A Plan to Curb Farm-to-Watershed Pollution of Chesapeake Bay

Andy Young’s dairy cows produce a lot of milk. They also produce a lot of manure. How much manure ends up in a nearby creek — and ultimately Chesapeake Bay — is the question at the center of an unusual effort to reinvigorate the bay’s declining grasses, crabs, fish and oysters.

The dairy farms here in Lancaster County, among the top milk-producing counties in the nation, send more manure into the waterways that drain into Chesapeake Bay than any other part of the bay’s 64,000-square-mile watershed. Now the state of Pennsylvania is trying to get farmers like Mr. Young to reduce the damaging runoff by letting them apply for pollution credits that can be sold to developers needing to build sewage treatment plants.


The goal of the experiment is to pump new life into the bay, which was once the showpiece of the Eastern Seaboard but has been in biological decline for three decades, in large part because of manure and other agricultural pollutants.

In March, the Chesapeake Bay Program, a federal-state partnership, reported a 25 percent decline from 2005 to 2006 in the underwater grasses that are the anchor of the bay’s ecosystem. Algae thrives on the nitrogen in manure and other waste products and the phosphorus in fertilizer, becoming so abundant that it blocks sunlight and, by consuming oxygen as it decays, threatens to suffocate the grasses and other underwater life.
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