Proposed Changes to Law Onerous to Horse Farm Owners

21 Comments

1. 

   Kaye Newman on June 26, 2011 at 11:06 am

   I feel that the proposed change #3 is ridiculous. I am currently on the eastern shore of Maryland but in the process to moving to the western shore of Maryland and chose that particular farm because of the water that runs through the pasture. To be forced to move all fencing due to stream beds and water to keep the horses away from it is just plain stupid!!! It will also be more costly and time consuming. Why
   on earth is this particular change necessary? Make the answer a good one please!

2. 

   Ed Garono on June 26, 2011 at 7:58 pm

   As a realtor who specializes in the sale of farms and land I have talked with many farmers about the subject of govt. regulation of their business and their comments are that it is just too hard to farm here in Maryland and it seems like just as farming has become fairly profitable the govt comes along and drives up costs, just as they have done with every other American business. It seems many more farms will be sold for development and farmers will move to a more ag-friendly state. Except the poor suckers who fell for the Ag-preservation program, they are stuck.

3. 

   Milly B Welsh on June 26, 2011 at 9:59 pm

   I find #4 to be especially difficult, not owning the equipment to inject manure into pastures.

4. 

   Sandy C. Smith on June 26, 2011 at 10:24 pm

   Very few horse opperations are the polution problems. Once more we see industry trying to put the blame on everyone else. Just follow the money trail.

   For example: The sewage treatment opperations produce SLUDGE which is a very toxic mix of industrial, municipal and household waste loaded with lead, PCBs, DDT,arsenic,mercury,dioxin,flame retardants(asbestos), petroleum products, industrial solvents, and the list goes on. This is not fertilizer but is allowed as such! Maryland, like Pennsylvania, allows sewage sludge to be dumped on farmland that is under Preservation as well–what a sick joke to the hard working people providing tax dollars to preserve our sewers and dumps under the guise of keeping pristine countryside for future generations! We are allowing and paying for industry to dump their waste and grow our food laced with the above. Typically 100-200 companies flush their wastes into a single treatment plant with newly formed toxic substances created as waste products break down sludge that ends up on our farmland and in the water we and our horses drink.

   As far as I’m concerned, when DEP and the EPA stop allowing Sludge dumping on our farmland, then we can talk about what little damage horses may do to the environment and the Bay!

5. 

   Joel P Fields on June 27, 2011 at 10:11 am

   In rule 4, It is unclear as to what is meant by 72 hours. Does it mean applied over a 72 hour period for any application or is to be only one application of 72 hours or less?

   Rule 5: Definitely object. Argueably, the best time to apply manure is during the winter months. MDA should be required to analytically defend (cost /benefit) the vaue and benefit of this proposed rule.

   Rules 7. Again, the rule prohibits application oif manure during the most appropriate times. It is only after July that a rigorous assessment ofthe nutrient applacations can be made by the land owner with time to perform effective subsequent applications.

6. 

   Vicki Carson on June 27, 2011 at 10:48 am

   Approx. 70% of my pasture has intermittent streams running through it. Permanently moving horses off the affected pasture is not an option, so I gather I would be forced to install fencing in order to comply with the proposed stream fencing regulation.

   I believe the Department of Agriculture’s estimate of average fencing cost is $3/foot – or $15,840 per mile. If every stream contained within a livestock pasture in Maryland must be fenced off, we could be talking tens of millions of dollars of expense to farm owners. In the current economy, with farmers struggling already, that seems absurd (IMHO). Does the Department of Agriculture have $10 million or more in funds to help the farmers with cost shares? I doubt it.

7. 

   Jack Louth on June 27, 2011 at 11:22 am

   Rule #4 is definitely unclear as to the 72 hours requirement. What does “incorporated” mean? Does this mean spreading with a conventional manure speader where the shreded manure is spread on the surface of the pasture is not allowed?

8. 

   Valerie Ormond on June 27, 2011 at 1:54 pm

   Folks,
   This might be obvious, but just in case it’s not, I’ll point it out. Since MDA is looking for comments by WEDNESDAY, you may want to send comments directly to them as stated above, i.e. If you would like to file comments of your own, please email them to MercerJA@mda.state.md.us. Please copy valeriec.mdfb@verizon.net so we can include your thoughts in our official comments as well. Your comments HERE are great, but to ensure they reach the right people, may want to cut and paste them to ensure they get there in time.

9. 

   Edward Sylverne on June 27, 2011 at 2:05 pm

   What’s the science behind these recommendations, as well as the cost-benefit analysis? Or is agriculture just the low hanging political fruit because we are a relatively small portion of the population?

   As I write this, I’m watching the real estate development project across the street, that was once 40 acres of beautiful pasture, pour 100 times the silt and runoff into my creek in 20 minutes of hard rain than my operation would do in a 100 years. Even with all the requires silt fencing they were required to erect, the river down the street and into my stream bed is as red-brown as Georgia clay.

   I’m all for reducing runoff and pollutants in the Bay, and am willing to make sensible changes in an effort to make a real impact, but before proposing such rules we are entitled to see the rationale and how it fits into the big picture, not just of ag runoff, but from of all sources of pollution.

   Additionally, fencing livestock from streams seems to make little sense, because the surface water will have to be replaced by groundwater draw down, and that brings with it a whole host of other problems, especially here in the Mt Airy area, where groundwater is in precious short supply as it is.

   So, please make available to farmers the facts before spending our money.

10. 

    Editor on June 27, 2011 at 2:53 pm

    From Senator David Brinkley (R), District 4: Carroll and Frederick Counties

    I recently looked over a report for changes to the Nutrient Management plans under consideration by the Department, and in my opinion, none of these are necessary.

    We are trying to ensure the success and viability of Maryland’s agriculture community and these do nothing to move in that direction. I gather from the first proposal these are crafted with TMDLs in the background which the Counties and Towns are facing the real costs of compliance. Ironically, the State, in another unwise economically, but otherwise purely political move, accelerated the required Federal deadlines which is a hardship to all.

    In the past few years, the two dairy farms (comprising about 300 head of cattle and 900 acres) along my road have stopped dairying operations because that aspect of Agriculture is less viable. While many market circumstances come into play, these proposals go nowhere in helping those existing operations.

    The equine industry has been hammered by the petty political games in Annapolis (vis a vis slots) which now allows Pennsylvania (who wasn’t even in gaming), West Virginia, and Delaware to stay far ahead of Maryland in gaming revenues that would benefit our horsemen(and the thousands of businesses and operations that support them), local communities, and the State’s coffers.

    Finally, serving on the Budget and Taxation Committee, I know the State does not have the money to assist, much less finance, any of these requirements. We can’t even mow the medians of our highways! Yet the war on Rural Maryland from Annapolis continues with a fanaticism determined to eliminate the best Agricultural Preservation Program there is: the opportunity to earn a respectable profit on the land.

    Since the State doesn’t have the money to do this, where in the world does the State expect a struggling agriculture industry to find the resources to do this, particularly during these horrific economic times?

    I urge the state not to adopt these stringent proposals.

    -Senator David Brinkley
    david.brinkley@senate.state.md.us

    District office: 301-698-9206
    P. O. Box 321 • New Market, MD 21774-0321

    Annapolis Office:410-841-3704
    403 James Senate Office Building, Eleven Bladen Street• Annapolis, MD 21401

11. 

    naomi manders on June 27, 2011 at 5:26 pm

    More government regulation without the science to back it up. Owners of horse pastures deserve to understand the reasoning behind new restrictions. I’ve always thought it was detrimental to water quality to allow a herd of cattle/horses to wallow in a stream all summer. There are other options available for providing water in this case. It’s unrealistic to think every small stream or run-off area can be fenced, fragmenting pastures and forceing huge expenses on land owners.Enforcement of these new regulations would be impossible.The State needs to rethink its program of water protection—go after those developments with disfunctional silt fenceing pouring run-off into the rivers and bay—I see it every time it rains.

12. 

    Pam Saul on June 28, 2011 at 3:33 pm

    Copy of my comments sent to MDA

    Ms. Mercer:

    I am writing with deep concerns over the proposed changes to the Nutrient Management Program by MDA. As a farmer and Montgomery Soil Conservation District board member, I have received many telephone calls and e-mails voicing frustration from my equine community about these changes. Most specifically, the stream fencing change.

    These proposed changes will have drastic effects on a majority of farms in Maryland. The amount of fencing that will be necessary hasn’t even been calculated yet. I can assure you that the division of pastures and hayfields will cut off access to vital areas of the farm. Placing this burden on farms without knowing the economic impact could be the nail in the coffin for many businesses that are trying to survive during this deep economic downturn.

    I would urge you to reconsider placing this mandate in the Nutrient Management Program until further scientific study can be done to determine if it is the correct course of action.

13. 

    Karla Stoner on June 28, 2011 at 5:36 pm

    First, what are the reasons and background behind these proposed changes? As presented, they appear to have been drawn up from an ‘academic’ view point with little thought to practicality, expense or particular situations. Are these aimed at major offenders and the rest of us are caught up in the system? I agree with other posted comments regarding these proposed changes, especially the impracticality and expense of fencing off all intermittent streams and would also add the following:

    #4 – #8 Without the background behind the reasoning here, prohibition of winter application of manure or other soil amendments in reasonable amounts makes no sense for pastures with good vegetative cover and hay fields as long as setbacks from water are observed. In the case of hay crops, I have always understood that application of manure to these areas should stop by the end of February or very early in March in order to produce more palatable hay.
    – #4 – What is ‘injected or incorporated’ mean and within 72 hours of what? Collection?
    – #5 – What does ‘adequate’ storage mean and does this apply to everyone, even those with smaller numbers of animals and smaller amounts of manure? As others have pointed out; where does the money come from to build these storage systems?

    Wouldn’t some flexibility and case-by-case planning to achieve the goals be more reasonable and encourage compliance? I agree with others’ comments; on the surface, this appears to be another step in to discourage agriculture in Maryland.

14. 

    anne cowles on June 29, 2011 at 2:09 pm

    I am with senator Brinkley all the way…
    Impossible guidelines to follow in an already heavily regulated and tax burdened area of this country and to stay in farming of any type is exceedingly difficult not to mention that it is already physically hard work!
    Enough Already!

15. 

    Editor on June 29, 2011 at 9:38 pm

    MARYLAND HORSE COUNCIL COMMENTS
    REGARDING MDA’S PROPOSED CHANGES TO NUTRIENT MANAGEMENT PROGRAM
    Submitted to MDA June 29, 2011
    by Steuart Pittman, president

    The Maryland Horse Council represents the 40,000 people in Maryland who own or work with horses. Our Save The Horse Farms Campaign is an effort to reduce the regulatory burdens from state and county laws that threaten the viability of horse farms.

    Our members are very proud of the efforts horse farm owners have made to install best management practices and work with their soil conservation districts to ensure that the pastures we maintain are effective filters for the nutrients that would otherwise enter our waterways.

    Nutrient Management Plans have been a useful tool to educate horse farm owners and encourage them to become better stewards of their land. Most of us apply less nutrients to our pastures than NMP guidelines allow.

    Some of the proposed changes to NMP guidelines, however, shift the document from one that encourages good land stewardship to one that applies expensive and onerous requirements on farms. We believe that if the changes are adopted as proposed, the percentage of horse farm owners who do nutrient management plans on horse farms will decline significantly, creating an enforcement nightmare for MDA and a battle with landowners that could put other environmental programs at risk.

    The two items that are of greatest concern to our members are the requirement that we fence out streams and stream beds, and the restrictions on spreading manure.

    Horse fencing is expensive, and on most farms a great deal of planning has gone into the layout of pastures and paddocks. Most of us fence our horses out of streams where there is a lot of erosion and mud already, because the mud causes skin and hoof problems. The dry stream beds or the well managed livestock crossings are less of an erosion source. To put farms in violation because they have streams that go through their pastures is a truly misguided approach that will create a groundswell of opposition and has very little benefit to the cleanliness of the waterways.

    Many of our best managed horse farms have manure spreaders parked outside their barns. It is a common practice that is supported by our soil conservation district staff to spread manure lightly across our pastures and hayfields throughout the year. Very few horse farm owners have equipment to disc the manure into the ground, and if they did the pastures would be destroyed and the soil exposed to erosion. To ban manure spreading from March 1 through September 9 unless it is plowed into the soil within 72 hours will surely create an atmosphere of disdain for NRCS and Soil Conservation District staff. The ban on manure spreading from November 16 until February 28 means that our spreaders can only operate from September 10 to November 15. The manure storage facilities approved by under NRCS guidelines are not designed to hold a ten month stockpile of manure.

    The Maryland Horse Council strongly advises MDA to remove these requirements and restrictions from the NMP proposed guidelines and seek to maintain the NMP as a management tool that encourages farmers to steward their land well. Using NMP to make current farm practices illegal is unlikely to change practices, but will make effectively criminalize the people who are maintaining the open space that our citizens enjoy.

16. 

    Editor on June 29, 2011 at 9:54 pm

    FREDERICK COUNTY EQUINE ALLIANCE
    COMMENTS SUBMITTED TO MDA
    June 29, 2011
    provided by Arlene Atkins, Alliance Co-Chair
    http://www.FrederickCountyEquine.org

    Thank you in advance for reviewing our concerns. On behalf of our county wide Equestrian Alliance, several of us put our thoughts together quickly to share with your office and other involved parties.

    These are burdensome and arduous requirements for equine facilities. Many farms have wet-weather creeks and streams that run through them and the fencing of such occasional waterways will place a tremendous financial burden on most facilities. Not only would fencing have to be erected but gates and access and in some cases a complete re-design of existing paddocks and fields. In such an economic climate as the horse industry currently faces, this could be the straw that broke the camels back for many horse operations.

    The word intermittent is particularly troublesome in that the rainfall pattern of recent years has been so varied that a series of particularly hard rains (such as we had during April of 2011) can create streams that come into existence overnight and a gully may remain but it may not flood again for many years. It will be impossible to determine which intermittent stream should be fenced off.

    We understand that Concentrated Feeding Operations (CFOs) are major contributors to pollution in the Bay and must be managed, but highly doubt there is one horse farm in the whole state of Maryland that could be classified as a CFO. Horse Farms should be exempt from this.

    With this proposal, manure must be tilled or injected into the soil to get rid of it, and not be allowed to be spread any longer. That is not possible with horse pastures/manure and then we will have to pay someone to haul it off for us. Most equine facilities could not sustain such a financial hit. Manure management plans state that we can spread so much per acre based on output per 8k of animal weight. All plans are based on this formula. They work for us, and we then do not need to buy commercial fertilizer because we produce our own naturally. This would be another expensive burden to keeping farms going.

    This is a disaster plan and needs to be stopped. It will put many of us out of equine related businesses and in the process lose many thousands of acres of open space.

    Thank you for reviewing these matters further before any changes are made. We would appreciate any opportunity to explain our position further.

17. 

    Editor on June 30, 2011 at 8:50 pm

    SOIL CONSERVATION ASKS HORSEMEN TO PLEASE READ THE ENTIRE TEXT
    submitted by Eddie Franceschi
    Equine Resource Conservationist, Montgomery Soil Conservation District

    The equine community needs to be read the entire document with the propose changes to the nutrient management law (for PDFs of the documents, please e-mail me at Eddie.Franceschi@md.nacdnet.net).

    For example, Page I-D-1, the document defines the term “setback”. In this section the term “stream fencing” never appears. I do understand that is implied, but the document does not include that stream fencing is required. Without using the word stream fencing, the Department of Agriculture does not need to use USDA NRCS fencing standard(see attachment 382) to mandate this setback. The word “setback” is also implying an “Access Control” (see attachment 472). These conservation practices can be recorded, then used in the Chesapeake Bay module to lower nutrient and erosion deposition(pollution)to the bay.

    These regulation are design to lower the agriculture sediment and nutrient impact to the bay. The University of Maryland does the research to validate these regulations.

    In my opinion, all of these regulations are base in the need for the Great State of Maryland to meet the EPA Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL)requirements by 2017(read more at http://www.baystat.maryland.gov/index.html ). Look at bay stat goals and milestone to understand the direction of the policies http://www.baystat.maryland.gov/2yearplan.html

    Unless the agriculture community germinates from dormancy, the Chesapeake Bay regulations will destroy present day farming practices as we know it.

18. 

    Editor on June 30, 2011 at 8:52 pm

    THANK YOU
    from H. Paul Ritchie

    First I want to thank Senator Brinkley for his response that is listed in the discussion section. These regulations will force many Maryland horse farms to either close or move to another State, which many have already done. Every horse farm of any size in Central or Western Maryland has at least one dry creek, or a creek that is not available for navigation or trout stocking. In short these minor wet areas have been Nature’s storm water management long before the words were created.

    Regulation that will have a major negative impact on an agriculture industry should never be implemented without the approval of our elected representatives, and this will definitely have an adverse impact on the horse industry in Maryland. Maryland should be implementing programs like Texas and Kentucky that not only preserve and protect horse ranchers and farmers but set up special incentives that will encourage increase equine activity and tax revenue.

    I hope our legislators will do whatever they can to stop, delay, and change these proposals, or a large part of Maryland’s history will be lost.

19. 

    Anne Davies on July 2, 2011 at 11:27 pm

    These proposed regulations seem very heavy handed and lacking in flexibility to me. A one-size-fits-all approach may seem to make enforcement easier, but in fact, it will only create scofflaws. And horse farms turned into subdivisions.

    Who says manure spread in the winter will wash into the Bay? Doesn’t it depend upon how much manure and where it is spread? Who says horse manure must be worked into the soil in order to stay out of the Bay? Horse manure is dry, not liquid manure. Who says that horses drinking from and crossing streams will affect the Bay? Doesn’t it depend on how many horses and what the stream bed is?

    I am glad that Maryland is getting serious about cleaning up the Bay, but it must be done more thoughtfully and carefully than this, if we are to succeed.

20. 

    Outi on August 19, 2011 at 6:43 pm

    It is the chemically oriented agriculture and the huge industries that pollute the bay, not the small farms and horse owners!
    Ban all chemical NPK type fertilizers and only allow organic slow realase, broad spectrum fertilizers in the whole state and we’ll come a long way to clean the bay along with the poeple who live along it.

21. 

    jacobmichael786 on September 1, 2011 at 1:08 am

    Thanks for the sharing useful information.