"As sea levels rise, saltwater is entering farms near the bay, damaging crops and releasing legacy nutrients into already-polluted waterways. "
"Kate Tully has spent the last few years sampling farm soils, ditch water, and marsh muck on Maryland’s lower eastern shore. Tully, an agroecologist at the University of Maryland, is tracking saltwater intrusion in the area, or the degree to which salt water from the nearby Chesapeake Bay has moved inland to compromise groundwater and soil. As sea levels in this region are expected to rise as much as two feet by 2050, she has found that saltwater may also be helping to unleash farm nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous that have been locked in the soil.
The Chesapeake Bay is so choked with agricultural pollution that lawmakers have agreed on a mandate to reduce nutrient runoff that spans six states. And yet, poultry farmers on the eastern shore produce almost 2 million pounds of chicken annually, making it one of the top poultry-producing areas in the United States. That steady supply of manure has been a cheap, plentiful source of fertilizer since the 1920s, so many farmers have applied it to their fields for decades. But there’s more manure on some fields than crops can absorb, and the resulting runoff has triggered algae blooms and a massive dead zone.
Tully is one of several scientists who recently published a study about saltwater’s impact on so-called “legacy nutrients.” And it could complicate the already confounding efforts underway to clean the bay—efforts now at Code Red status due, in part, to lax EPA enforcement."
