There was a scene in the movie Blow, starring Johnny Depp, where Depp’s character and his business associate were making so much money from selling cocaine that there was no where in the house to put it. All the rooms were flush with greenbacks. It eventually came to the point where a third-party location was needed to store the money.

Well, in the case of the Chesapeake bay, it’s not denominations that are piling up, but manure. Too much of it.

This is undoubtedly more fodder to the environmentalists’ quarrel with the impacts of agriculture.

Maryland lawmakers and environmentalists have both acknowledged this problem, with Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.)  proposing a bill that will allow farmers to sell their pollutants to other polluters to reduce the pile-up.   Some farmers see the proposed bill as a threat to their business, feeling that it will increase costs on poop removal that they would otherwise use toward farm production.

As the Washington Post explained:

*The reasons for manure’s rise as a pollutant have to do, environmentalists say, with a shift in agriculture and a soft spot in the law.

In recent decades, livestock raising has shifted to a smaller number of large farms. At these places, with thousands of hogs or hundreds of thousands of chickens, the old self-contained cycle of farming — manure feeds the crops, then the crops feed the animals — is overwhelmed by the large amount of waste.

The result in farming-heavy places has been too much manure and too little to do with it. In the air, that extra manure can dry into dust, forming a “brown fog.” It can emit substances that contribute to climate change.

And it can give off a smell like a punch to the stomach.

Source: Washington Post

Animal feces feed unnatural algae blooms that cause dead zones in the Bay. As long as manure remains in abundance, restoration of the bay will become harder and harder.