Virginia Lawmakers To Learn Of Strides, Challenges In Chesapeake Bay Clean Up

By Shannon Heckt, Virginia Mercury

July 11, 2025

The Chesapeake Bay is one of Virginia’s top economic drivers and premier recreational sites. The commonwealth, as well as surrounding states, have taken strides to clean up the waters over the last decade. But as the estuary faces new, climate change-fueled challenges, researchers will provide critical information and recommendations to lawmakers this weekend on how to meet the obstacles head on.

A joint meeting of the General Assembly’s Agriculture and Natural Resources committees will convene at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s Eastern Shore Laboratory July 11 and 12 to learn more about the state’s part in the Chesapeake watershed agreement, flood resiliency, oyster farming, saltwater intrusion, and how agriculture plays a role in cleaning the bay.

“We’re not just talking about thriving wildlife and habitat. We’re also talking about engaging communities and protecting our land and protecting our water, to think of it all as one interconnected body,” said Adrienne Kotula, Virginia Director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission.

She will speak about the state’s agricultural conservation programs and how they work to reduce the pollution runoff into the bay.. Virginia has made record investments in the cost share program that gives farmers grant funding to implement conservation projects such as specific cover crop growth, animal waste control, and dozens of other methods.

Virginia increases funding for agricultural conservation projects aimed at Chesapeake Bay cleanup

“We also talk about whether there are ways to better incentivize some of the practices that provide a lot of pollution reduction benefit, and ways to make sure that all of the benefits of the practices are fully understood by the people implementing them as well on their own farms,” Kotula said.

Sediment runoff has been reduced, she said, and the state is nearing its goals for nutrient runoff reduction.

Virginia has achieved 84% of its 2009-2025 reduction goal for nitrogen, 91% of its reduction goal for phosphorus and 100% of its reduction goal for sediment, according to Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources Stefanie Taillon. The watershed agreement will have a refresh at the end of this year to find gaps in the pollution reduction.

Taillon is also working under a 2024 directive from Youngkin to reevaluate investments in the bay to make sure they are the best ways to drive progress. She also is tasked with assisting farmers with implementing the conservation programs and looking at ways to preserve wetlands and other living resources. She said the state’s oyster population is at a 40-year high and there have been efforts to restore reefs in five bay tributaries.

At the joint meeting, lawmakers will get an up-close look at the conservation programs in action.

“One of the demonstrations we’ll do is show soil from one plot that has been basically tilled to death over the last, you know, 100 years,” said Mark Reiter, the Director of the Eastern Shore Agriculture Research and Extension Center hosted by Virginia Tech. “Then from just 10 feet away show another soil that’s been under these practices that are receiving a cost share [grant] for the last 15 years, just to show the stark differences, and you wouldn’t even think it’s the same material. You would think it’s completely a different soil from a different part of the country.”

Panelists will show legislators how building flood resilient communities can aid in those goals. Several projects aimed at helping with flood mitigation and dam repairs have been cut from federal spending, leaving some communities in coastal zones in repeated flooding events.

Federal cuts hit coastal flooding, dam projects

Jessica Whitehead, a professor at Old Dominion University, recently told legislators in Norfolk that the few grants that are still available have increased demand and the rules for who qualifies have been altered. This leaves more projects up to the state to pay for in order to combat coastal flooding and erosion.

Legislators will visit oyster farms and marshes to learn how the health of the bay impacts habitats and fisheries. Saltwater intrusion onto farmlands on the Eastern Shore concerns farmers and researchers who are looking for ways to slow down the land loss and sea level rise.

“We find the saltwater is creeping in along the edges. It’s like a farmer loses one tractor row at a time over a course of years,” said Cora Baird, site director for the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-term Ecological Research. “The edge of the field doesn’t produce great crops, and so the next year, they just decide not to waste the seed on that little corner, and then that little corner expands. And so they’re losing little pieces of an acre at a time. But there is very clear data showing that loss is increasing over time.”

One way Eastern Shore farmers can slow down the saltwater seeping into their cropland, especially during storm surges, is by planting salt resistant vegetation in the buffer zones between the land and waterways.

Right now farmers can get tax credits for plants and trees through the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, but if the plants die – as many are in the salty waters on the edges of the land, then the farmers can’t get the credit. Baird hopes legislators would consider altering the program to include the salt resistant plants.

“If we can encourage the things that naturally stabilize shoreline, deal well with salt, that sort of thing, those will hopefully have better effects on the long term stability of the land and protecting it from further coastal intrusion,” Baird said.

The road to a healthier Chesapeake Bay is more than just cleaning up the water, it is flood resilience, farming, recreation, and public interaction. Scientists and environment advocates hope that the legislators can see how investments in all these areas are critical to their goals in the watershed agreement and the overall success for the state.

“We have to focus and pay attention to the same issues, to ensure that we can farm for generations and also make money as a business, right? So nobody wants to be wasteful, so it’s just going to be an interesting thing to see all these different groups come together and everybody is going to hopefully see that we’re all focused on the same things,” Reiter said.

In the fiscal year 2026 budget, lawmakers allocated over $222 million outside of administrative costs to pay for air, water and land protections. Over $30 million was put towards marine life management while land and resource management received over $144 million. As legislators grapple with reduced federal funding, they must determine how state money should be spent on the state’s scope of environmental needs.

This story was originally published by the Virginia Mercury. For more stories from the Virginia Mercury, visit Virginia Mercury.com.