Phosphorus

BLADES, Del. - Chicken litter, blamed for fouling Chesapeake Bay tributaries and leading to fish kills in Eastern Shore inlets, has become a hot property. As state and federal regulators tighten restrictions on the use of chicken litter - a mixture of manure and sawdust - as fertilizer, two poultry industry companies are planning power plants fueled by a mix of chicken waste, wood chips and sawdust in Dorchester County. And chicken giant Perdue is building a $12 million plant on the outskirts of this Sussex County hamlet to turn chicken litter into fertilizer pellets for Midwestern farms.

After 13 years of trying, the multistate effort to clean up the Chesapeake Bay will not meet its goal of reducing harmful nutrient runoff by 40 percent this year, and there are no signs that water quality has improved. But cleanup experts say the goals will be met by 2003, and the bay's health should get noticeably better soon after. Bay scientists are setting even more daunting goals for 2010. The new goals, to be set by the end of this year, can be met only if all the bay states reduce polluted runoff from every source - including farm fields and suburban back yards, sewage plants and automobile tailpipes.

WHEN THE new agreement that will guide restoration of the Chesapeake Bay is signed this month, the love-festive official celebration will scarcely allude to months of grueling negotiations that underlie it. The agreement's wording - crafted as delicately as an international treaty - and changes from earlier drafts of the 13-page document hint at the struggles and compromises. "Individual responsibility" was diluted to "individual stewardship." And "will strive" pops up in places that cry out for a "will do."

A National Academy of Sciences report identifies nitrogen pollution, the environmental problem that Chesapeake Bay managers have been trying to control for more than a decade, as the most serious threat to coastal waters nationwide. The report by a dozen top marine scientists, made public yesterday, calls for a national strategy to reduce the flow of nitrogen and phosphorus into rivers, streams and bays. The overabundance of these two key nutrients is causing serious environmental damage all along the nation's coast, the report said.

The days are getting warmer, but the earth is slow to thaw. It's the season when farmers take advantage of the still-firm ground to perform an annual chore that is under increasing scrutiny: spreading fertilizer. Today, many of them are likely to spend the day in the fields, and the evening at a public hearing on the state's proposed regulations on fertilizer and manure, at 7 p.m. at Westminster High School. It is the last in a series of six public hearings since Feb. 16. Among the clarifications offered for public comment is flexibility in the timing of fertilizer application.

Q. We're newlyweds with a composting conflict. I like to throw everything on the compost heap as is, and he insists on buying an expensive shredder to chop it all up beforehand. And then he wants to spend a whole day carefully layering soil, grass clippings, leaves, etc. Please help me straighten him out.A. You're going to have to compromise to make this compost pile work. He's right about shredding materials before they go in (although you don't need an expensive shredder). Chopping things into small pieces will hasten decomposition.

WASHINGTON -- It is a normally quiet corner of the city, an enclave of wealth and prestige whose winding, leafy lanes are home to foreign ambassadors and other members of the capital's upper crust.It is also home, however, to some ghosts from an antique age, and it's taking more than $25 million and the combined efforts of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the city to exorcise them.Beneath the green lawns and ornamental gardens of the South Korean ambassador's back yard lies a burial pit for World War I-era chemical weapons and munitions.

Scientists say they have taken a major step toward improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and throughout the country by feeding chickens a hybrid corn that sharply reduces the amount of phosphorus in their waste.Researchers at the University of Delaware fed chickens the corn, along with an enzyme that helps the birds digest phosphorus more efficiently, and found the birds produced manure with 41 percent less phosphorus and 82 percent less water-soluble phosphorus. The mineral has been related to water pollution and outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida.

It's imperative that the state do more to control pollution runoff from Maryland farms into the Chesapeake Bay. But the state's proposed nutrient-management rules, which go into effect next year, need amending to ease the burden on small farms and to assure their equitable application.An advisory committee made up of farm and environmental interests is proposing several worthy changes to the rules.They include a change in calculating the size of a livestock farm, exemption of research or demonstration projects, and a state cost-sharing manure-disposal program for all livestock producers.

Saving the Chesapeake Bay is turning out to be a lot more complicated than we thought.In the mid-1980s, it seemed as simple as a second-grade subtraction problem: Just take out the main pollutants -- nitrogen and phosphorus -- and we'd be left with clear water and bountiful seafood harvests.Now, as the bay's guardians begin refining their long-term plan to restore the bay, they're looking at the first dozen years' worth of results and realizing they don't add up. And new worries are cropping up: toxic Pfiesteria piscicida, rising sea levels, oyster diseases.