Manure, the main event in a yearly cycle

By Jon Rutter

12/09/2008

The start of spring where I live in Pennsylvania Dutch Country is a pastoral milestone, and a smelly one.

The earth yaws on its axis toward summer. Farmers harness statuesque draft horses - six to a team - and root up the ground. Then they coat it with manure.

I wheel my racing bike out onto the porch. The wind's sour breath almost makes me clomp back inside.

But I click into the pedals, cruise through a couple of miles of rapidly greening suburban sprawl and finally break free. I steer the bike down a rural lane. Amish mailboxes blur past on either side. KingEshBeilerStoltzfus. Buggy wheels have incised faint lines on the gray road. Something more meets the wheel.

Not for nothing does my friend, Bernie, call his Lancaster County cycling blog "Potholes and Road Apples." The road apples - poop from buggy horses and work horses - lie everywhere. Leaky liquid manure spreaders drizzle dung. Set out on a 50-mile bike tour in the country and you'll weave among the earthy clots like an Olympic slalom skier.

Cars, trucks and tractors trample the stuff flat. Rain softens it to mush. Spinning bike tires fling the goop onto my red carbon frame and water bottle, making the contents suspect.

It's not just straw-hatted Plain sect folks muddying the routes in these parts. Bigger "English" farms and concentrated animal feeding operations to the west and north generate tons of cow, chicken and hog manure.

Most of the rural land here is so intensively farmed that it can't absorb all the waste. Some farmers try to give away manure ?- there's a web site where they can post their excess - and a few progressive souls have taken to generating electricity with manure digesters.

The rank residue does more than gum my treads and make me wrinkle my nose.

Thundershowers hose the stuff off the fields and roads and into ditches, rills and runs. Little streams feed it to the Pequea Creek, the Conestoga River, and, finally, the Susquehanna, which supplies the Chesapeake Bay with half its fresh water. Excess nutrients fuel algae blooms that choke bottom grasses and marine life. The resulting dead zone smothers 40 percent of the bay in summer.

Ag isn't the only culprit. Proportionally, suburban homeowners spread more fertilizer than farmers. Sewer plants add about a fifth of the bay's nitrogen, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's Chesapeake Bay Program. Long-vanished stream-side mills and dams have left so-called legacy sediments that continue to break loose with every gully washer.

But manure is the main event. And, when it comes to gunking up the water with number two, my fecund, fertile hometown is number one.

We're supposed to be joining other communities in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia in helping to spruce up the bay by 2010. It doesn't look good.

Our state's nutrient management plan, updated in 2005, is spottily enforced, according to "Sick Susquehanna," a recent report by the environmental advocacy group PennFuture. As of last summer, the report said, key components of applications or permits filed by 48 of Lancaster County's 81 large-scale livestock farms were missing.

Meanwhile, said local conservation district official Dennis Eby, farmers must still spend $4 for every dollar of grant and public money available to them for terracing, stream bank fencing and other best management practices.

There are glimmers on the horizon. This past Election Day, Pennsylvania voters OK'd a $400 million clean water referendum that should help cash-strapped municipalities meet federal bay cleanup mandates.

Economic necessity is driving some positive trends.

Farmers are adopting no-till planting methods, which are cheaper and disrupt the soil less. No-till grew from 10 percent of the acreage here to 40 percent over the past five years, according to Jeff Graybill, an agronomy educator for the cooperative extension. Organic farms, with their careful husbandry, comprise a tiny, but expanding, agricultural niche.

Still, that air can be pungent.

I'm grateful for the summer sun, which dries out the road apples and brazes them to the asphalt. Paradoxically, I'm thankful for the bounty of the land. I'll readily eat the beans, broccoli, corn and tomatoes that sprout from the enriched earth. But I breathe more freely after fall harvest.

Many of the fields are crew cut now. The air is getting colder. The northern hemisphere is tilting toward the shortest day, Dec. 21. Around here, in deference to our Amish friends, we call it the Winter Stoltzfus. It can be a good time to ride, and to fill your lungs.

There's less excrement going down.