Joining together to clean up the Bay

Growing up in Virginia, I gained an early appreciation of the region's farming history. The rich soils through the Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley (where my family lived) have nurtured crops and livestock for hundreds of years, and it's not uncommon for one family to plant the same fields for six or seven generations or more.

That's why I pay attention when local farmers describe the drastic decline they have witnessed in farming and in the water resources that support farming.  These men and women know the region better than most, and they have a front-row seat on the collapse of the streams that feed the Bay.

One farmer, David Blake of Buckland Farm in Warrenton, VA, comes from fifteen generations of farmers in Virginia and Maryland. In his mid-forties, Blake described the change he has seen in his lifetime:

"I have watched vast areas I knew well transformed by suburban development and tributaries we hunted/fished have died as poultry-agribusinesses changed farming practices. These changes brought with them devastation to the small farmer, the once-thriving seafood industry, watermen, and the small towns we all supported have nearly disappeared."

Blake wrote those words in a letter to Congress in support of the Chesapeake Bay Clean Water and Restoration Act of 2009. The bill is designed to clean up the soaring levels of pollution that are choking the bay and endangering the livelihoods of fishermen, owners of beach tourism businesses, and small farmers like David Black.

The guiding principle behind the bill is that every pollution source must do its fair share to help clean it up. This includes suburban communities and industries, but it also includes farmers.

Dirty runoff from farms is responsible for about half of the pollution in the Bay.

I have experienced some of that pollution first hand. Many times over the years, I have gone tubing or canoeing down the Shenandoah River and its tributaries only to find myself literally floating in cow pies.  It was disgusting, but not just a nuisance to local citizens and an impediment to the tourism industry, but also a key contributor to the dead zones that leave major sections of the Chesapeake Bay lifeless in the summer. 

It doesn't have to be this way. There are many proven and affordable ways to keep manure out of streams that can be integrated into current farming practices--solutions that will sustain farms and clean the Bay at the same time.

That's why Blake wrote in his letter, "Every farmer I know is very much in support of this bill and would ask that you all please do the same. We must not let another generation, as has my own, watch the environmental health of this remarkable asset continue to decline. I hope and pray that future generations will say that it was you who finally stood up to do what is right."

Unfortunately, agribusiness lobbyists don't appear to be consulting the farmers that Blake knows and who are eager to do the right thing. Some of them believe that farmers should have the right to choose not to clean up their part of the mess. 

They want to continue on the current path of little or no pollution control, even though that path leads directly into a trashed Bay that will soon be unable to support the seafood or tourism industries.

The lobbyists may be looking out only for themselves and their richest clients, not the farmers in the region--as Blake illustrates. Many farmers in the region support the Chesapeake Bay bill. They want to see the bay cleaned up for future generations, and they are willing to do their part. Now it's time for them to follow Blake's lead and let their views be known to their elected officials.