If you follow regional farm news you will already be aware that “Uncle” has been involved in putting together rules and regulations to reduce erosion, sedimentation and bacterial contamination in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Several environmental groups have been actively monitoring several large farm operations and vigorously pursuing those operations if they feel they are operating outside the current rules. That watershed is massive and stretches across more than 64,000 square miles, encompassing parts of six states — Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia — and the entire District of Columbia. Threading through the Chesapeake watershed are more than 100,000 streams and rivers that eventually flow into the Bay.  

All of this should be of interest since, at least in my opinion; the same process will soon begin again in the Delaware Bay watershed.  Considering the state of our economy, it might not be such a bad thing. I say this only because every new law, rule, regulation or ordinance creates its own little economic ripple. Protecting the environment is big business. Industry spends a great deal of money complying with environmental rules and regulations. Even when compliance is without question, industry employs “boatloads” of specialists just proving there is no problem. It should come as no surprise that agriculture is easily the biggest user of lands in the watershed and is therefore a primary suspect whenever water quality issues are being discussed. From a regulatory perspective farmers are an easy target. They control a great deal of the land use, and there really aren’t very many of them.  By contrast, there are probably more individual landowners in the greater Camden area than there are individual farmland owners in the entire watershed.  While residential homeowners may be and probably are greater polluters of water than most farmers, regulating their lawn and gardening activities is infinitely more difficult than keeping a watchful eye on one farmer tilling 400 acres.  So what!  Technologically speaking, we know more about what is in our surface waters now than we ever knew before. Between the satellites, the computers, the GPS systems and all that other stuff, a farmer can determine which parts of what fields yield the most and therefore can determine exactly where fertilizers and other soil amendments need to be applied. The science of micro managing every acre on a farm is here today and available right now. Unfortunately the science of guaranteeing an adequate return on investment for the farmer has not kept pace with the science that can make a farmer pollute less. High tech farm machinery is insanely expensive. You can’t just trade in your used equipment and do a simple upgrade. The used equipment is low tech, old school and not worth much.

We farm less acres in Warren County in 2010 than was farmed even 40 years ago. The Warren County Soil Conservation District and the USDA-NRCS have worked diligently with our farmers over the last half century to reduce erosion and control runoff. There are many who believe our waters are more degraded now than ever before. No amount of government regulation will overcome the natural erosive processes and many of the chemical and biological contaminants are naturally occurring. Perhaps all those recently constructed 4000 square foot homes on large lots are what is causing the problem since all those acres aren’t being farmed anymore?

We need production agriculture to take a leadership role in this process when it begins anew.

Have you ever imagined that approximately ½ million eggs would be recalled due to salmonella contamination? I believe when you look at our national egg production, this is a fairly small percentage. Feel better? I didn’t think so. This is pretty convincing evidence that purchasing locally produced and grown food products may be good for your health in more ways than one.