The Chesapeake Bay is North America

The Chesapeake Bay is North America's largest and most biologically diverse estuary. Its water quality has declined significantly since the 1970's, due to increased population and intensive agricultural production. Starting in the 1980's the Bay watershed has been a focal point of federal and state initiatives to reduce nutrient pollution from agriculture and other sources. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) that sets a pollution “diet” for the watershed and further heightened the impetus for measures for reducing agricultural and other sources of pollution.

Up until recently almost all the efforts for reducing agricultural nonpoint source pollution have been voluntary, consistent with policies nationally for addressing this problem. Generally, voluntary approaches have been shown to be insufficient to meet water quality goals. Even where nonpoint source water quality problems are known to exist, such as the Gulf of Mexico, little has been accomplished through traditional, voluntary actions (Osmond et al., 2012). However, evidence suggests that agricultural producers may respond to intense and focused policy scrutiny by adopting best management practices, with and without assistance, in order to get ahead of any potential regulations (Ribaudo and Johansson, 2007; Kara et al., 2008; Key et al., 2011). One might therefore expect to see a higher percentage of producers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed adopting best management practices than producers operating outside the watershed.

In this paper we examine the issue by focusing on the animal sector, primarily because of the availability of farm-level management surveys. The animal sector has been particularly targeted for improved management. Poultry, dairy, and swine all contribute to a nutrient surplus in the watershed that must be addressed in order for the TMDL to be met (U.S. EPA and USDA, 2006; National Research Council, 2011). Large animal feeding operations is one agricultural sector that is currently regulated under the Clean Water Act. Evidence finds that animal feeding operations often produce more manure nutrients than required by the crops grown on land under their control (Gollehon et al., 2001; Ribaudo et al., 2003). The extent of the excess in the Chesapeake Bay watershed is such that the cost of moving manure to cropland that can utilize it at agronomic rates is significant (Ribaudo et al., 2003). The consequence is excess applications of nutrients to land, resulting in excessive losses of nutrients to water systems that eventually discharge into the Bay. The combination of the intense focus brought on by all the initiatives leading up to the TMDL and a perception that regulations will become more widely used by the states could be driving the adoption of management practices at a greater rate in the basin than outside.