Where is the finish line?

I always like to listen when a policymaker gives a presentation to an agricultural audience about water quality improvement efforts. I’m interested to hear how the message is delivered, and also how the audience receives it. Overall the message has become more friendly and collaborative over time (particularly from the non-regulatory folks at EPA) and I appreciate that they make the effort to reach out. I think both the tone and the outreach efforts might have something to do with how partnerships in the Chesapeake Bay Region have tended to be more inclusive in recent years, which is a very good thing.

There’s one line that’s in every presentation though. It goes something like “The agricultural community should be commended for all that they’ve done to help improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay, but more must be done.” The farming community in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed has done an awful lot to reduce nutrient and sediment losses to the Bay, especially compared to other areas of the country, but our current level of effort isn’t sufficient to meet water quality goals. It’s that “more must be done” that gets me, and for several reasons.

1. We don’t have a very good handle on what’s been done already. What the conservation community has tended to track so far are conservation practices that we pay for. For the most part, we know the extent to which cost-shared practices like cover crops, animal waste structures, or grass buffers have been adopted. Precision agriculture and some soil health practices? Not so much, even though nutrient rates, timing and placement on individual farm fields ultimately have significant environmental impacts.
2. We acknowledge that there’s a lag time between when practices are implemented and when improvements are evident in water quality. On Delmarva, many of our streams and rivers are mainly fed through groundwater rather than surface water, and it can take anywhere from less than a year to more than 50 years for that water to travel from the field surface to a stream. On the one hand, watershed managers are aware of this and take it into account in planning efforts, but there’s often a disconnect when discussing current conservation efforts alongside current water quality monitoring results.
3. Farmers want to know what the urban sector is doing. When that context is missing, it can give the impression that the agricultural community is shouldering a disproportionate burden in the Bay restoration effort. (If you’re curious, you can see some information for the whole Bay Watershed here, and Maryland has a really nice tool to track progress from both the agriculture and urban sectors here.)
4. Often, the farmers who receive the message are the ones who already feel like they’re doing everything they can. In identifying the “more that must be done”, we also need to acknowledge variability in both the adoption and the effectiveness of practices. We need greater adoption of practices, but more specifically, we need the right practices in the right places, since some areas are more vulnerable to nutrient losses. I wish our most conservation-minded farmers were always managing our most vulnerable fields, but that may or may not be the case.

I don’t argue with the general premise that we all must do more if we want to meet water quality standards in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. So if the current message is flawed, what’s a better alternative? I think we need to move from the idea of more practices everywhere, and start to focus on opportunities to be more efficient in our restoration effort. As we learn where those environmentally sensitive areas are, we also need to determine how best to work with those land managers- what are the right practices? The right incentives? The right person to offer technical assistance? And, how does that fit into an overall effort where all the residents of the watershed are responsible for a successfully restored Bay?