Future of Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay
Hinges on Reducing Excess Nutrients

Doug Beegle was surprised when the Susquehanna was named the nation’s “most endangered river” recently by a national conservation group, but perhaps he, more than anyone else, understands the seriousness of the vexing problems facing the river and the Chesapeake Bay it feeds.

The Penn State agronomy professor has been dealing with nutrient management issues in the Susquehanna watershed for two decades. As a cooperative extension specialist, he has been working with farmers to develop nutrient management plans to reduce the amount of phosphorous and nitrogen that runs off agricultural fields and ends up in the river and eventually the bay. “Since 1985, we have made a lot of progress in nutrient management,” he says. “I never expected the Susquehanna to be named most endangered—there have to be other rivers more threatened in this country. But we still do have serious problems, and I think we have not been making progress fast enough to suit the folks at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.”

Now is the time to build on past successes by implementing the simple solutions science has provided, states a news release issued by American Rivers, the organization that gave the Susquehanna the dubious honor. “A healthy Susquehanna River system will enhance the quality of life of Pennsylvanians and will dramatically improve the health of the Chesapeake Bay. Failing to clean up the river could have a huge economic impact on Pennsylvania,” the release asserts.

But solutions to the nutrient-management problems in much of the Susquehanna Watershed
are anything but simple, Beegle warns. “At the heart of the excess-nutrient problem facing the river and the bay is the current structure of animal agriculture in the world,” he explains.

Livestock animals such as cattle, chickens, and swine are not very efficient in converting
nutrients from what they eat—namely grain—into products such as meat, milk, and eggs, notes Beegle. “Just a quarter of the fertilizer nutrients in feed ends up in the products, the other three quarters ends up in manure,” he says. “When you consider that some farmers import most all of their feed—such as corn from places like the Midwest—you get an idea about how bad the nutrient imbalance can be.”

Traditionally, farmers have spread manure on crop fields to fertilize plants. And when farms were relatively feed self-sufficient, with lots of land and relatively few animals, the method worked well for centuries. “But animal agriculture in the Susquehanna Watershed has become more concentrated, with more animals being raised and fed on less land,” says Beegle. “Farmers are importing a lot of nutrients in animal feed. If we keep accumulating excess nutrients in the watershed, we will never solve the problem. For example, a six-county area, including Lancaster County, produces more than half the manure generated in the state. With more and more feed imported into the region, manure spreading has become more about disposal and less about fertilization. Thus, there are regulations about how manure may be spread.”

But the problem is not nutrient mismanagement by farmers, according to Beegle. Rather, it is the accumulation of nutrients such as phosphorous and nitrogen on farmland in the watershed. “This accumulation is driven by the economics of the animal-agriculture business,” he explains. “The consequence of an economically sound practice of importing feed is accumulation of nutrients on the farms with animals. We are accumulating somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million pounds of phosphorus a year in the state. It is not that those farmers are bad managers—far from it. They are good at what they do. But we must either develop better feeding programs to reduce the amounts of nutrients we bring in, or we have to somehow take nutrients out of the watershed.”

Although dairy farms outnumber other animal-livestock operations in the Susquehanna Watershed, Beegle says they contribute less to the excess-nutrient problem. Because most dairy farms still grow most of their own feed, they have many acres of crop fields on which to spread the proper amount of manure for fertilization. “It is the poultry and swine operations that face more difficulties,” he says. “With chicken and pig farms, almost all of their feed comes from somewhere else. There are a lot of small farms in places such as Lancaster County with a lot of animals concentrated on relatively little land.

“We can’t solve this simply by going to farmers and asking them to change what they are doing on their farms, because the problem is not usually caused by on-farm management practices,” Beegle adds. “We need to build an economic incentive into the system to encourage hauling manure out of the watershed or to transfer manure to farms that don’t have animals. Because animal agriculture is concentrated by economics, somehow we have to have the nutrient issue built into the economics of the business.”

The Chesapeake has one of the largest watersheds for the amount of water flowing into it of any estuary in the world, Beegle explains. “The huge size of the watershed makes it tough to reach goals because very small nutrient losses per acre can accumulate to large contributions to the bay,” he says. “One of the sermons that I have been giving the past few years is that we are not paying enough attention to the real problem. We have to get away from just looking at best management practices and spreading the manure. It is not as simple as just building a better manure spreader. We need to get the system into better balance.”

Beegle believes that nutrient-management challenges in the Susquehanna watershed threaten the very survival of central Pennsylvania agriculture. “We have to figure out how to make agriculture sustainable in the Susquehanna Watershed,” Beegle adds. “The possibilities range from building the cost of environmental protection into the price of food to greater public financial support for best nutrient-management practices. Farmers want to deal with the problem—they just can’t right now and be competitive.

“We have to focus on how to allow farmers to properly manage nutrients and remain competitive. We don’t want to destroy the system. I suppose we could force farmers to do this with ‘manure police’ and draconian measures, but that would result in Pennsylvania farmers going out of business, food prices going up, and production migrating to another state. I would hope that we are smart enough not to solve the Susquehanna River’s and the Chesapeake Bay’s problem by destroying Pennsylvania agriculture and just moving the excess-nutrient problem somewhere else.”