EPA Has Lancaster County ‘In Its Crosshairs’

Dick Wanner
Lancaster Farming Staff

LANCASTER, Pa. — The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has Lancaster County in its crosshairs, Don McNutt told a breakfast meeting on Thursday, Oct. 8, at the Lancaster Farm and Home Center.

McNutt is chief administrator for the Lancaster County Conservation District, and has taken up a spot somewhere between the EPA and local farmers.

In particular, McNutt has been arguing the case for 25 Amish farmers in the Watson Run watershed in the eastern part of the county, around the village of Bird-in-Hand. EPA is also looking closely at the nearby Houston watershed and according to McNutt, they’re interested in six more small watersheds in the county, which has a total of 74 watersheds.

McNutt’s audience, the monthly Ag Issues Forum sponsored by the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce and Industry, seemed spellbound by McNutt’s intensity and the message he delivered. The plan for the October forum was to provide a preview of an Oct. 20 and 21 agriculture summit sponsored jointly by the chamber and the Lancaster County Commissioners.

Day one of the summit will examine the economic importance of the county’s vast and varied agricultural enterprises.

There were discussions led by Extension Director Leon Ressler and Extension Educator Peggy Fogarty-Harnish about the importance of putting numbers to the total farming enterprise. The biggest obstacle to getting the numbers, both they and audience members noted, is the ingrained reluctance of farmers to publicly discuss their finances.

The hope is that the ag summit will shed light on some of those numbers, but Ressler said they may end up with more questions than answers.

McNutt followed the discussion of economics with the story about his spirited discussions with officials from EPA’s Region 3, which covers the Mid-Atlantic states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia.

The program for the second day of the ag summit is entitled “How Water Quality Benefits from Agriculture.” McNutt said he showed the brochure announcing the event to an EPA administrator, and she said, “I want to be there.”

She’s skeptical, McNutt told the group.

Water quality and conservation practices have gone hand-in-hand for decades, and things have improved over the years, McNutt said. But the changes are coming faster and faster. And Lancaster County is being impacted by three big forces for change.

One is the May 12 mandate by the Obama administration for an overhaul of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. The second force is the impending imposition of a total maximum daily load (TMDL) of nutrients and pollutants into every single watershed that ultimately empties into the bay. These two forces will take years, not decades, to work out, and they will affect every individual, farm, business, and government entity in the bay watershed.

The third force, the one that’s bearing down on the county like a speeding freight train, according to McNutt, is EPA’s targeted focus on Lancaster County.

One audience member asked if any other areas were getting as much attention as the county. “Yes,” said McNutt. “They’ve already been to Delmarva, and they’re in the Shenandoah Valley. But they come back to Lancaster every time because of the concentration of animals we have here. We have a lot of animals per square mile.”

On Sept. 9, McNutt said he was called to a meeting with the EPA and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources. They told him of their plan to visit every one of the 25 farms along Watson Run, evaluate them, and possibly assess penalties. The visits were planned for the third week of September. They wanted the Lancaster County Conservation District to partner with them in this effort, to go along to open the doors.

“I objected vehemently,” McNutt said. “I told them no. It’s not our philosophy, it’s not the board’s philosophy, it’s not our style and it’s not how you get things done in a quiet community like Lancaster County.”

The third-week-in-September timetable was set aside, but a month of wrangling ensued. The visits will still happen, but probably not until early November. The EPA was at the district’s board meeting the night before the ag issues forum and the night of the forum, McNutt was to meet with 25 to 35 Amish farmers from the Watson and Houston Run watersheds.

He planned to tell them about EPA’s plans and about a deal he had worked out with the agency that would allow the district to conduct what he called a “gentleman’s walkaround” of each farm before the EPA visit. A district employee would spend half-a-day or so on each farm, take note of the good things on the farm, look at borderline situations, and warn the farmer of any environmental hotspots that would be sure to catch the EPA’s eye.

McNutt said most of the farmers the district deals with want to comply with environmental regulations. When the district comes across a noncompliance issue, it’s only the rare farmer who doesn’t take action. And if the farmer doesn’t take action after three warnings from the district, he gets fined. Fines average $2,500, and the operation still has to pay to fix the problem.

McNutt is a firm believer in voluntary compliance, and believes the district has taken a big step in getting more farmers into the fold with their “Fence ‘Em Out” program. “We’re encouraging every farmer to fence every animal out of every stream in Lancaster County,” he told the group. “It’s not required by any law or regulation, we want them to do it voluntarily, and we want them to do it with their own money.

“The Lancaster County Farm Bureau has agreed to partner with the district on this program, and they’ll be taking the idea to their state convention in November. Having the Farm Bureau working with us on this is huge. It is huge,” McNutt said.

While there are many issues the county’s farmers have to deal with in the Chesapeake cleanup, those farmers have already done a tremendous amount of good work, McNutt said. His hope is that as the EPA focuses ever more sharply on Lancaster County, the agency will see the good work that’s already been done, and that they’ll accept the good-faith voluntary efforts that the district and the agribusiness community are making to help clean up local watersheds and the Chesapeake Bay.

Dick Wanner can be contacted at rwanner.eph@lnpnews.com, or by phone at 717-419-4703.