Pennsylvania Project Aims to Improve Chesapeake Bay Watershed Quality

Posted: 16-Nov-2004; Updated: 11-Jan-2007

The Chesapeake Bay Watershed extends from New York south into Virginia, encompassing portions of five states. (Adapted from Chesapeake Bay Foundation graphic)

Agriculture offers one of the best opportunities to address many pressing natural resource concerns, especially water quality, in major watersheds such as the Chesapeake Bay. And, though the standard farm-by-farm approach has benefited many watersheds around the country, it's increasingly clear that more coordinated partnerships and improved tools and technologies are also needed to meet the critical challenge of excess agricultural nutrients. That's the approach of Lancaster Farms, a new project in the Susquehanna River basin of Pennsylvania. That area is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, where declining water quality has severely impacted the nation's largest and most biologically productive estuary, as well as its fish and shellfish industries.

With local farmer leadership and essential partners, the Center for Conservation Incentives at Environmental Defense launched Lancaster Farms this spring. The project is using innovative tools and cooperative efforts to improve nutrient use efficiency and correct the nutrient imbalance in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Partners include the county's Conservation District, the local Cooperative Extension, Lancaster Farmland Trust, the Lancaster County Agricultural Preserve Board, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, local farmers and a University of Connecticut soil fertility expert. The goal is to achieve 30% or greater improvement in agricultural nitrogen use efficiency countywide without increasing soil phosphorous levels or lowering farm incomes.

Well known both for its Amish community and robust agricultural economy, Lancaster is the most productive non-irrigated county in the nation with a strong animal agriculture sector. However, this productivity has created serious challenges. Significantly more agricultural nutrients enter the county in fertilizer and feed than leave in food and fiber. Lancaster produces more manure nutrients than the entire county's farmland can use, and the excess nutrients contribute to water quality problems that eventually reach the Chesapeake Bay. If the county and state are to meet water quality goals mandated by the Chesapeake Bay Agreement Tributary Strategies, it's essential to move toward a nutrient balance.

In pilot projects with farmers this year, the partnership launched two key Lancaster Farms components: spring and fall nitrate tests to improve nutrient use efficiency and farmer-led discussion groups to further the successful use of these and other nutrient use efficiency tools and conservation practices. Both the tests and discussion groups focus on one of farming's biggest challenges: Many factors affect how crops use nitrogen, creating considerable risk and uncertainty for farmers trying to decide how much nitrogen fertilizer to apply to plants. Understandably, most farmers deal with this inherent variability by applying a sizeable nitrogen buffer above what the crop may need. Usually this buffer is not needed and does not increase yields. More likely it's lost to the environment, which in Lancaster County means sending more excess nitrogen into the Chesapeake Bay.

So what is the alternative? New precision agriculture technology such as the fall cornstalk nitrate test, pre-sidedress nitrate test (PSNT), variable rate application technologies and tools can help farmers better assess the specific nitrogen needs of their crops and thus reduce buffer applications of nutrients. The benefits? Reduced fertilizer costs, significantly improved nutrient use efficiency and less nitrogen in the Chesapeake Bay.

In 2004, the Lancaster Farms project introduced the PSNT and cornstalk nitrate tests to more than 30 farmers in the county, on both non-Amish and Amish farms. This pilot project collected about 400 PSNT soil samples and conducted 400 cornstalk nitrate tests. Funded through a cooperative agreement between the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Pennsylvania and the Center for Conservation Incentives, the project offered the tests to farmers free of charge and with full confidentiality. The two organizations then brought the farmers together to discuss the tests, the results and the implications for farm management.

Farmers gave the project high marks. "I think this project has tremendous potential," said Matt Young of Red Knob Farm in Peach Bottom, Pennsylvania. "It will help us properly apply nutrients to the right place so we get the full yield potential [from crops] without excess levels causing a negative environmental impact."

Lancaster Farms hopes to expand to as many as 300 farmers in 2005. Project partners plan to launch an innovative incentives program for nutrient use efficiency and are discussing both a manure brokering program to improve nutrient distribution within the county and a countywide strategy to treat and export excess manure nutrients for appropriate and beneficial use outside the county. An overarching long-term goal of Lancaster Farms is to serve as a model not only for improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, but also to demonstrate that a broad partnership approach and innovative technical tools can benefit both natural resources and farm income in nutrient-impaired watersheds nationwide.

-Suzy Friedman
Scientist and Agricultural Policy Analyst
Center for Conservation Incentives
Environmental Defense