(The Center Square) — Congressional members from Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania have introduced legislation in the House to build on existing Chesapeake Bay conservation efforts for the next 10 years with more than $825 million of federal funding.
The Chesapeake Bay Conservation Acceleration Act of 2023 seeks to improve water, soil and air quality of the bay and its watershed by reducing pollution from the more than 83,000 farms in portions of Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and West Virginia — states that either border the bay or contain rivers and creeks that eventually flow into the bay.
Bay conservation work dates back to at least 1966, when the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the bay’s health, was founded. It wasn’t until 1983, however, that Congress first passed interstate legislation connecting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, D.C., in an attempt to address nutrient pollution from farms – like increased levels of nitrogen and phosphorus and decreased levels of oxygen – in the bay.
Since then, the bay has been the subject of several pieces of federal legislation, according to the CBF, mainly to create concrete standards and limits for bay pollution and restoration, efforts to reinforce and uphold those standards and lawsuits by the American Farm Bureau Federation opposing them.
So far, conservation ventures have fallen short of established goals. The second Chesapeake Bay Agreement required a “40 percent reduction in nutrient pollution to the bay by 2000,” according to the CBF. That goal was not met in 2000 nor by 2007, when the EPA and others announced that a more realistic deadline would be 2010, at the earliest, and possibly 2020 or later.
If this latest bill is passed, its funding will assist farmers, both technically and financially, who are investing in approved conservation methods, like conservation tillage, cover crops, prescribed grazing, riparian buffers or other edge-of-field practices and waste storage facilities.
Just last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the formation of the Chesapeake Bay States’ Partnership Initiative, a coalition that will provide “a new and innovative framework to leverage USDA conservation financial and technical assistance, locally-led conservation, and coordination with state partners,” according to a release. It also announced the creation of a joint task force between itself and the EPA to focus on refining the process of crediting farmers who invest in conservation techniques. The CBCA Act of 2023 allocates $75 million annually to this organization for fiscal years 2024-2027.
Notably, it also apportions $60 million per year for fiscal years 2024-2033 to develop a “more robust agriculture workforce” for the watershed that can assist in implementing conservation techniques in farming.
A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate.
