Mid-Atlantic Water Program announces nutrient budget tool

The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States, and its 64,000-square-mile watershed is home to more than 16.6 million people.  Pollution from human activities, including agricultural production, has greatly damaged the Bay.  Policymakers and state agencies have struggled to meet Bay restoration goals.

To help these officials address water quality impairments stemming from agricultural production, the Mid-Atlantic Water Program, in partnership with the Chesapeake Research Consortium, has developed regional nutrient budgets that indicate possible excesses in available nitrogen and phosphorus across a five-state region.  These tools have the potential to improve water quality protection by providing policymakers and agency staff with the ability to assess the effectiveness of current and alternative practices, incentives and regulatory actions relating to nutrient supply and crop production. 

 
By using publicly available data on nutrient supply and crop production in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, the Mid-Atlantic Nutrient Budget provides nutrient balances at the county and state levels.  These balances, calculated as the difference between the nutrient inputs and outputs, indicate which counties have more nutrient supply than demand. Over time, increasing imbalances indicate the potential for water quality concerns.  With many of the federal and state programs looking for nutrient pollution reductions from regions that produce the most nutrients, this tool provides a critical need in targeting geographic regions of concern.

According to Dr. Kevin Sellner, executive director of the Chesapeake Research Consortium, “Nutrient accumulations pose huge problems for local farmers as well as receiving waters down-slope of the farms. The nutrient budget tool should facilitate innovative solutions for localized management, like relocating animal wastes from regions with high nutrient balances to areas with lower balances. Such practices can reduce overall nitrogen and phosphorus loads to the Chesapeake Bay since animal wastes from nutrient-rich areas can be used in place of fertilizer in areas with lower nutrient levels.” 

Available at http://www.mawaterquality.agecon.vt.edu/, the nutrient budgets cover the period between 1987 and 2007, and demonstrate that after increasing each year from 1987 to 2002, the regional nitrogen nutrient balance for Mid-Atlantic cropland fell in 2007 to 92 percent of its 1987-2007 average, while the phosphorus nutrient balance fell more dramatically to only 62 percent of the 1987-2007 average.  This dramatic drop in the phosphorus balance may be attributed to several factors.
Dr. Jim Pease, a professor at Virginia Tech and lead developer of the nutrient budgets, says, “Fertilizer sales fell in 2007 because of dramatically rising prices.  But these improved nutrient balances may also reflect education efforts to persuade farmers to manage nutrients carefully.”

The Mid-Atlantic Water Program is a coalition of universities across five states. These universities include the University of Maryland, College Park; University of Maryland Eastern Shore; Virginia Tech; Virginia State University; West Virginia University; The Pennsylvania State University; University of Delaware; Delaware State University and the University of the District of Columbia.  The Mid-Atlantic Water Program is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service to improve water quality by creating and disseminating science-based knowledge that facilitates change in environmental management and policy, industry practice and individual behavior. Contact Daphne Pee (dpee@umd.edu) for more information on the Mid-Atlantic Water Program, or visit www.mawaterquality.org.