The current drought could put a major stress on farmers but also limit the amount of nutrients flowing into the Chesapeake Bay. In our weekly series with the Bay Journal Delmarva Public Media's Don Rush talks with reporter Jeremy Cox on what may lie ahead. The full interview can be heard on this Friday's Delmarva Today at noon on WSDL and WESM.
RUSH: The current drought could have an upside and a downside for the Chesapeake Bay region. This is Don Rush. Dry climate has put a strain on water supplies, farming, and many recreational activities, but it could also mean less nutrients flowing into the bay and a smaller dead zone. In our weekly series with Bay Journal, we talk with reporter Jeremy Cox about what the future may hold... and we begin with the impact on agriculture.
COX: Usually the saying is you either get irrigation or you get crop insurance, right? So if you do get a drought and your yields go down, you either turn on the sprinklers or you can turn to your insurer. That's where they stand right now. You see the corn getting planted right about now. Soybeans will be planted about a month or so, and I'm sure they're very happy to see the rain coming right now, and so could be a non-issue. But if we fall back into those drought like conditions, you'll see the farmers with much reduced yields, which means much less money in the pocket. But that's part of farming unfortunately.
RUSH: So the other issue of course, on the environmental side are dead zones.
COX: Unfortunately, land, the way that we manage it, is a pollutant to the bay. We like to put fertilizer onto our lawns. We like to fertilize our crops, and so when it rains, that gets washed off into nearby ditches and streams that eventually make their way to larger ones that go into the bay. So it's sort of like keeping money in the bank when you don't have rainfall, that money is the nutrients staying where they should be. So at least in the near term, a drought can be a good thing when it comes to keeping the nutrients out of the bay, keeping the algae blooms from blooming, and therefore those dead zones from forming and dead zones of course, are not so great because they are areas of nearly oxygen-free water where nothing can live.
RUSH: In terms of dead zones, do we expect this to be one of the lowest or smallest at this point, or do they know?
COX: Scientists track this every year. They try to anticipate what's going to happen, and this year's report says largely because of these drought conditions, we can expect the dead zone to be among the smallest on record going back to the mid 1980s when they started tracking these sorts of things... bottom 10%. And so before everyone may be patted themselves on the back, remember, this is mostly due to things outside of our control about weather and that sort of thing. Probably buried in the data there is practices that have been installed, such as keeping livestock out of creeks and stream restorations and that sort of thing, but it's mostly because of mother nature.
RUSH: So looking forward in terms of the weather, obviously we're experiencing a bit of a drought, but all of that ultimately could change.
COX: Yeah, I'm glad you asked because that allows me to go back to my little metaphor there about the bank. So we've been storing away our nutrients and our nutrient bank, but then... as we've seen this week, the rain will come eventually. And so that's basically like taking your money out of the bank, withdrawing it. And so now you're seeing these nutrients flushed out of the system into the streams, into the creeks and the rivers and making their way to the bay. And the question is now: how much? So this prediction about bottom 10% size of the dead zone could turn out to be quite wrong if it turns into a rainy summer.
RUSH: Bay Journal reporter Jeremy Cox on the impact of the drought conditions in the Chesapeake Bay region. 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.
