Biofuels can help agriculture save the Bay

According to Dr. Cheng-I Wei, dean at the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, researchers at the university are responding to the current political and environmental climate to reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels.

Dr. Wei notes that oil supplies are unpredictable and finite, and increased use of fossil fuel for energy has been connected with human health problems as well as global warming. University faculty is actively involved in exploring novel and diverse biofuels feedstock such as barley, hybrid poplars and algae.

Others are examining economic implications and strategies for improving production.

So what do we need to do? According to Dr. Robert Kratochvil, agronomist at the University of Maryland, corn is not as nutrient efficient as soybeans, but farmers are using best-management practices such as buffers or filter strips along streams and waterways and planting fall cover crops to significantly reduce nitrogen runoff and leaching losses. Since 1985, farmers spent more than $11 million of their own money to match about $90 million in state water quality cost share funds to install more than 21,000 on-farm conservation measures.

Since the passage of the ‘‘flush fee,” significantly more funding has been made available to Maryland farmers to expand the acreage of cover crops grown in the region. Each year, farmers have oversubscribed to the program showing their willingness to plant these winter crops, which take up nutrients that remain in the field after harvesting their summer crop.

Maryland has a mandatory nutrient management law and farmers are required to utilize only as many nutrients as their crop is expected to need, based on historic yields. With this year’s drought, crops did not produce anything like a normal crop, so nutrients are now in farm fields ready to be taken up by these cover crops. Understand that the nitrogen a farmer uses costs close to $500 a ton, so there is no desire to waste nutrients.

The Maryland Department of Agriculture enforces the Nutrient Management Law. To date, 96 percent of the 6,300 eligible farmers are in compliance with the law, representing 98 percent of the 1.3 million eligible acres.

We are taking enforcement action on those who do not have a nutrient management plan and inspecting 10 percent a year for implementation compliance.

The good news is that American farmers, including those in Maryland, are using fertilizer nutrients with the greatest efficiency in history.

Between 1980 and 2005, U.S. corn production increased by a whopping 74 percent. At the same time, The Fertilizer Institute estimates that U.S. farmers are applying 41 percent less nitrogen and 53 percent less phosphate per bushel of corn produced. The latest advances in agriculture technology enable farmers to apply fertilizers with pinpoint accuracy, minimizing their impact to soil, water and air. Close on the horizon are new corn varieties with significantly improved nitrogen use efficiency and greater drought tolerance.

Despite woeful predictions of significantly more corn production, I predict that next year we may see less, not more corn in the Chesapeake region. Farmers will continue to spread their risk when selecting the crops they grow. Following this year’s devastating drought, many of our farmers who are not enrolled in the cover crop program are planting wheat this fall, which will take up excess nutrients during the winter and will be followed by a soybean crop next year. This will keep our farmers rotating their crops from corn to small grains and then soybeans, which improves soil fertility.

Furthermore, according to a September 2007 EPA report, new development is increasing nutrient and sediment loads at rates faster than restoration efforts are reducing. It is the total impact of impervious surfaces for schools, roads and malls that make development bad for the Bay.

The report shows that agricultural and wastewater restoration efforts are well underway to reaching the Bay restoration goals, but urban and suburban nutrient loadings have increased as much as 90 percent.

According to the EPA Chesapeake Bay Program figures, on-farm best management conservation projects and others such as cover crops, have resulted in a significant achievement of Maryland’s 2005 Tributary Strategy goals for agriculture. Since 1985, Maryland agriculture has achieved 54 percent nitrogen reduction, 70 percent phosphorus reduction and 54 percent sediment reduction.

These facts conclude that harm to the Bay cannot be solely placed on ethanol production. The effects of urban sprawl are far more damaging to this watershed. While it is our duty to ensure better and cleaner production of ethanol, it also is our duty to ensure that the development of our urban lifestyle does not put the Bay at risk.

Roger Richardson is secretary of the Maryland Department of Agriculture.