Pennsylvania dairy farmers adopt conservation practices

To understand water quality issues in the Chesapeake Bay, take an imaginary trip upstream, from the mouth of the Bay near Virginia Beach.

Your first hundred miles will be through the big waters of the Bay, where populations of striped bass and blue crabs once thrived but are now causes of perpetual concern. Eventually you will pass the heavily developed waterfronts of Baltimore, then up into the Susquehanna Flats. Keep going, up out of the Bay and into the Susquehanna River. At about the 200-mile mark, you will pass into Pennsylvania, home to some of the richest dairy lands in the nation.

Although the river continues for hundreds of miles, your water-quality journey can end anywhere along here, in one of the countless feeder streams running between vast corn fields and bucolic pastures dotted with black-and-white dairy cows.

Sources of excess nutrients and chemical pollution can be found all along this journey. Some of those sources represent enormous challenges for communities, governments and business leaders throughout the watershed. But here, in the fields of Pennsylvania, NFWF is working with conservation nonprofits and dairy industry leaders on voluntary efforts to empower dairy farmers to make immediate and long-lasting contributions to water quality.

In 2022, NFWF awarded more than $37.5 million in grants through its Chesapeake Bay Stewardship Fund, bringing the program’s total investment since 1999 to nearly $250 million. Many of these grants will help dairy farmers overcome financial disincentives to create buffer zones that keep livestock and manure out of streams.

When rainfall washes manure down a hill, grasses don’t filter out much of those excess nutrients, explained Ryan Davis, senior forests projects manager for the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, one of NFWF’s many grantee organizations working with farmers throughout the watershed. “If it’s cropland or just bare soil, then even less. But if we put just a little bit of a buffer around the stream, then it can take care of itself.”