Technology can help clean Pennsylvania's water

Newtrient would like to commend the Pennsylvania Senate for its passage of Senate Bill 799, which will open the door for dynamic, new technologies to help clean up the Chesapeake Bay, address Pennsylvania’s growing drinking water crisis and support Growing Greener initiatives. Many factors contribute to Pennsylvania’s water quality problem, including agricultural runoff from Pennsylvania’s long-standing livestock population. Livestock, however, provides viable solutions for the state’s complex water challenges. We know Senate Bill 799 is going to help because it will provide farmers with access to more than 100 new technologies to reduce manure impacts. SB 799 will direct taxpayer funding away from expensive infrastructure projects to low cost on-farm reductions. Senate Bill 799 will transfer the performance risk of reducing nutrient losses to that portion of the private sector, which can deploy comparatively low-cost technologies and have significantly greater impacts. Most importantly, many of these manure management technologies can reduce the nitrogen, phosphorus, ammonia and other greenhouse gas impacts from livestock manure that are the most costly and difficult to capture by the current publicly financed facilities.