82% of Md. Farms will not be affected by PMT

The Maryland Department of Agriculture says they’ve collected data from 875,000 acres of farmland statewide.  

According to the report, 82 percent will not be impacted by recent regulations like the Phosphorus Management Tool (PMT). This is because phosphorus levels in those fields reportedly fall below PMT threshold; therefore, they do not have to run the tool and may still benefit from manure as a crop fertilizer.

Data found remaining 18 percent will still have to have evaluate the risk using the tool.

Overall, only one percent of all farm fields are immediately banned from applying phosphorus crop fertilizer.

“It’s real information where the real phosphorus levels are. Prior to this, it was based off assumptions or preliminary work that was done basically from areas where we knew it was high phosphorus.” Says Hans Schmidt, Assistant Secretary of Resource Conservation.

We’re told this data represents about 70 percent of farmland required to submit soil phosphorus data to the department.

The PMT regulations went into effect June 2015 and are part of the state’s Watershed Implementation Plan to restore the Chesapeake Bay