Perhaps the most critical issue the new agricultural and environmental policy center is grappling with is Pennsylvania’s nutrient-management challenge and nutrient imbalance, as it relates to the Susquehanna River and the Chesapeake Bay. “Agriculture is increasingly an important target of environmental-protection policies in Pennsylvania,” says Shortle, an agricultural and environmental economist. “At the same time, environmental goals are increasingly important in agricultural policies in this state and the nation. This evolution is occurring for many reasons, but chief among them is recognition that agriculture has enormous impacts on the environment, both positive and negative.

“From the standpoint of agricultural stakeholders, profitability is increasingly related to environmental concerns,” he says. “Achieving environmental imperatives related to the Chesapeake Bay and other emerging issues will require significant changes in farming practices. A fundamental challenge is how to maintain an economically vibrant agricultural sector while also meeting those imperatives.”

Decades of scientific research demonstrate that Chesapeake Bay water quality can only be improved significantly if the excess nutrients it receives from the Susquehanna River and other rivers in the Bay’s watershed are significantly reduced. The Susquehanna, with a massive basin that drains 13 million acres—or over 20,000 square miles—supplies more than half the troubled estuary’s fresh water. But it also delivers almost half its nitrogen and about a quarter of its phosphorus, much of those nutrients derived from millions of tons of livestock manure.

Nitrogen and phosphorus become pollutants when they excessively nourish algal blooms that deprive bay grasses of sunlight and deplete water of oxygen. This, in turn, kills fish and other plants and animals that make their home in the bay. Each summer, die-offs of these unnatural explosions of algae are blamed for oxygen-starved “dead zones” that stretch for hundreds of square miles.