A sharp west wind sings across the flat fields of Balvin Brinsfield's farm, just north of Vienna, Maryland. The wind has the bite of winter in it, but otherwise the sun is shining and the low-lying fields gleam with a thin carpet of green. Balvin has a wide smile and a welcoming handshake. Welcome to farm country, Eastern Shore style.
To get here, drive east and south from Annapolis for an hour and a half to the marshy Nanticoke River, where traffic thins out and life slows down. Turn north onto Route 331 just past a sign that says, Scenic Byway: Chesapeake Country. In the middle of a winter's morning you might stand on the centerline of the road and not see a car coming either way. But despite this rural quiet, there is a double message in Balvin Brinsfield's handshake and that scenic highway sign: this is both farm country and Bay country, a landscape that offers up sweet corn, peppers and soybeans, but also blue crabs, oysters and striped bass. When things are working right, it is a bountiful place to be.
Brinsfield has a round face and looks at you with clear eyes. It is a farmer's face, and you can see those same features in his ten-year-old son, Josh. Brinsfield seems a modest man, with no axes to grind. Still, working the land has its challenges, and changing weather, changing markets, and changing regulations routinely test his patience.
Cranking up the heat in one of his sheds on a cold February morning, he sits down to talk about farming. Soon his cousin John Brinsfield, who lives next-door, comes in and joins the conversation. The Brinsfields have been here since grandfather Balvin Bacchus Brinsfield settled this low-lying Eastern Shore land three quarters of a century ago.
In addition to difficult markets and narrow profit margins, farmers must also contend with a range of programs aimed at cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.
Both Balvin and John each farm fewer than 400 acres. In fact John shares his land with other members of his family, so they have three families supported by a little more than 100 acres each. Between Balvin and John's farms they grow sweet corn, feed corn, soybeans and assorted vegetables — string beans, peppers and onions. Depending on the year, Balvin may also grow watermelon, potatoes and pumpkins. While the vegetables are headed for market (or Balvin's roadside stand), the feed corn is usually headed for poultry houses — part of a large Eastern Shore connection between grain crops and a very big chicken business.
The Brinsfield compound represents a tiny slice of the estimated 87,000 farms in the Chesapeake Bay watershed — most of which average only about 180 acres, far smaller than the 500-acre average for the rest of the country. While large agricultural companies may get the press, the vast majority of farmland in this region is still comprised — so far — of fairly small family-owned farms.
The two Brinsfield cousins make it clear that farming is part of who they are. "We sure aren't in it because it's lucrative," John laughs, dragging out the word lu-cra-tive. John has penetrating brown eyes and a college diploma, and like Balvin, he takes his farming seriously.
Perhaps their biggest concern is what John calls "succession" — the passing on of the family farm. Fewer farm children want to stay on the farm, John says, given the demanding lifestyle and the market's economic rollercoaster, and he sees smaller farms taken over by increasingly larger ones. Grandfather Balvin Bacchus Brinsfield left his farm to his children and grandchildren, but John worries about what will happen to family farms all across the Bay region once the current generation passes away.
Ten-year-old Josh, home schooled and attentive to this conversation, says with a shy smile that he'd like to work the farm — and maybe he will.
If he does, he will inherit not only the land but the tensions of an ongoing dilemma. He will face the dual challenge of working the farm while protecting the water, of keeping this land along the Nanticoke both farm country and Bay country.
Balvin and John say that they care about the nearby Nanticoke River, where they sometimes fish and where John likes to sail and kayak. The cousins take pride in their farms, and they are often unhappy with the way farmers are portrayed in the media. The talk about "all these subsidies" farmers are getting. Balvin tugs at the bill of his cap and says he would rather just get paid for his crops and not have to worry about subsidies at all.
This is a painful irony, that farmers, who as a group don't generally like big government, often rely on government subsidies.
And it gets more complicated than that.
The state of Maryland, the federal government and the environmental community are all calling on farmers to help clean up the Chesapeake Bay. In addition to difficult markets and narrow profit margins, farmers now contend with a range of Bay-related programs — cover crops, nutrient management plans, manure management, buffer strips and easements, among others.
This is because farming, according to the regionwide Chesapeake Bay Program, puts more pounds of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment into creeks, rivers and the Bay than any other source — some 40 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus and more than 60 percent of the sediment.
While about half of agriculture's flow of nitrogen and phosphorus comes from intensive animal operations, especially poultry, the other half comes from chemical fertilizer used on a variety of crops. Sediment comes from a wide range of row crops and farm activities. A recent report by the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Blue Ribbon Finance Panel (see "Desperately Seeking Dollars") has stated that in order to reach goals for restoring the Bay virtually all of the region's 87,000 farms will need to implement improved farming and conservation techniques — generally known as best management practices (BMPs) — at levels never before seen in this country.
Come spring, Balvin will walk over to the long sheds covered by corrugated roofs and start up a large machine he uses to spray herbicides and fertilizers, or he'll pull out a tractor to disk the fields and turn over the topsoil, as farmers have done for generations. If he decides on no-till farming, a widely used practice that prevents soil erosion by cultivating crops without overturning the soil, he'll have to use herbicides to burn off cover crops or weeds. If he disks his fields to turn over the soil and activate nitrogen-fixing bacteria, he'll risk more erosion. If he spreads manure but doesn't disk it in, the manure will volatilize, with ammonia evaporating into the atmosphere and then raining down to add to the region's nitrogen load.
There is a lot for a farmer to think about in Bay country.
Along the Nanticoke, farmland blends into marshland (top, by Skip Brown). Farms have bordered the Bay since before George Washington built Mount Vernon on the Potomac, but intensive agriculture has led to a surge of nutrients that find their way into the Bay's rivers and streams (bottom, Chesapeake Bay Program).
When Bay grasses began dying in the 1970s, scientists went looking for causes, and farm chemicals were high on their list.
A $26 million research effort funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency quickly focused on the chemical herbicides that farmers use to kill off unwanted plants and weeds. Those herbicides, the theory went, might keep killing once they entered the Bay. But five years of research concluded that except for some farm ditches polluted with herbicides, those agricultural chemicals did not reach the Bay in strong enough doses to kill Bay grasses.
Farmers, however, were not off the hook. What was smothering the grasses, the researchers found, were blankets of sediment and algae that spread across the Bay, blocking out sunlight. With fewer grasses and more algae blooms, the Bay also began to lose something else — dissolved oxygen essential for life, especially in the summer and in the deeper waters. Much of the sediment that washed into the Bay and a good deal of the nutrients came from farm fields.
When these research results hit the press, mounting public pressure — to take away this blanket of sediment and nutrients — sparked a new level of cooperation between the Bay states and led the federal government and led to the signing of Bay Agreements in 1983 and 1987. While the first Agreement brought the states together in a general commitment to restore the Chesapeake, it was the 1987 Agreement that committed the jurisdictions to reduce nutrients by 40 percent by the year 2000. When the year 2000 came, and nutrient goals remained unmet, a new agreement, Chesapeake 2000, spelled out even more ambitious goals for improving water quality and clarity.
After two decades the clock is winding down on the court-ordered deadline of 2010, the time given the states to remove the Bay from the Clean Water Act's list of impaired waters. According to the Chesapeake Bay Program, nutrient reductions are about one third of the way toward that goal, with two-thirds of the reductions remaining to be made by the end of this decade.
The pressure to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus — as well as sediment — has intensified as success at reducing them has stalled. While new technologies can help in some cases — for example, to cut nutrient levels at waste treatment plants — it remains more difficult to control the flow of nutrients and sediment from farms, where runoff can't be put inside a pipe.
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The good news is that cover crops work. The bad news is that not enough farmers are planting them.
Think of farms as nutrient cycling machines. In their most basic and self-contained form farms use nutrients in the soil, combined with water and sunlight, to grow crops that in turn provide nutrients for people and animals. Waste from animals (in the form of manure) and even from people (in the form of sludge) can be returned to the soil to fuel the growth of more plants. In more intensive agriculture, however, farmers bring in specially prepared commercial fertilizers to boost yield. They may also raise animals — like chickens, turkeys or hogs — in very intensive operations that produce large amounts of waste in a very concentrated area. Since these operations often lack enough acres of farmland to use all that manure or poultry litter, what should be an asset becomes a liability — too much animal waste, with too much nitrogen and phosphorus, and no place to put it.
The result of bringing commercial fertilizers into the region and disposing of large amounts of animal waste on Bay area farms is a landscape that leaks nutrients from the watershed, and into the Chesapeake.
One of the scientists trying to devise ways to plug that leak grew up on a farm just across the road from Balvin and John Brinsfield. Russ B. Brinsfield (the B is for Balvin) left the family farm to get a Ph.D. in agricultural engineering, and for years he and his colleague Ken Staver have wrestled with ways to keep nutrients out of rivers like the Wye, the Choptank and the Nanticoke. How fast does nitrogen leave a farm field? What can keep it from reaching the groundwater? These are the research questions Brinsfield tackles, both as the director the University of Maryland Wye Research and Education Center and as the head of the Maryland Center for Agroecology, Inc.
To track the movement of nitrogen as it seeps into groundwater and begins its slow slide to the Bay, Brinsfield and Staver have installed wells and instruments called lysimeters on both no-till and conventionally plowed fields at the Wye's experimental farm. Using data from these devices they can watch what happens to dissolved nitrogen as it seeps through the soil after a rainstorm (see "Nitrogen's Underground Passage").
After years of research on different fields using different farming methods, Brinsfield says that the only practice that has significantly and clearly reduced nitrogen seeping through the soil is planting cover crops.
Cover crops, planted in the fall to help hold the soil and take up unused nutrients, seem to make sense to farmers like Balvin and John Brinsfield. Balvin says that even without incentives, he'd plant some kind of cover once he'd harvested peppers or potatoes, because there is no ground cover left after the harvest — no corn stalks or other residue to help hold down the soil. He says it just makes good sense.
Balvin has nearly half his land in cover crops, and John has better than half. According to the Chesapeake Bay Commission, cover crops provide one of the most cost-effective ways to keep nutrients out of the Bay (see "Where Should We Put Our Money?").
The Brinsfield cousins are aware, though, that not everyone participates in the cover crop program, for one reason or another. For one thing, they say, farmers like to buy seed in early summer, but the cover crop sign-up is in mid-summer. So they have to buy seed before they know whether they are in that year's program, which is strictly first-come, first-served. Also, to keep excess nutrients off winter fields a farmer participating in the cover crop program can't put down any manure or fertilizer before March 1. So some farmers don't enroll, they say, in case they want to fertilize sooner.
The good news, then, is that cover crops work. The bad news is that not enough farmers are planting them. Brinsfield knows we have a long way to go, because he and Staver track monitoring stations in other areas as well — like the U.S. Geological Survey's Greensboro station in the Choptank River watershed.
Brinsfield says that on the basis of data from such stations, he sees "little indication that we have significantly reduced the rate [of agricultural runoff] into Eastern Shore rivers."
At best, he says, inputs of nitrogen may be leveling off, but they're not going down. Even when conservation efforts begin to work, he says, the results may be years in coming, given the slow-motion nature of groundwater.
In fact, burgeoning federal deficits, proposed budget cuts, and hard-pressed state resources in many parts of the Bay watershed have led many to ask how we will ever reach levels of funding and participation needed to cut nutrient and sediment loads. With the nutrient problem spread among 87,000 farms across a 64,000-square-mile watershed, and with population growing in the Bay region at the rate of one million each decade, bringing increased sewage, urban runoff and the destruction of forests, one might well wonder, how will we ever restore the Chesapeake Bay?
At a recent rally in Virginia, the president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, William C. Baker, warned that if more progress is not made, the Chesapeake Bay Program, long touted as a national model for ecosystem restoration, may well become an international "model for failure."
To anthropologist Michael Paolisso's way of thinking, farmers should be strong allies in protecting rural landscapes and watersheds. But Paolisso, an associate professor at the University of Maryland who has studied farming and fishing communities, argues that the Bay restoration effort has not found a way to enlist their full support. The environmental community, says Paolisso, has failed to tap the deep values of those who work the land and the water — farmers and watermen — who have, he says, their own profound attachment to nature and their own sense of environmentalism.
According to Paolisso, farmers and watermen often find themselves responding primarily to regulations — and either agreeing to cooperate, or not. There needs to be a shift, he says, toward collaboration and what he calls "collaborative learning." All these different groups — regulators, conservationists, scientists, farmers and watermen — need to learn more about each others' "environmentalism."
Russ Brinsfield agrees that we don't engage the farmers enough, and don't give them credit for their ethics.
J.D. Wilkins has experienced these divisions firsthand. When Wilkins, who is both farmer and banker, speaks to farm groups, he often encounters a deep skepticism about the Bay cleanup effort, and the science. Wilkins hails from high up in the watershed in Circleville, West Virginia, and represented the state of West Virginia on the Blue Ribbon Finance Panel appointed last year by the governors of the six watershed states.
"I have a PowerPoint presentation I've put together that shows a lot of data and information," he says, "but for farmers it's not so much about the data, as about people, and trust."
"You can see a farmer tense up when an environmentalist approaches him at one of these meetings," Wilkins says. "He expects to be blamed for something."
Wilkins says that farmers often don't accept the science that's presented to them. "They [farmers] don't believe the current model," he says.
The model Wilkins refers to is the computer model used by the Chesapeake Bay Program to estimate nutrient and sediment loads and to set allocations for the different jurisdictions — maximum limits for nitrogen, phosphorus and other contaminants in their waters. According to Wilkins, farmers often point out that the model's numbers have changed before, and so they could change again. For example, modelers have lowered their estimates of reductions resulting from best management practices on farm fields. While the rationale, according to the Bay Program, is that some practices either were not used to the extent estimated or resulted in less of a reduction than originally thought, farmers see the changes as waffling, and question whether the "baseline" was correct to begin with, says Wilkins.
"A lot of farmers find it hard to swallow that they are responsible for all the nitrogen and phosphorus going into the Bay," says Shawn Maloney, a research associate in the University of Maryland Department of Anthropology. Maloney, who is now writing a doctoral dissertation for the University of Kansas on farmers and the environment, says farmers feel that the science presented to them is "one-sided," and they don't trust it.
Maloney points to the example of phosphorus in fertilizer, an example also raised by Balvin and John Brinsfield. For many years agricultural experts told farmers that they didn't need to worry too much about phosphorus. They were told to apply a little at the beginning of the season, and then mainly manage for nitrogen. Today that advice has shifted, and farmers hear that they must place a greater emphasis on curtailing phosphorus as well as nitrogen, since many fields in the Bay watershed now contain too much phosphorus.
Wilkins says he's come to believe that even if the science we have is imperfect, it's the best science available. "My suspicion is that the numbers put into the model are just about as good as what we've got."
The difficulty, according to Wilkins, Maloney and others, is not only getting farmers adequate money, but convincing them that they need to spend it on keeping nutrients out of the Bay.
The way Wilkins sees it, we need to de-emphasize our philosophical differences, and stop trying to change each other. "Everyone has their passion," he says. "It's like their religion. You don't have to convince the other side of your passion. When people try to 'convert' each other, the walls between them just get higher."
Herein lies the final irony. Farmers have a deep sense of doing what is right on their farm, but if pressured to "do right" for the "common good," they resist.
Wilkins thinks we should stick to specific measures that make sense for everyone — like improved feed pads. These hard-surfaced areas keep cows out of the mud and mire as they come to feed, and reduce dirt and bacteria on the cow's udders. At the same time, they reduce the runoff of mud and sediment into local streams. "We have to go to the little goals," he says.
The challenge, Paolisso says, is how to channel what has often been an antagonistic relationship — between farmers and government, between government and environmentalists of all kinds — into one focused on common interests and common values. In group meetings, Paolisso has brought regulators together with those they regulate, along with members of the scientific community, in order to explore discussions that break down walls that usually divide these groups.
He argues that if such groups can accept that there are multiple "environmentalisms," and if they can come to understand each other's core beliefs and models of what environmentalism can mean, then they will not only be able to better communicate with each other but will also be able to move together as stewards of the Bay and its watershed.
Our best hope, Wilkins, Paolisso and others seem to be telling us, is for farmers to tap their own natural ethic to do right by the land, and in this way to do right by the Bay.
"I believe in Providence, but also in sustainability," says John Brinsfield. He feels that farmers have to take the long view, to look out for their family's future. A while back, he says, the University of University of Maryland Extension had farmers in his area write a mission statement. One of the goals they identified was to leave the land better than they found it. "That's important to me," John says. "These core values."
Back on the farm, as Balvin leaves the shed and heads back to work, he does not have time to think too much about all these issues. For him it is mostly about the doing. He has to get his equipment ready for spring and decide whether or not to plant potatoes this year, and how much energy to put into peppers and sweet corn.
As the day wears on an afternoon light settles over these flat fields, on this land that still belongs to the descendents of grandfather Balvin Bacchus Brinsfield. It is a low-slanting light, cold and clear, and despite the winter landscape there is color on the fields, the pale hopeful green of cover crops.
Following in a farmer's footsteps, ten-year old Josh has already learned a lot about big rigs and working the land from his father, Balvin Brinsfield, on their farm near the Nanticoke River. Photograph by Skip Brown.
For More Information
Maximizing Return on Public Investment in Maryland's Rural Land Preservation Programs. 2004. Joseph Tassone et al., Maryland Department of Planning. Available from the Maryland Center for Agro-Ecology, Inc. agroecology.widgetworks.com/researchers.html
Downzoning: Does It Protect Working Landscapes and Maintain Equity for the Landowner? 2003. Rob Etgen et al. Available from the Maryland Center for Agro-Ecology, Inc. agroecology.widgetworks.com/policy.html
Finding Solutions to Excess Nutrients in Animal Manure and Poultry Litter: A Primer. 2004. Available from the Chesapeake Bay Program, Annapolis, Maryland or on the web at www.chesapeakebay.net.
Task Force to Study the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation: Final Report. 2004. Maryland Department of Planning & Maryland Department of Agriculture. www.ruralforvm.state.md.us/News/
Chesapeake Environmentalism: Rethinking Culture to Strengthen Restoration and Resource Management. Michael Paolisso. 2005. Chesapeake Perspectives. Maryland Sea Grant College, College Park, Maryland. For more about this report, see Et Cetera.