Polluters Sue EPA For Doing Their Job
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), the Bay states, the District of Columbia, federal agencies and thousands of volunteers including teachers and farmers have
Swoope Almanac October 2012 – Figs, Cab Sav, Blue Cheese, and Sunsets
Why Don’t Farmers Just Do It?
Why don’t farmers just do it? I mean fence their cattle out of the streams. If farmers would do this one practice, at least in the Shenandoah River watershed, agriculture would probably be finished with its part of the Chesapeake Bay TMDL. Excluding livestock from streams is possibly the single...
Baled Corn Stalks: Symbol of Agricultural Waste and Poverty
I drove onto a farm in Northern Virginia this week and noticed a row of baled up corn stalks. That’s a red flag for me…I have learned over the past 30 some years as a conservationist that when I am on a farm and see rolled up – baled, corn...
“T” Stands For Tolerance
There has been a lot of talk about “T” these days because of the Chesapeake Bay TMDL. I hate jargon so here’s a quickie on these two terms. The TMDL is the agreed-upon pollution diet for the Bay; it stands for Total Maximum Daily Load. It’s the maximum amount of pollution loading on a daily...
Bare Ground in Dayton
Yesterday I was called out on a job in the Dayton area of Rockingham County, Virginia. This area is intensively farmed with livestock and crops. I was totally amazed at two things: the amount of bare ground and the number of fields farmed up and down the slope of the...
Cover Crops a Must
Here in the Bay states and across the temperate zone of the world farmers are busy planting cover crops on fields that were used to produce their summer crops such as corn. The purpose of a cover crop is to “cover” or protect the land during the winter so that...
