RUSH: The goals for cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay will not be met. So, we'll look for another set in 2040. This is Don Rush. Millions of dollars have been spent on such projects as best management practices, but nutrient runoff continues to flow from the region's agricultural sector. For instance, there has been an increase the number of animals being raised while the amount of fertilizer applications was up by 20% over the last 15 years. In a weekly series with the Bay Journal, we talk with editor at large, Karl Blankenship, who has been looking at the issue.
BLANKENSHIP: They face substantial hurdles because the area where they've had the great problem making nutrient reductions is from agriculture. And they're expecting about 90% of all their future nitrogen reductions to come from agriculture. And that would require a significant acceleration of progress because it would require, watershed-wide, doing five to six times as much in the next 15 years as they did in the last 15 years. And the biggest hurdle is in Pennsylvania, but the other states all have substantial challenges to meet and maintain those goals.
RUSH: Because my understanding is that you're actually meeting for headwinds because you are looking at continuous increase in farming, whether it's from the nitrogen, from the runoff, animal farms. It does seem as if we're looking on a general trend going in the opposite direction in terms of development.
BLANKENSHIP: That is really one of the biggest challenges. It's not like people have been standing in place or not doing things because everybody's been doing things to try to reduce runoff. Farmers are doing cover crops, they're doing no-till, they're planting buffers, they're doing many things. But the fact of the matter is that there are just substantial headwinds just from the continuous intensification of agriculture. There's more animals being grown in the watershed. We're producing more food on each acre of farmland. And all those activities are fairly nutrient intensive. And so you're really facing major headwinds, and that's really one of the take home points, in science they call this a wicked problem, where the solutions are difficult. They involve a lot of difficult societal tradeoffs. And when you look at farming, there's a lot of things that we want from our agricultural system. We want farms to feed everyone. We want them to be profitable, but we want to keep the food prices low and we want to reduce pollution. And those are goals that don't easily mesh well together.
RUSH: Karl Blankenship, editor at large for the Bay Journal and the difficulty of meeting the bay cleanup goals. The full interview can be heard on this Friday's Delmarva Today at noon on WSDL and WESM. This is Don Rush for Delmarva Public Media.
