Editor’s Note:
This article concludes a series that has tackled tough questions about nutrient pollution from agriculture in the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers.
For this series, editor-at-large Karl Blankenship built on 30 years of experience with this topic by conducting nearly 200 interviews, reviewing dozens of reports and scientific studies and following discussions at conferences, workshops and Chesapeake Bay Program meetings. His research led to candid conversations with past and current Bay experts, who revealed perspectives often not shared in public.
In the end, the goal of the series is to recognize decades of important work but also spur conversations that daylight the difficult issues this reporting has uncovered — and to shape meaningful progress in the years ahead.
After missing their third deadline for controlling nutrient pollution in a quarter century, Chesapeake Bay cleanup leaders in December did what they have become well-practiced at doing.
They set another deadline — their fourth.
The state-federal Bay Program partnership now targets 2040 for achieving huge reductions in the amount of water-fouling nitrogen and phosphorus that reaches the nation’s largest estuary.
The vast majority of those nutrient reductions must come from the region’s farms, and there is little evidence that existing programs can get the job done. It would mean achieving six times more in the next 15 years than in the last 15.
These clean water efforts have long struggled with competing pressures: the need to grow more food at low costs while keeping farms economically viable. Those goals don’t easily mesh.
“So many folks want things to be simple, and that is just not how it is,” said Mark Dubin, who was the agricultural coordinator for the Bay Program for nearly two decades.
Numbers illustrate the problem. When the Bay Program set its previous cleanup goal in 2010, it called for reducing nitrogen runoff from farms across the six-state region by nearly a third by 2025.
During that period, though, farm animals reared in the watershed, measured by weight, increased by 11.5% and the amount of nutrients applied as fertilizer grew by 20%. The human population grew by almost 10%.
That headwind is hard to counteract. The region achieved just 16% of its farm runoff objective, according to Bay Program estimates, even though state and federal agencies ramped up funding to help farmers with fertilizer plans, nutrient-absorbing cover crops and streamside buffers.
Those actions helped hold the line, but studies cast doubt that they can achieve the magnitude of reductions needed to achieve cleanup goals.
“Is it a solvable problem? If I was to bet, I would say no,” said Jim Shortle, a distinguished professor of Agricultural and Environmental Economics at Penn State University.
He’s written about the Bay restoration for decades, including in a 2021 book, Water Quality and Agriculture, which examined the challenges of reducing farm runoff to the Bay and other waterways.
Meeting the goals, Shortle said, would require “radical change.” It would take a restructuring of agriculture, he said, with a shift to larger farms, changes in incentive programs, increased regulation and probably a willingness to shut down some farms altogether. And consumers would likely need to pay more for food, especially meat.
“I think a lot of people believed initially that there were win-win solutions,” Shortle said, but the system is filled with difficult choices and trade-offs.
Growing crops and raising animals requires large amounts of nutrients in fertilizer and generates large amounts of manure. But unlike wastewater treatment plants, which made significant reductions through technological upgrades, there is no single way to control nutrient-laden runoff from tens of thousands of farms.
Many Bay advocates believe win-win policies can boost profitability and reduce pollution — and to some extent they can, but likely not at the scale needed to reach Bay goals.
Studies have long shown that reaching the required level of reductions could slash farm production. In 2001, a Chesapeake Bay Foundation analysis found that meeting cleanup goals would require actions equal to retiring a quarter of the farmland in the Bay watershed and slapping 100-foot stream buffers on all remaining farmland.
A 2021 report by the U.S. Geological Survey said reaching the goals could require taking 44% of farmland out of production.
Pennsylvania’s 2010 Bay cleanup plan called for removing roughly 180,000 acres of farmland from production — more than four times the size of the District of Columbia. The state’s current plan doesn’t retire that acreage, but it also doesn’t meet the goal.
So, are the goals attainable? “Is it technically feasible? I think potentially yes,” said Dubin, who worked extensively with states and the farm community. “But is it reasonably feasible? That’s not as easily said … I think we can make improvements, but it has to be a reasonable expectation. That’s the challenge.”
It is possible, of course, that some type of transformative technology might improve the outcome. It will be needed: A 2023 report from the Bay Program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee said meeting the goal is unlikely with existing programs and technologies.
“There’s only so much that you can do with the system that we’ve got,” said Kurt Stephenson, a Virginia Tech professor of agricultural economics, one of the report’s lead authors. “You have got to recognize that.”
The system we’ve got
The region’s agricultural system was restructured after World War II when plants producing ammonium nitrate (a form of nitrogen) for munitions were repurposed to make new, low-cost fertilizers.
Previously, farmers recycled animal manure by using it to fertilize local crops that, in turn, were fed back to animals.
After the war, cheap fertilizer allowed grain to be grown more economically in rich Midwest soils. Farms here specialized in meat and milk production to feed East Coast cities. They began importing Midwest grain to supplement locally grown feed.
That made economic sense, but it was never economical to send manure to the Midwest. It accumulated here, and by the 1960s Bay water quality was declining: The manure build-up, combined with greater fertilizer use, increased nutrient runoff that fueled algae blooms, killed underwater grasses and spurred “dead zones.”
Today, farming in the Bay region is tied to intense animal production like a gordian knot. Two-thirds of farm revenue in the watershed come from livestock, according to David Abler, a Penn State agricultural economist. Nationally, livestock accounts for about half of farm revenue.
Maryland and Delaware are top 10 poultry production states. Virginia and Pennsylvania are not far behind. New York and Pennsylvania are in the top 10 for dairy. Pennsylvania is in the top five for egg production.
That system also allows locally grown grain, with lower transportation costs, to reap higher prices than would otherwise be the case, although the region is still a net grain importer.
It also keeps farms viable in the face of development pressure. Because of their proximity to urban centers, farmland prices in the Bay region — especially in Maryland, southcentral Pennsylvania and parts of Virginia — are higher than the national average.
“One of these uncomfortable truths in the Chesapeake Bay region is that the economics of agriculture drive animal production into this region because you’re close to the markets,” Shortle said. “And because land costs are relatively expensive, you need to have your agricultural land in something that can compete at the margins with urban land. That’s intensive agricultural production — meat production.”
Intensification will continue
Agricultural predictions are difficult. They are impacted by government policies, tariffs, markets and human diets. But Penn State scientists in 2020 projected that the state’s poultry population would double by 2050 while beef cattle and hog numbers would increase by smaller amounts. They predicted more manure in almost all counties.
While exact numbers are uncertain, “I don’t see the economics changing in a way that [make Pennsylvania less] animal intensive place over time,” Shortle said.
Other states also generally expect increased animal production, primarily with more chickens. Those trends are often driven by broader forces. For instance, in a survey last year, Cargill, an agribusiness group, found that 61% of consumers reported increasing their protein consumption in 2024. That was up from 48% in 2019.
Dairy production in the region has been hard-hit in recent years, but that could change as the yogurt company Choboni is building a $1.2 billion plant in Rome, NY, that is expected to boost dairy production in New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont.
The drive for increased production extends to crops. More animals require more food, and grain production has increased as well.
Cornfields in much of the watershed increase production on average by roughly 2 bushels per acre annually. As a rule of thumb, each added bushel needs an extra pound of nitrogen, which can lead to more polluted runoff. Production of soybeans, another high runoff crop, has also sharply increased.
State and federal programs encourage more production to help farms stay in business.
For instance, the EPA in all recent administrations has promoted more ethanol in fuels, spurring higher corn prices and greater production. Governors routinely seek to boost production and open new markets for state agricultural products.
These efforts help farmers, whose incomes can fluctuate widely from year to year based on weather, production costs and the prices they receive for their products.
Despite increased production, Abler said farm profits in recent years have not risen at the same rate. Farmers are particularly hard hit now because of drought in 2024 and a severe slump in grain prices caused by tariffs and other factors.
Because of such financial pressures, it is common for banks to encourage intensification to improve farm cash flow. For instance, they sometimes recommend that grain farmers add a chicken house.
“The intensity of agriculture, not just in this region, but in general, is a potential game stopper,” said Zach Easton, a Virginia Tech agricultural engineering professor, who chairs the Bay Program’s Agricultural Modeling Team, which analyzes piles of farm data. “There’s a huge excess of nutrients in a lot of areas of the watershed at whatever scale you want to look at, whether it’s the county or the farm.”
The watershed is also part of a broader food system. Globally, food production needs to increase by about 2% annually to feed the world’s anticipated 2050 population, according to Virginia Tech’s annual Global Agricultural Productivity report.
It’s failing badly: Production grew just 0.7% annually from 2012-22.
How and where that production takes place is important, not just for the world but for the Bay.
A 2018 report by the World Resource Institute (WRI) in partnership with several United Nations agencies emphasized the need for new production to take place on existing farmland. That means each acre needs to produce more, and animal production must intensify.
Since the early 2000s, an area the size of Greenland was converted to cropland globally, according to the WRI. About half of that replaced natural ecosystems such as grasslands and forests. The other half came out of pastures which, in turn, spurred more land clearing.
If farmland increases at past rates, the report said, an area twice the size of India will be cleared by 2050.
That would lead to a loss of biodiversity and huge releases of carbon dioxide as new land is plowed. Converting land to agriculture accounts for a quarter of annual greenhouse gas emissions, the report said.
It illustrates that the Bay region can’t simply solve its problems by sending them elsewhere, because that’s a two-way street. Other places could do the same. A 2024 paper in the journal Environmental Research estimated that reducing agricultural fertilizer use in the Mississippi River basin to meet Gulf of Mexico nutrient goals would shift some production elsewhere. For example, it could increase nitrogen loads to the Chesapeake by 4.2% a year and to Lake Erie by 5.5%.
A problem of scale and uncertainty
The region’s primary strategy to combat nutrient runoff has been, in the words of a former Bay Program director, is to “carpet bomb” farmland with best management practices (BMPs).
The Bay Program credits roughly 200 types of BMPs for their nutrient reduction value, including such things as nutrient management plans, cover crops, streamside buffers and manure storage sheds.
In the last 15 years, the acres treated with BMPs have more than doubled. But the nutrient reductions have been relatively small, according to Bay Program computer models. From 2009 through 2024, they estimate the region achieved only 5.6 million of the 40.2 million pounds of nitrogen reductions needed from farms.
All states had substantial shortfalls, according to the models, but about half of unrealized reductions need to come from Pennsylvania, which has the most farms.
But in the real world, it is difficult to know how the pressure to grow more crops and animals is balanced by more BMPs.
A water quality monitoring study by the U.S. Geological Survey in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from 2010 through 2020 found that nutrient runoff in the Smith Creek watershed rose despite a four-fold increase in BMPs. Bay models predicted a decrease in runoff.
The study said intensification of farming, particularly with more livestock, likely offset nutrient control efforts. Studies in small watersheds in Pennsylvania and on the Delmarva Peninsula had similar results.
The discrepancy between modeling and monitoring makes it hard to know with precision how much progress, if any, has been made since 2010.
“It’s an important question, and one that should be answered so that we can all work from a reference point that we’re pretty confident in,” Dubin said. “Right now, we’re not.”
But Bay Program computer models, water quality monitoring and analyses from scientists do agree on this: Overall, nutrient runoff changes are small, although they vary from place to place. There is limited evidence here or elsewhere that BMPs provide the level of impact needed to meet Bay goals.
And there are significant challenges to increased BMP adoption. Most are funded through state or federal programs that require farmers to pick up a portion of the cost. BMPs that save farmers time and money have high adoption rates. Practices like planting streamside buffers, which take land out of production, have much lower adoption rates.
Further, more than 40% of farmland in the watershed is leased and farmers have little incentive to invest in practices on land they rent. Similarly, many farmers have outside jobs and operate farms part-time, making outreach a challenge.
State and federal technical assistance programs that help farmers with BMPs are critical, but they have historically been understaffed and lack sustained funding.
Still, even if their nutrient reduction impact is uncertain, BMPs are valuable conservation measures. For example, fine-tuning fertilizer applications can reduce nitrate build-up in groundwater, where it is a human health hazard. Keeping animals out of streams reduces bacteria levels. No-till farming and cover crops reduce erosion.
“There’s no reason not to do what we’re doing,” said Kristen Hughes Evans, executive director of Sustainable Chesapeake, a nonprofit that works with farmers, universities and agricultural professionals to promote such measures. “If all the farmers [abandoned no-till practices], our rivers would be running with sediment.”
Further, many of those practices can build healthier soil that increases fertility while absorbing more rain, which reduces runoff. Healthier soil can help farmers achieve high yields with fewer nutrient inputs, Hughes Evans said.
“Is it showing up in water quality like we thought it would? No, and we don’t really understand why,” she said. “But we do understand that what we’re doing is smart, it makes sense and it’s the right thing to do.”
Wanted: more measurable results
Even with headwinds and doubts about the 2040 goals, most people working to reduce nutrient pollution in the Bay believe the region can still make progress. But it will require new tools and strategies.
Uncertainty about computer estimates of BMP effectiveness — and whether they can offset impacts from large-scale market drivers — has spurred interest in new programs that seek measurable results in other ways.
For instance, the Nature Conservancy is leading a program with other partners that measures the amount of fertilizer placed on fields, along with what is removed by crops. The goal is to improve efficiency.
Typically, “farmers get the same payment per bushel of corn whether they’re growing it [well] or poorly in terms of conservation,” said Matt Houser, a social scientist who works for the Nature Conservancy and University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “There are no premiums for sustainability.”
To change that, farmers in the program get incentive payments based on the percentage of nitrogen used by the plants, leaving less behind that is vulnerable to runoff.
Rather than solely relying on reducing fertilizer, they can improve outcomes by identifying areas where crops are underperforming. By fixing those problems, the farmer can both increase yields and reduce nitrogen runoff.
Virginia Tech scientists are piloting a similar approach on five dairy farms in Virginia. Nutrient inputs to the farm are measured along with exports in the form of milk or crops.
Participants get incentive payments for reducing nutrients through whatever means make sense, whether adjusting feed for the animals, altering fertilizer applications or improving manure handling.
“We’ve spent decades relying on modeled estimates, and it’s clear that does not always work,” said Virginia Tech’s Zach Easton, who is working on the project. “If we want real progress, we need to measure what actually happens on farms.”
Emphasizing local benefits
Another way to seek improvements is to shift the emphasis from Bay water quality to fixing local problems.
While BMPs do not always lead to measurable Bay nutrient reductions, they have helped local waterways. Fencing livestock out of streams has reduced bacteria problems while streamside tree plantings reduce water temperature and improve fish habitat. One degraded stream in Lancaster County, PA, now supports trout.
Proponents argue that it is easier to sell farmers on practices that provide tangible local benefits rather than vague water improvements far downstream.
“The Bay program discovered maybe 20 years ago that they should be using local language, and it would resonate better,” said Matt Ehrhart of the Stroud Water Research Center in Pennsylvania. But, he said, the actual objectives never changed. “It was sort of assumed that if we fix the Bay, we fix our watersheds. I think that’s possible, but not likely. But the reverse is more likely to be true: That if we fix our watersheds, the Bay probably comes along for the ride to a significant extent.”
That’s not necessarily easy. Improving degraded streams requires most landowners along the waterway to participate — a big lift — and it can mean that some practices, such as streamside buffers, may be needed in places where they help the stream but do little to reduce nutrients.
There could be substantial payoff downstream, though. Over time, a healthy stream filled with the right mix of microbes, bottom-dwelling organisms and fish helps remove more nutrients.
Also, practices that help the landscape to hold back water, whether buffers or soil health, can reduce local flooding as well as the surge of spring runoff that stratifies the Chesapeake, setting up conditions that lead to dead zones.
“There is a recognition that what happens upstream determines what happens in the Bay,” Jim Shortle said. “But I don’t think the science of solving it has moved upstream to the extent that it should.”
Innovation will be needed
Achieving significant nutrient reductions from farms will require new approaches, products and technologies beyond those commonly used today.
That is happening, though not driven by Bay goals. Corn varieties have gradually become more efficient at using nitrogen over the years and development of new varieties will continue.
Similarly, fertilizer companies are developing “smarter” fertilizers that help release nutrients when plants need them. Scientists in the Bay region are developing better tools to fine-tune fertilizer applications.
There’s a growing market for soil amendments aimed at improving soil conditions and improving nutrient use by plants. While results are mixed, some seem to be having success.
Feed improvements have reduced the amount of nutrients in the Bay region’s poultry manure: The amount of nutrients in the manure is not rising at the same rate as the chicken population. Researchers are working to improve rations for other animals, particularly dairy cows and hogs.
Technological solutions are getting a new look as well. Modern technologies can identify parts of fields with low and high productivity, and new equipment can adjust planting and fertilizer rates accordingly. Drones may be able to plant cover crops when it’s too wet for equipment.
For younger farmers in particular, Kristin Hughes Evans said, “technology is native to them. I think we’re going to see a natural improvement in the use of precision technology.”
Still, regions with large populations of farm animals will face a continued challenge: How should they handle excess manure?
Some believe it will require technologies that treat manure to remove nutrients, use it to generate power or turn it into other products.
“We treat all the human waste in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, but the animals produce 10 times more,” Easton said.
A role for regulation?
One of the most controversial issues is the role regulation should play in future efforts.
The Clean Water Act keeps the EPA from regulating farms except for large animal feeding operations. States have varying degrees of regulations, with requirements for conservation and nutrient plans and oversight of large animal farms being the most common.
Broadly regulating the 80,000 farms in the Bay region — mostly small ones — is difficult.
But as farms consolidate, as is the trend, regulation is more viable, Shortle said. “I think what has to happen is that agriculture will become increasingly industrialized,” he said. “We will quit looking at it as friendly farmers and start looking at it as a big business that we will be willing to [regulate].”
Still, many farm activities are hard to oversee, and factors beyond a farmer’s control — like weather — can influence how rules are followed.
“I’ve heard people say things like, ‘cover crops should just be required,’” Hughes Evans said. “Required for what? Sometimes you can’t get out in the field to plant them. If you’re harvesting soybeans on Thanksgiving and the fields are wet or frozen, what is the point of planting on that?”
And if regulations drive up costs, they could produce unintended consequences. A farmer may rear more animals to make up for lost revenue.
Some are frustrated, though, that four decades after initial nutrient goals were set, obvious problems remain.
“Can you tell me one beneficial thing about allowing cows to stand in a stream?” asked Jon Mueller, who heads the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. He argued in a recent law journal article that relying on voluntary cost-share programs will never achieve Bay goals and that additional regulation of farms will be essential.
A long slog ahead
In a sense, Bay leaders always knew they would end up here. As far back as the 1987 Chesapeake Bay Agreement — the first to set a nutrient goal — they recognized that pressures from population growth, and how people live, would threaten their efforts.
At that time, the discussion was focused on development and the smothering of the landscape with pavement. But the same is true for agriculture. The needs of a growing population and what they choose to eat, coupled with the need to have a farm economy that can withstand development pressure, results in a high-value, animal-intensive agricultural system that harms Chesapeake water quality.
The market forces that drive that system are more powerful than goals and deadlines set by the Bay Program, and that is not likely to change.
Caitlin Grady, director of research and policy at the Global Food Institute of the George Washington University, has been developing large-scale computer models that predict the region’s nutrient future.
The conclusions are stark. Meeting Bay goals by 2030 would require slashing fertilizer applications by 25%, dramatic changes in farm animal feed management, and taking 5% of land out of production.
By 2050, the actions were even more dramatic. Projecting “business as usual,” nitrogen losses from farms would be about 20% higher than today.
“I’m not trying to be doom and gloom,” Grady said. “But there are a lot of system-wide influences on farms. We are in a global economy. Things get traded. Things get exported and imported out of the ports at Baltimore and Norfolk, and these are influencing us in ways that are way beyond what we talk about managing.”
In that context, holding the line and making incremental progress has been a significant accomplishment. Many farmers feel they don’t get enough acknowledgement for it.
“The farmer is getting a bad rap in regards to helping the Chesapeake Bay,” said a farmer in Lancaster County, PA. “Farmers are doing a lot more than what we’re getting credit for.”
Cleanup goals assigned to agriculture, often with little regard of their achievability, create an ongoing dynamic in which Bay advocates often view farmers as key obstacles.
The Bay Program recently created an Agricultural Advisory Committee to improve interactions with the farm community.
So far, that has resulted in some changes in its newly revised cleanup agreement, which acknowledges the importance of farming and the need for it to be profitable.
While nutrient reduction progress will happen, many working on the issue acknowledge it will be a “long slog” and are skeptical about meeting the new 2040 deadline, saying it will take decades, or even generations, to attain. If the deadline is unrealistic, it seems likely to heighten tension with the farm community.
“Because of all the trade-offs, there are limits to the improvements that we could do,” said Virginia Tech’s Stephenson. “It’s not a problem to be solved. It’s a problem to be infinitely managed. If we could get directionally correct trends in a lot of these watersheds, I think we should celebrate that.”
Making substantial cleanup progress will require things that go beyond “business as usual.” It will almost certainly require new and better fertilizers, new plant hybrids, improved application methods and some means of dealing with excess manure. Meaningful communication between Bay advocates and farmers is critical.
What is clear is that in 2040, if agriculture does not reach its nutrient goal, it will not be the only sector confronting population headwinds.
Stormwater runoff from developed lands continues to increase as states and local governments are reluctant to manage growth or effectively control runoff.
Wastewater treatment plants have made the greatest nutrient reductions by upgrading facilities with new technology. But most of their potential reductions have been realized, and discharges are expected to gradually increase as more people flush more toilets.
What will the future hold? The Bay Program has long tied its view of restoration to Chesapeake conditions of the 1950s. But as it approaches 2050, it will have a watershed with nearly three times as many people, vastly more development, warmer temperatures, more hardened shorelines, more heat waves, more intense storms. And more intense farming.
The future Chesapeake will be different from that of the past, and the word “restoration” is already falling out of favor. Its problems are driven by more than just nutrients, and its solutions will need to be more balanced. There are ways to achieve a “better” Bay — and better watershed — even if nutrient reductions come up short.
A realistic conversation about agriculture could help illuminate the path forward.