News Releases

Farm Bureau leaders vow to stand their ground against proposed Chesapeake Bay mandates

Farmers are not opposed to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay—just to costly mandates that threaten their livelihoods.
At a Dec. 2 news conference during the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation’s 2009 Annual Convention in Richmond, representatives of the state’s largest agricultural organization vowed to oppose unaffordable, one-size-fits-all federal and state mandates.

“Reauthorization of the Chesapeake Bay Program is a good thing, and this organization believes in it,” said Wilmer Stoneman, VFBF associate director of governmental relations. “But when you add Total Daily Maximum Loads or give EPA the authority to regulate every molecule of water,” that’s unacceptable.

“These mandates are coming without enough financial assistance when farmers are already losing money,” said VFBF President Wayne F. Pryor. “We feel there is a better way to attack this issue than to close our gates and fallow our fields.”

Third-generation Amelia County dairy farmer Donna Kerr said she already has voluntarily implemented conservation practices on her 200-head dairy farm. She has planted riparian buffers and cover crops to protect water quality and prevent soil erosion. She also has fenced her cows out of the streams on her land.

“Farmers have always been and will always be stewards of the land, and a cookie cutter approach from the EPA just won’t work,” Kerr said.

Pryor and others said proposed legislation regarding cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay threatens current state and federal cooperative efforts to voluntarily install conservation practices on farms. It establishes a nutrient and sediment cap for all sources in the bay watershed.

“In its current form, the regulations will effectively cap everybody, everywhere on every thing,” Stoneman said.

Another point of contention is the way the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay computer model measures efforts to reduce pollution in the bay. That model takes none of farmers’ federal cost-share efforts over the past four years  or voluntary measures into account.

“I’ve been living on equity this past year, and I’m just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Kerr said. “If the mandates are put in place, I can’t afford them.”

Leigh Pemberton, a Hanover County dairy farmer, said he also has voluntarily implemented conservation practices using cost-share money, but financially he has had his worst year ever.

“These [proposed] mandates will likely force me to go out of business,” Pemberton said.

Stoneman added that farmers are accused of being the largest non-point source contributor of nutrients in the bay and are being unfairly blamed for 50 percent of the pollution in the bay.

However, farmers have made great strides in reducing the amount of runoff from their farms into the bay. From1987 when bay cleanup efforts began until this year, Virginia farmers used 269,000 fewer tons of fertilizer, according to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and the Virginia office of the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

“The Chesapeake Bay’s current condition is from 400 years of contact from humans,” Stoneman said. “We can’t overcome that in 30 years or 15 years or even 2 years. It’s going to take time and effort from everyone” to fix it.

With nearly 150,000 members in 88 county Farm Bureaus, VFBF is Virginia’s largest farmers’ advocacy group. Farm Bureau is a non-governmental, nonpartisan, voluntary organization committed to protecting Virginia’s farms and ensuring a safe, fresh and locally grown food supply.