ANNAPOLIS, Md. – The rate of sea level rise is incremental, typically measured in millimeters per year.
But Pat Neild has lived long enough to witness how those millimeters have added up.
“In my lifetime, which is 94 years now, the sea level has come up at least a foot, maybe 18 inches,” said Neild, the owner of a large grain farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that is slowly being overtaken by the Chesapeake Bay. “I can tell that by the land that we can’t till anymore.”
The main issue is that the swollen Bay spills onto his land more often, he said. It would only be a temporary headache if the incoming tides and storm surges were freshwater. But the water is brackish. And when it retreats, it leaves behind a farmer’s worst enemy: salt.
“Once it is salted, it takes at least five or six years for it to return [to normal], and we’ve had some tides since then that have encroached over the edges of some of the fields,” Neild said. “It’s moved the farming land back considerably.”
Across the portions of Maryland and Virginia east of the Bay, saltwater intrusion is a widespread and growing problem. Using satellite imaging, researchers for the first time last year measured the scale of farmland converting into salt patches and salt marshes in the region, finding approximately 9,700 acres lost in Maryland and 2,200 acres in Virginia as of 2017. Both figures represented steep increases compared with imagery collected just six years earlier.
In agriculture, land is wealth. The less of it you can farm, the less money you can make from it. So, the rapid pace of saltwater intrusion has triggered an unprecedented effort to save an industry and a way of life.
That the drama is unfolding barely an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital serves only to heighten the stakes. What is done to blunt climate change for coastal farmers on the front lines here, experts say, will likely provide a roadmap for efforts elsewhere.
“We started out and no one cared, and now a lot of people care about it,” said Kate Tully, a University of Maryland agroecologist whose research team has been studying the region’s threatened farmland for more than six years. “If you look at it from the landowner’s perspective, the way I think about it is that we need to help incentivize good decisions.”
But the help might not come in time. “For some lands, it’s just late,” said Pinki Mondal of the University of Delaware, the lead author of last year’s salt-mapping paper. “We just can’t get anything out of it.”
Meanwhile, the potential solutions — such as subsidizing flood-protection measures, creating markets for crops with higher salt tolerance and paying landowners to create wetlands — still face a host of unknowns.
“I think we’re still at the point where we don’t know enough,” said Jarrod Miller, a soil expert and farming consultant, also at the University of Delaware. “I don’t have a grasp on what’s going to work here. On everything, we’re behind. On practices, we don’t know.”
The rise of salt
It doesn’t take much for Rick and Kathy Abend’s land to flood. For about 50 years, they have owned a loblolly pine plantation near the community of Madison in Dorchester County, MD, and leased adjoining cropland to a tenant farmer.
A two-lane, state-maintained highway separates the property from the mouth of the Little Choptank River, a Chesapeake tributary. Although the raised roadbed acts as a flood barrier, storm-angered waters and significant high tides still find their way through culverts and up ditches to flood his low-lying land, Rick Abend said. It used to happen maybe once every other year; now, it’s three times a year.
Soybeans are a staple on Eastern Shore farms, harvested to help feed the 600 million chickens produced annually for the region’s meatpacking plants. But on several acres of the Abends’ land, especially those closest to the road, the plants struggle to grow.
“It’s getting worse, I think, over the last 10 years or so,” Abend said, surveying the sparse soybean crop at his feet on a recent sun-soaked afternoon. “It used to get a nice crop out of this field.”
With each flood, the soil gets saltier. In the worst spots, the ground is pure white like powdery sand. Here, the gaps between sickly soybean specimens extend up to a few feet or more, gradually giving way to bare earth.
Harold Travers Jr., who leases both the Abend and Neild tracts for farming, said it’s getting harder to make a living on the land. But he has little choice economically but to keep planting and hoping for the best.
“It seems like you keep trying even when you know what the outcome is going to be,” he said.
Eastern Shore farmers are on the vanguard of this climate-fueled trend, researchers say. (Although the Western Shore also abuts the Bay, increases in elevation are steeper in most places, minimizing coastal floods.)
In the Bay region, water has risen about a foot over the past century, about twice as fast as the worldwide average, studies suggest. That’s because not only is the water rising, but the land is also sinking — owing to the gradual resettling of the Earth’s crust after Ice Age glaciers retreated. Up to 4.9 feet of sea level rise is possible by 2100, according to the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
If that happens, untold acres of land, including many waterfront farms, will become submerged or morph into marsh. Some of the lowest-lying fields are already transitioning, as demonstrated by a growing frequency of flooding and increasing salt concentrations in the topsoil.
Tully has learned to recognize the telltale signs. “Sometimes, it’s just an edge of the field where you can tell it’s been really salty or inundated,” she said. “You’ll actually see salt crystals on the ground, and it’s shiny.”
Economic damage
In their study, Mondal and her colleagues tried to quantify the economic pain farmers on the Delmarva Peninsula (which incorporates the Bay’s eastern shores of Maryland and Virginia and nearly all of Delaware) are experiencing from the expansion of salt patches. Their calculations assumed that the patches would produce zero profits for growing corn. And they added all land within 200 meters (or 656 feet) of the patches to encompass the areas at greatest risk.
Under that scenario, farmers would have lost $58 million in 2011, they estimated. By 2017, that total nearly doubled to $107 million because of the salt’s rapid spread in those intervening six years.
“It has been going on for a while, but, because it has been invisible, people weren’t paying attention. One way you get people’s attention is to attach a dollar amount to it,” Mondal said. “It’s a huge problem. It’s not a local problem or an isolated problem. This issue is not stopping on the farm fringes on coastal lands.”
As Mondal and many other scientists see it, the responsibility for saltwater intrusion’s economic costs shouldn’t end at the edges of farm fields either.
“It’s a collective problem. We can’t just tell them to just bear the cost, because they have been on the receiving end for generations,” Mondal said. The two Maryland counties with the highest percentage of salt-impacted farmland — Dorchester and Somerset — also have among the top five highest poverty rates in the state.
“You can’t really build a seawall or anything that’s going to protect the whole coastline,” Tully said. “So, people are picking and choosing” which properties to save. She added, “It’s definitely an environmental justice issue.”
But researchers are only just beginning to turn their attention toward finding solutions for farmers.
“In the last five years, we’ve identified the problem,” said Matt Kirwan, a coastal ecologist with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science who studies the influence of climate change on marshes. “The next five years, we’ll be identifying solutions.”
Search for solutions
Harold Travers Jr., the Dorchester County farmer, does what many farmers do when their yield declines from saltwater intrusion: They keep farming. To reduce their financial losses, they turn to federally subsidized crop insurance.
It’s unclear how well that strategy works, though. Nate Bruce, a University of Delaware farm business management specialist, said the phenomenon is so new that he was unable to pinpoint any scholarly writings about it.
“Not a single thing exists,” he said. “This is sort of uncharted territory. I think putting together a fact sheet on this is something I should be working on.”
To file a claim, a farmer must check a box identifying the offending cause, such as a drought, freezing temperatures or disease. Saltwater intrusion isn’t one of the options, Bruce said. “Unless you had field flooding or something really obvious, a crop insurance agent probably doesn’t really know how to evaluate that,” he added.
And even if they can receive a payment, those farmers likely will face diminishing returns in future years, Bruce explained. That’s because payments are typically tied to a farm’s previous 10 years of revenue. As saltwater eats away at a farm’s productivity, the dollar amount covered by insurance will decline as well, he said.
Farmers can take steps to delay the onset of saltwater intrusion by irrigating their fields to flush out the salt or spreading gypsum to dislodge sodium from the soil, experts say. But neither is of much help if the fields don’t drain well enough, and that is increasingly the case on many farms, said Miller of the University of Delaware.
Corn and soybeans are the tried-and-true money crops on the Eastern Shore. But neither fares well in salty conditions, experts say. A vein of the research is exploring which crops thrive best in the region’s marginal soils and whether they can be harvested for profit.
There are environmental benefits as well, researchers say. Many of the crops being tested require no fertilizer, which would mean less nutrient pollution leaching into the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.
And the plant material stores carbon, helping in the fight against climate change.
Scientists have fanned out across the peninsula, planting atypical crops such as barley, quinoa, switchgrass and salt marsh hay. Some show promise. But it will take several more growing seasons and years of research to give Bay region farmers the answers they need, Miller said.
“There’s plenty of salinity work across the entire planet because of drier climate, and some of it applies [locally] but not all of it applies,” he added. “You have to learn. So that’s why I feel we’re behind.”
Then, another daunting challenge lies ahead: finding a market for those crops. Agriculture on the Eastern Shore revolves around the poultry industry. In one of the most notable efforts to create an alternative market, a $5 million USDA grant is funding work by the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and College Park to mix chicken manure with switchgrass for producing biogas.
“There’s no current market,” said UMES plant professor Jonathan Cumming. “Right now, we’re all looking for that potential economic driver.”
Land preservation advocates are also responding to the saltwater crisis. The biggest tools at their disposal are conservation easements, which offer landowners financial benefits in return for shielding their land from development. Depending on the program, the land can remain in farming or undergo restoration into a wetland.
But salt-impacted lands present special challenges, said Dave Satterfield of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy. Funders are wary of investing in properties that are apt to be underwater within a few decades. And many landowners are put off by the relatively low dollar amounts per acre that land conservation programs are offering.
In general, getting help to rural areas affected by saltwater intrusion and other climate change impacts is more difficult than in urban areas, Satterfield said.
“It’s easy for the federal government to see that I have 1,000 homes impacted by sea level rise in this town,” he explained. “It’s a hard sell when it’s one property with the same amount of shoreline with two houses on it. It’s the same impact, but it’s affecting less people.”
