Editor’s Note: State and federal leaders have acknowledged that the Chesapeake Bay region will not meet its most fundamental 2025 cleanup goal: reducing nutrient pollution in the Bay and its rivers. Now, people are asking, “How did we get here?” and “What’s next?” This article is part of an ongoing series that tackles that question.
For 40 years, the Bay region has struggled to sufficiently reduce nutrient pollution from farms. The reasons are complex. But it’s important to explore those challenges as the region holds a tough conversation about the Bay restoration effort beyond 2025.
Previous articles in this series discuss difficult trade-offs with agriculture, the challenge of setting realistic goals, the effectiveness of best management practices, concerns about ag data used in Bay computer models and more.
A bit more than a decade ago, Josh Satteson was growing increasingly concerned about the large bites that Turtle Creek was taking out of his pasture.
The side-to-side movement of the badly eroded central Pennsylvania creek was eating away at its banks, causing walls of sediment to collapse and wash away. The stream bed between those banks had grown from 8 to 35 feet wide, leaving a muddy mess in between.
He visited the Union County Conservation District to get some help. Before long, he was talking to officials from state agencies and others who recommended a variety of fixes. Among them was planting trees along the stream and placing rocks and logs to stabilize its banks.
Today, Satteson said, “I have this awesome buffer.” Sycamores reach heights of 20–30 feet, and fences keep his cattle out of the water. “I have this beautiful place now. The deer actually bed underneath my trees.”
More than deer took notice. So did his neighbors, who became interested in doing similar work on their farms. “I never realized I was going to set the world on fire in this watershed,” Satteson said. “I was just looking for financial assistance.”
Partly because of what Satteson initiated, a throng of state officials, conservationists and neighbors gathered at a farm along Turtle Creek one morning in April to celebrate its improving condition — and a potential new direction for Chesapeake Bay restoration.
State department heads, elected officials and others held up individual placards with a message: “D-E-L-I-S-T-E-D-!”
That’s because parts of the creek had recently been removed from the state’s list of impaired, or “dirty,” waters. The federal Clean Water Act requires each state to compile a list of stream segments that fail to meet its water quality standards and submit the list to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Of Pennsylvania’s 85,000 miles of streams, its 2024 list estimates that 28,820 are impaired. Agriculture is the largest single source of impairment, accounting for more than 8,000 miles, mostly because increased siltation from farms renders the waterways unsuitable for anything other than the most tolerant insects, and those are not necessarily the species most critical to the aquatic food web.
The chain of events triggered when Satteson walked into the conservation district office led to about 2.2 miles of Turtle Creek’s 8.8 miles of impaired waters being delisted recently because of increases in the number of “good bugs” they could support.
After his work was completed, other farmers began knocking on Satteson’s door to look at the results. To capitalize on the interest, the Northcentral Pennsylvania Conservancy, a nonprofit organization, secured grants and worked with state agencies and the conservation district to conduct work on other farms. Stream improvements have since taken place on roughly 20 parcels.
With the Chesapeake region set to miss its 2025 goal for reducing nutrient pollution in the Bay, some are wondering if it’s time to change emphasis. Would an approach focused on tangible improvements in streams like Turtle Creek produce better results — and more farmer cooperation — than focusing on the Chesapeake Bay?
The nonprofit Chesapeake Conservancy has advocated such an approach and, using high-tech data, has worked with local organizations to identify 30 Pennsylvania streams it hopes to delist by 2030, with another 27 slated for the future.
Lancaster County Clean Water partners, a network of organizations working to improve water quality in the Bay region’s most intensive agricultural area, has a goal of restoring 350 of the county’s 1,400 miles of impaired streams.
“This phenomenon is growing,” said Joel Dunn, president of the conservancy. “And it’s a great example for the whole Chesapeake Bay watershed of how to flip the whole effort on its head and make it hyper-local, but [to] deliver results for the whole watershed.”
Indeed, cleanup approaches demonstrating more quantifiable local results got a boost last year when a report from the Bay’s scientific community warned that efforts to control polluted runoff, especially from farms, have been less effective than thought and are unlikely to achieve the water quality goals in the Bay.
It said that focusing efforts to reduce nutrient pollution and improve habitats in shallow areas would yield more tangible results for various stakeholders than trying to improve oxygen in deep areas of the Bay, which has received the greatest focus.
That think-local approach was also embraced by Maryland’s General Assembly, which this year passed the Whole Watershed Act, a pilot program that will target five small watersheds in the next several years to not only deliver measurable results for water quality, fisheries and wildlife, but to build resiliency to impacts of climate change, such as increased flooding.
Kristen Reilly, executive director of Choose Clean Water, a coalition of more than 200 organizations in the Bay watershed, including a number working on stream delisting projects, said it’s critical that future Bay goals result in more tangible local outcomes than has been the case in the past.
“People want to see the result of all of this work,” she said. “Nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment reduction is not something that’s easily visible to anyone. More tangible results for people — things that impact their local community, waterway or farm — is where we need to take this effort. And I think that’s how we become more successful.”
‘Mostly just words’
The Bay cleanup has long touted improved streams as a benefit of nutrient reduction activities that are ultimately aimed at clearing the Chesapeake’s waters and reducing its oxygen-starved “dead zones.”
The reality has been different. The EPA evaluates state progress by the pounds of nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus — they keep out of the Bay, as measured by computer models.
That often encourages state runoff control efforts to focus on things like reducing tillage, planting cover crops, writing farm conservation plans and promoting nutrient management on croplands.
Those have relatively low costs and get nutrient reduction credit in Bay computer models but can be less helpful to streams.
Also, much of the Bay emphasis is on nitrogen, which has been particularly difficult to control but is especially impactful in salty Chesapeake water. Freshwater streams are more impacted by sediment and phosphorus, which attaches to sediment.
“Eighteen to 20 years ago, people sort of discovered that the Bay message didn’t resonate all that well for lots of people, and they started to talk about streams more,” said Matt Ehrhart, director of watershed restoration at the Stroud Water Research Center in Pennsylvania. “But it was mostly just words.”
Actions more directly beneficial to stream health, such as vegetated buffers, especially forested ones, have had much lower implementation rates. Fast forward two decades, and the results — or lack thereof — have had consequences.
Despite ramped-up spending to control farm runoff over the last 15 years, computer models show only small pollution reductions from runoff control practices on agricultural lands, especially for nitrogen. That creates a circle of blame. Lack of progress puts more pressure on farmers, but farmers often blame the model for not accurately representing their efforts.
The lack of trust hurts Bay efforts because most future nutrient control actions need to come from farms, which contribute the most nutrients. The job is especially daunting in Pennsylvania, which has the greatest number of farms and generates more nutrients.
Now, some argue, focusing on local stream results could provide common ground. Instead of talking about nutrient reductions in a Bay many miles away, they can talk about improvements in streams where their kids and grandkids play. Maybe they can even bring back trout.
Those types of conversations can help break down some of the historic resistance to things like buffers, said Lamont Garber, watershed restoration coordinator with the Stroud Water Research Center.
“I can’t tell you how transformative it is to be in a room full of farmers and to be talking about their streams versus the Bay,” Garber said. “It is an entirely different discussion. For a very long time, it was always about the model, and who’s to blame.”
While computer-measured nutrient reductions have been small, there are many examples of how runoff control practices have resulted in direct improvements to stream health.
A vision of the possible
When Dick Stroud, a dairy farmer with an interest in science and the outdoors, donated a tract of land for a scientific research station on White Clay Creek in Chester County, PA, scientists had a request: that he put up a wire to keep his cows out of the water. “Is that a problem?” Stroud responded.
“That,” said John Jackson, senior research scientist at what is now the Stroud Water Research Center, “was a dairy farmer’s perspective in 1967.”
It wasn’t surprising. Over hundreds of years, the once-forested landscape had been transformed into a breadbasket for East Coast cities. The new normal was plowed fields or barren meadows where cows wandered in and out of streams with steep, eroded banks.
White Clay Creek now shows what other agricultural landscapes could look like, Stroud scientists say. They began planting trees along the creek decades ago and worked with farmers to build terraces and take other actions to curb erosion.
Today the creek is one of the region’s best studied streams. Every large piece of wood that falls into the water is tagged so its movement and decay can be tracked.
Buckets catch leaves so scientists can estimate the amount falling into the stream and how far they travel before being consumed (typically less than 100 yards). They provide a food source not available in a meadow stream, thereby promoting a more diverse and stable base to the stream food web.
Left alone over time, the creek has widened and become shallower, creating more habitat for bottom-dwelling aquatic life. The fallen wood makes for a mix of pools, runs and riffles in the water. Logs and tree roots have stabilized eroding banks.
Stream life has responded. Trout, which once only occasionally reproduced there, now do so regularly. “Some years were too hot or something,” Jackson said. “Now there’s continuous reproduction. So we’ve cooled it, we’ve stabilized it, we buffered it.”
And there are more “good bugs” to feed the trout. White Clay Creek has about 350 species of stream-dwelling insects, including pollution-sensitive stoneflies, caddisflies and mayflies, widely considered to be essential building blocks for a healthy stream. Some of the most degraded agricultural streams in nearby Lancaster County have fewer than 50 species.
Research at the center has also shown that, as it improves, the stream itself can create conditions that more effectively remove nitrogen. Other pollutants, such as pesticides, are also reduced.
“I think the takeaway here is that this stream is what everybody is trying to get to throughout the Bay watershed,” Garber said. “And we’re able to show what is possible.”
Today, he and others are spreading that message to farmers along streams, showing photos and bar charts of what a healthy stream — and the life in it — is like, compared with one in poor condition. “This is the kind of data that we’re sharing with farmers on their own streams and saying, ‘If we’re successful with you guys, these graphs will go up.’”
A delisting strategy emerges
The idea of putting more focus on recovering degraded streams got a high-tech boost several years ago.
The Chesapeake Conservancy pieced together satellite and aerial images, along with a wealth of other data, to enable what they call “hyper-local” decisions about the Bay region’s more than 100,000 miles of waterways.
Previously, land use imagery was available only at a resolution of 30-by-30 meters.
Now, it’s available at a single square-meter resolution, providing more precise information about land use and its impacts.
It can also identify pathways that water follows as it flows off streams, places that forest buffers exist and even sites where stream banks are rapidly eroding. That data can be overlain with information about the location of trout streams, areas that provide drinking water supplies, important habitats and more.
In fact, the high-res imagery provides so much information that it is was overwhelming for local groups to use in their work, recalled Carly Dean, director of the conservancy’s Chesapeake tributaries initiative.
After working with local Pennsylvania organizations, they hit upon the idea of using the wealth of information to prioritize small segments of impaired or “listed” streams where, by working with a manageable number of farms, they had a chance to tip the scales toward delisting.
The targeted areas are typically stream segments that are only a couple of miles in length and drain watersheds of 1,000–5,000 acres with 10–15 landowners. That allows more focused work, which they hope will provide quicker and more tangible results, although it is likely to take a decade or more to fully realize.
“That size is more manageable for setting targets that are achievable,” Dean said. “It’s breaking the [Bay cleanup goals] down into something that individual human beings can see how they’re working toward it.”
The actual selection of targeted streams was left to local groups, though the conservancy — besides providing data — helps with coordination, fundraising and some monitoring to make sure that, once delisted, streams stay off the list.
Trade-offs
Just as focusing on Bay water quality never guaranteed that streams will improve, focusing on streams does not guarantee Bay goals would be met.
Streams in Pennsylvania are often delisted when their insect community reaches certain levels. That can happen by reducing sediment, which smothers stream bottom habitat, and by adding logs and rocks that create habitat diversity.
Nutrient reductions are not always essential for delisting streams, although they remain critical for the Bay.
Matt McTammany, an environmental studies professor at Bucknell University who lives in the Turtle Creek watershed and uses it for class studies, applauded work to improve the waterway but said dense mats of algae are still common. “It is eutrophic,” he said. “It is loaded with nutrients.”
Along some restored stream sections, cornfields are only a few feet from the water. And forest buffers are often less than the 35-foot minimum recommended to help control nutrients.
Satteson said that reflects the reality that many farmers simply cannot afford to give up more land. On his own farm, Satteson had to give up 2.3 acres of pasture to allow for a full 35-foot buffer, which others can’t necessarily afford to do.
Crop farmers “want to be able to farm to right here,” he said, standing only a few feet from Turtle Creek. They can lose $300 an acre in income by converting it to a buffer.
“You take away 10 acres, and that’s a lot of cash,” Satteson said. “That’s crucial for farmers, especially when every acre of production equals income, equals staying on the farm or working two other jobs.”
A long task
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to addressing stream health, and many biologists consider delisting to only be the starting point.
Producing more good bugs is a first step, but streams have been degraded by centuries of changes that have altered their temperatures, changed water velocities and added a broad mix of chemical contaminants in addition to nutrients and sediment.
Fixing all of that is a long job.
“In general, you have an impaired stream because you have an impaired watershed,” Stroud’s Jackson said. “So you have to fix the watershed to fix the stream.”
In some small catchments, organizations are pursuing a “whole farm approach,” which not only promotes forest buffers to improve the stream, but a whole range of conservation practices to control nutrients reaching the Bay, from adequate manure storage to managing barnyard runoff, reducing tillage and promoting cover crops.
“We try to be realistic with them about how fast the process is going to be, which is not very,” Garber said. “But we are also realistic with them about the extent of the change that is needed.”
Historically, agricultural conservation programs required farmers to share a portion of the cost. Because many of those stream improvements and other practices provide little direct benefit, and could even cost money, many farmers have been reluctant to participate.
Recent influxes of state and federal money to help meet Bay goals have enabled a broader approach. Many organizations are helping to foot the full bill to implement practices, handle the paperwork and even undertake buffer maintenance.
Still, there are many unknowns, such as how much of a stream needs to be addressed to move the needle on its overall condition. “We’ve seen a lot of places where they do 10% or 20% of the farms, and that’s clearly not enough,” Ehrhart said. “We’re hoping that it’s not 90% or 100%.”
Some farmers, like Satteson, may be eager to participate. Others will wait and see. In one small stream where Garber and Ehrhart began working a decade ago, the last of the dozen farmers are only now starting to participate.
It is a process: gaining trust, improving the stream and waiting for results. As is increasingly the case with the entire Bay effort, it is one in which today’s efforts are building blocks that may not be fully realized until future generations.
“There’s no magic recipe,” said Patrick Fleming, an associate professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster who operates a 99-acre beef and organic grain farm with his wife. “The building of trust is so important in this, and that takes work.”
He’s been working with an effort that seeks to engage enough of the 39 landowners along Indian Run, a small stream that drains a 3.2 square mile area in Lancaster County, to slash streambank erosion enough to remove its sediment impairment.
An important part of the process, Fleming said, is to not cast blame for the creek’s condition, because the problems are from hundreds of years of farming, land clearing and the construction of sediment-trapping mill dams.
“We’re working together to address an issue that we’ve inherited, to manage our streams sustainably for future generations,” he said.