It has been widely written in books and scientific reports that one of the biggest– if not THE biggest– polluters of the Chesapeake Bay comes in the form of excess nitrogen and phosphorus from farm runoff and manure.

Now, thanks to budget cuts, chicken manure– a waste product  highly sought after by farmers to fertilize their land — is not being removed from the bay watershed as much as it once was.

At one point, according to delmarvanow.com, state funds were used to used to truck over 40,000 tons of chicken waste from farms on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that were willing to sell it to other farms off the Shore. Now that a good chunk of the government funding for the transport program has been cut, more of the manure is staying on the Shore.

Much of this debate focuses on a material called chicken litter, a mix of chicken waste, wood chips, straw and other materials. Some 57 percent of the chicken litter in Maryland is is created in the lower three counties on the Eastern Shore, which is home to a large poultry industry.

This material is  highly concentrated with nitrogen and phosphorus, which can be harmful to the bay and yet helpful to farmers because it fertilizes their crops.  The conflict is clear: In an area where bay advocates are desperately trying to eradicate those two materials from the watershed, farmers want it more than ever.

And now that the state subsidy which had helped some Shore farmers sell their chicken litter to farms where it was less likely to run into the bay has been cut,  more Shore farmers are likely  to use it on their own land. The impact could be significant:A 2002 study found that farmers who used organic fertilizer rather than chicken litter or poultry waste cut the nitrogen and phosphorus surpluses in the runoff from their fields by over 90% each.

It’s yet another example of budgetary constraints going head-to-head with activism in the battle to cut farm runoff.