DEP Official Laments Ag’s Lack of Recognition for Bay Cleanup

Dick Wanner
Lancaster Farming Staff

LANCASTER, Pa. — “It is acid on my soul to hear my colleagues say that agriculture is the issue for the Chesapeake Bay,” John Hines told the monthly meeting of the Ag Issues Forum at the Lancaster Farm and Home Center on Thursday, Dec. 10. Hines is deputy secretary for water management at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The Ag Issues Forum is sponsored each month by the Lancaster Camber of Commerce and Industry.

“We have this cauldron of issues going on with the Chesapeake Bay, and they’ll continue as long as we’re north of Maryland,” Hines told the group. “But we have reduced the nitrogen going into the bay, and 55 percent of that reduction can be attributed to changes in agriculture. But you don’t hear about that in the press, do you?”

One way in which the agricultural community has failed, said Hines, “... is in celebrating our successes. Every one of our Susquehanna water quality stations, except for Marietta, is showing reductions in nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment going into the bay. Bay grasses at the mouth of the Susquehanna have shown an 85-percent comeback over the last few years.

“It’s a reflection of what we’re doing in Pennsylvania,” Hines said.

He noted there is still much to be done, but that it’s an all-inclusive challenge.

“It’s not a builders’ problem, it’s not a wastewater treatment problem, it’s not an agriculture problem, it’s a Pennsylvania problem,” he said.

And in spite of reports in the mainstream press, the state has incurred measurable successes, Hines pointed out, and he sees that story continuing.

He closed his remarks with a quote from Abraham Lincoln, “Without the will and sentiment of the people, everything fails. With it, everything succeeds.”

The “will and the sentiment” of Pennsylvanians can be a bit fuzzy when it comes to agricultural issues, but one expression of that sentiment is Act 43 of 1981, which provides for the creation of agricultural security areas. ASAs are designed to protect farmland from development and urban pressures, Peggy Fogarty-Harnish told the Ag Issues Forum. Fogarty-Harnish is an agricultural economic development educator with Penn State Extension in Lancaster.

She talked about the benefits for farmers in joining an ASA, and also their obligations. A primary benefit of being in an ASA is that local governments can’t legislate against normal agricultural activities, and it makes it more difficult for governments to take land by eminent domain proceedings.

An ASA is composed of contiguous tracts of land. A single tract can be as small as 10 acres, but an ASA must be 250 acres or larger. Individual farmers can form an ASA if each of them agrees to farm the land for seven years. At the end of the seven-year period, any individual farmer can withdraw from the ASA and do anything he wants to do with the land, as long as it is permitted by zoning laws.

Fogarty-Harnish discussed the ins and outs of forming ASA advisory committees, and said there are seven known committees in Lancaster County, and 172,978 acres of county farmland registered in ASAs. For more information on ASAs, Fogarty-Harnish can be reached on the Web at muf17@psu.ed, or by phone at (717) 394-6851.