The Chesapeake Bay is in such bad condition that President Obama issued an executive order last year to clean it up.
One of the problems plaguing the bay is excessive fertilizer and manure runoff. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is leading the conservation effort and discovered that Amish farmers from Lancaster Country contribute an alarmingly high level of the runoff.
The Amish lifestyle epitomizes sustainability. The Christian community dresses plainly and reject modern technology, including electricity, preferring to live solely off the land. They use horse and buggies to travel around and often rely on telephone booths for contact, rather than on landlines or cell phones.
But no one is perfect. The Achilles’ heel of the Amish farmers is their manure management.
An article in Tuesday’s edition of the New York Times reported:
“According to E.P.A. data from 2007, the most recent available, the county generates more than 61 million pounds of manure a year. That is 20 million pounds more than the next highest county on the list of bay polluters, and more than six times that of most other counties.”
This runoff reduces oxygen levels in the water. Decreased oxygen kills fish and creates “dead zone” regions.
The Chesapeake bay area is heavily dependent on fisheries. Dead zones are a fisherman's worst nightmare.
The EPA wants to work with Amish farmers to improve their methods for disposing manure. There is a lot of money being thrown at the Chesapeake right now, and some of that could go toward helping build better waste management systems.
Unfortunately for the EPA, the Amish tend to be wary of strangers, and even more suspicious of anything government related. The conservation efforts successfully caught the attention of a few farmers, however, among them dairy farmer Matthew Stolzfus.
Stolzfus applied for a government grant that will partially finance a new barn with a manure pit.
Recruiting a few Amish members is helpful for sure, but not enough to curb the dramatic amount of manure piling into the bay.
To make a broader impact, some money is being diverted to local organizations, like Red Barn Consulting, who are already in the good graces of the Amish. Red Barn Consulting offers instructions for farmers on proper manure management and free walkthroughs to provide suggestions. Over the last six months, the company's clientele shot up from several dozen farmers to around 200.
It is crucial that the Amish farmers change how they deposit manure, not just for the sake of the Chesapeake Bay, but also for their own health. The New York Times article reported on an assessment of 24 Lancaster farms and the results are disturbing:
“Twenty-three of the farms were plain sect; 17 were found to be managing their manure inadequately. The abundance of manure was also affecting water quality. Six of the 19 wells sampled contained E. coli bacteria, and 16 had nitrate levels exceeding those allowed by the E.P.A.”
Cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay needs to be a team effort and everyone, even the Amish, need to seriously reassess how their actions can influence the Bay.
Tags: Conservation, Geology, Green Science
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