By Matt Reese
Thus far, lawmakers in Ohio are making a concerted effort to prioritize reality, and not political perception, in the regulatory debate about water quality. This has often not been the case, particularly in watersheds in Florida and in the Chesapeake Bay that have received the most federal attention. There has been speculation that the Chesapeake Bay, in particular, could serve as a national standard for regulation across the country, and that Lake Erie is next on the list of federal regulators. Despite the national spotlight, Josh McGrath, associate professor and soil and fertility and nutrient management specialist at the University of Maryland, said the Chesapeake Bay nutrient management strategies are far from ideal because they too often favor the politics over the reality of the situation.
“Maryland is probably the most highly regulated state in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which is probably the most highly regulated watershed for agriculture in the country,” McGrath said. “The Maryland Water Quality Improvement Act was passed in 1998 and the first thing that it did was mandate that farmers could not exceed the fertility recommendations of University of Maryland Extension. That was not something that we supported in Extension. All farmers in Maryland now have to have nutrient management plans that cover N and P. More regulation came into effect this past October. Now we have a federal law that includes things like mandating manure incorporation. All manure has to be incorporated — no more surface application of manure in a no-till system — and we have a lot of no-till in Maryland. There are mandatory buffer strips around surface water, mandatory stream exclusion for livestock and they have outlawed fall applications of nitrogen in wheat unless you have soil nitrate tests below 10 parts per million. There are other regulations as well, but these are the biggest concerns for farmers right now.”
The emphasis on mandates is a real concern for McGrath and others, because, while these mandated practices may be the right fit for some agricultural situations, they may be the wrong fit for others. The net result is that mandates can actually hurt water quality improvement efforts.
“What we have done is turn the clock back in some situations. Agriculture has been progressively moving forward with technology that allows us to be more site specific,” McGrath said. “Some of the regulations, like mandating the incorporation of manure, may be fine on the coastal plain where it is flat, but in western Maryland with steep slopes and highly erodible soil, no–till was dominant. We’ve just turned back the clock to the 1970s by having these incorporation regulations across the board. Blanket regulations are moving us backwards with regard to site specificity.”
There is also quite a bit of emphasis, maybe too much, on the value of cover crops in Maryland.
“For a long time, cover crops have been viewed as the main tool for water quality in Maryland. A lot of this is tied to the way the federal policy is structured. The way the Chesapeake Bay model works, cover crops are the highest credit for nitrogen conservation,” McGrath said. “Cover crops are great, and in Maryland farmers are paid very well for growing cover crops. But, with N, a small grain doesn’t really take up much N until green-up. Nitrate leaching starts in August when corn senesces, which is our highest rainfall month. That nitrate has likely already leached out of the root zone by the time a cover crop starts taking up significant amounts of N. So, while cover crops are a good Band-Aid to recover some of the excess N in the soils, it is not recovering the majority of it.”
With such emphasis being placed on cover crops that, in reality, may not be doing as much good as the government models suggest, there is a significant political risk to agriculture in the future.
“Our lawmakers are investing all of their cost share dollars in cover crops because they have to meet the model load restrictions and not the real load restrictions. That is dangerous for agricultur