watermen suffered the worst crab harvest since Bay-wide record keeping began in 1945," the report states. "2008 was even worse in Virginia, and only slightly better in Maryland. Maryland and Virginia have endured more than $640 million in losses over the last decade because of the crab's decline. The states are taking immediate steps to prevent a potential collapse of the fishery. On October 23, 2008, Maryland banned the commercial harvest of female crabs until spring, and Virginia imposed the same prohibitions on October 27."

Now there's something to think about next time you reach for that bag of Scott's Turf Builder (40 percent nitrogen) to beef up your lawn. Better idea: turn your lawn into a vegetable garden and feed it with compost.