Animals other than chickens are also raised around the drainage basin that dumps into the bay as well as all the “treated” sewage waste that is emptied into the rivers from all the people living in the region. Getting back to the animals, even if cows and horses are kept out of the rivers, their waste can also wash into the rivers feeding the bay.

So what is the answer? Move all the poultry farms out of the area? Save the bay but destroy the economy? More focus needs to be given to solutions rather than accusations.

We all compete for the same food supply and from experience I know the animals and insects get there first. The day before my corn was ready I saw all the husks and silks up in the oak trees where the squirrels had feasted and we had none. If all the wildlife is allowed to feed on farm fields we will be short of every kind of food. With the drought in California we are already in for shortages and rising prices. To me, as a farmer, ethanol sounded great BUT it is a horrible fuel and has caused food prices to rise greatly, bringing big problems to underdeveloped countries.

Yes, livestock consumes feed and water and recently on NBC they were saying how much water it takes to grow a head of lettuce (it’s huge!) or broccoli or many other crops. Giving up meat will not save the planet; we will still be using trillions of gallons of water and trillions of tons of food. It is a good thing that people eat different kinds of food since if we all ate the same thing there wouldn’t be enough to go around.

A lot of what the government mandates, maybe most, makes no sense. A big fuss over marine toilets and holding tanks on boats. When nature calls it calls — whether it’s the Coast Guard or Marine Patrol on a Boston Whaler or a fisherman in a row boat or a bather in the ocean the person will do what the person needs to do. On a hot summer day if you fly the coast of NJ from Sandy Hook to Cape May you will see millions of bathers and swimmers and you can bet they are not going to look for a bathroom.

Years ago 40 bushels of corn per acre was the norm and now it runs over 200 bushels. I attended a conference at the VPI Ag Station in Painter and the speaker said we could grow 100 bushels of soybeans per acre instead of the usual 40 to 50. I thought to myself, yes and the price would drop from $6 to $1 and we would work that much harder and put that much more wear and tear on our combines and grain trucks and be worse off than before. Every spring I soil tested and only put on the land what was recommended. Most farmers will do this because lime and fertilizer is very expensive and you only spend what you need to spend. We have no way to know what the future holds as to weather, weeds, insects, and diseases, and it is FAR better to produce too much food than to produce not enough. Fat people are happier than skinny people, and like Charlton Heston says, “They will have to take this pork chop from my cold dead hands!”